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...
Read more →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...
Read more →Over at Katolik Shinja, some linguistic jokes. They’re pretty good. In my opinion, anyway.
Read more →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...
Read more →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,...
Read more →I’m working on a summary of the trip so far, but I’ve been pretty busy so I am gonna try finish that tomorrow, and maybe post some pics if there is time… … but for now… Well, now that I’ve been in India for a week, it’s begun: emails from students asking me to...
Read more →Last night I went for beer with some engineers I teach on Monday nights. It was an interesting talk we had, and I enjoyed it. Most flattering was when the students started comparing my teaching to that of their other instructors, both other foreign English instructors and also their Korean professors in their major...
Read more →Wow! Well, it seems like the ESL section of my website is more popular than I imagined. There are tons of teachers out there doing what we teachers do best… stealing goodies from other teachers, namely me. It makes me happy to see it going on. Another teacher, in New Zealand, has sent me...
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