A long time ago I read chunks of a book by Douglas Hofstadter titled Metamagical Themas which has a section on how we manage to see the same letters represented in what are, in fact, many different ways. He uses the example of Chinese characters as an illuminating example because, while to us Chinese characters […]

A few minutes after I’ve entered the room, and greetedthe students, there’s a substantial number of them still chatting among themselves. No, scratch that, it’s not the chatting that pisses me off. It’s the fact that they’re ignoring me, rather rudely. I’ve repeated my question to them a few times: “How are you?” trying to […]

Over at Katolik Shinja, some linguistic jokes. They’re pretty good. In my opinion, anyway.

Two of my classes today were wonderful; students joking but doing as part of their work, studying hard and trying to get things right, as well as pass the time in a pleasant way. I love classes like this. They’re usually mostly girls, but in these two cases, the boys in the class are all […]

Not for my LEC class. Ah well, the exercises do at least result in some interesting discussion. But I am working on ways to streamline the exercises to make sure students spend more time practicing useful structures and less time constructing way too complicated structures wrong in an attempt to “speak really well”. Ah, the […]