Random Quote
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
---- Fred Allen
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
---- Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats.
---- anonymous
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow
As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
---- Terry Pratchett
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
---- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
---- Doug Larson
This may be the most interesting blog theme I've ever seen. http://eflgeek.com/index.php Definitely in my top 5 at least.
---- Steve Dembo
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
---- Pablo Picasso
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
---- Isaac Newton
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
---- John Ciardi
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey
The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
Internet English
Recently my university changed the way vacation classes are run. Previously all teachers were required to teach six weeks during one vacation and three weeks during the other vacation. All hours were considered part of your contract obligations. However now teachers are required to teach only one vacation for six weeks and the hours are overtime pay. Additionally the school has decided to change the nature of the classes offered during vacation.
We were asked five weeks ago to submit proposals, but only five of 14 teachers did. We had a brief meeting today to talk about mid-terms next week and were told that there will be a 60-90 minute workshop in two weeks about the upcoming classes. Basically it seems like the director wants teachers to get cracking. The problem is that there has been very little in the way of guidelines for teachers and only a few teachers have taught anything other than conversation or writing in the past.
I put my proposal together and submitted it three weeks ago and included a detailed week by week outline of what I would be teaching and the goals of my course. At the end of the meeting I talked to the director and was told that my course is most likely going to be approved. The only potential hitch is finding a department willing to share thier computer lab. My department doesn’t have a lab, and Korean universities are notorious for not sharing resources among departments even if they are not in use.
the Course
The course is going to be rather broad in scope trying. The main goal is to demonstrate to students that the internet has a large potential to aid them in the quest for English mastery provided they take advantage of it in a principled manner. The proposed level for my students is intermediate and advanced. here is the abstract from my proposal.
I then further broke down each week into tasks. At this point they are not more detailed than students will start a blog, students will perform a webquest but the foundation has been laid. Once I finish the semester I will have two weeks to put everything together before launching my course. I will of course be using my moodle installation as a launch pad for all the internet activities and a resource for feedback from students.This course will focus on getting students to recognize the internet as a resource for improving their English. It will draw on the ubiquitous nature of pc bangs in Korea and college students’ enjoyment of surfing the internet. The course will be broken down into different components that are both educational and fun. In the end this class will enable students to see opportunities to use and practice English outside of the classroom through message boards, blogs, chats, and other online resources.
If possible I will arrange with another teacher in a country other than Korea to have language/culture exchange via the internet all conducted in English.
if you will be teaching during July and August and would be interested in doing a cultural/language exchange with students from Korea please let me know and we can start coordinating times and ideas for projects and activities. I am definately looking forward to preparing for and teaching this course.
polyglot conspiracy wrote 49 words on Friday Apr 15, 2005 at 03:39 AM
That sounds great! I’ve oft wondered if people couldn’t harness the English-dominant internet for ESL purposes. It seems like a perfect fit and a natural-seeming, productive way to help people get more experience reading and writing (and even “chatting,” if you will) in English. Good luck getting it passed!
Sandy wrote 18 words on Friday Apr 15, 2005 at 04:31 AM
I don’t understand - how can it be a vacation/holiday if you have to teach? Please offer enlightenment…
Sean. wrote 19 words on Friday Apr 15, 2005 at 09:54 AM
Sandy,
It’s vacation for students between semesters. However as foreign instructors we are required to teach optional vacation classes.
David (TEFL Smiler) wrote 220 words on Monday Apr 18, 2005 at 08:56 AM
Looks like a great course! At first when I saw the title ‘Internet English’, I was a little concerned for a moment, as courses by that title elsewhere are often about trying to teach some kind of supposed language form as one specific Internet genre - as if there’s only one!
I needn’t have worried, of course - clearly your aim is for your students to learn to use the Web as a source of inspiration and as a reference tool for themselves, both for them to find things they like doing on the Internet in English, and for them to realise how they can use it to help them improve their language skills.
Will you also be discussing with them how they can use different Google searches to see how a “string of words” might commonly be used, and to compare two or more strings to decide which appears to be the most common and with the most ghits, for instance? (I’ve started using Google in that way a lot nowadays when I write in other languages. I even use it quickly to check gender or spelling, for instance!)
I don’t know where I’ll be this summer, so I don’t think I can offer my services, by the way. Sorry, but good luck with finding someone who can help.
Sean. wrote 37 words on Monday Apr 18, 2005 at 10:11 AM
David,
I hadn’t considered using the google ghits as a tool, even though I do it myself for learning Korean. Thanks for reminding me, it is now added to the program.
good luck with your summer plans.
amanda wrote 68 words on Wednesday Dec 13, 2006 at 11:26 PM
I know you posted this a year and a half ago . . . but I would be curious to know if it was approved, and, if so, how did it go???
Care to share ideas on what you did the class and what went well and what did not?
I am teaching a similar course for a whole semester in the spring and am looking for ideas.
Sean. wrote 68 words on Thursday Dec 14, 2006 at 07:04 AM
Amanda,
No I haven’t yet taught a course like this. I switched universities and was preparing a proposal yet again, but after being told to create courses nothing happened. I’ve got a skeleton but no details.
However you’ll definitely want to talk to Aaron Campbell. He’s taught an internet English course a couple of times. Good luck and I hope to hear about your course in the future.