You know you’re a successful DJ when nightclubs you’re not booked for put you down as a headliner on their New Year’s Eve party advertisements. This has happened to one of my oldest friends this year. I just got the clarification mail and was deeply entertained. Happy New Year, everyone! 새해 복 많이 받으세요!
When I ran across this little red book in a used bookshop in Saskatoon last summer, I snapped it up for one reason and one reason alone: because I remembered the title from this post by Adrian over at mssv.net. Now, if you look at the post I just linked above, you’ll see that the book is, in fact, a kind of puzzle book. After I finished it, I had a sense — a very strong sense of it, one which Pullman works very hard to establish — that there was much more to the book than just the tale …
Award-winning author Philip Pullman used to be a teacher, I discovered in this interview. And he said something very interesting about classroom dynamics: It took him a while to work out how to tame a class. ‘You mustn’t try to be the most popular. That’s not your role. The way to control a class is to get the chief girl, or chief boy, interested in what you’ve got to say. Everyone else will follow them.’ After a few years he begin to notice something. Though every child was different, each class was more or less the same, with roles to …
That’s what Jodi’s reporting. And I say, good riddance. It’s not just that TOIEC doesn’t test real ability; it’s also that TOEIC sidetracks people from trying to learn to understand English, into memorizing ridiculous obscure grammar points and, worse, memorizing methodologies designed to maximize correct answers on TOEIC tests through absolutely inane grammatical analysis of the questions. Yes, really. Ask Lime if you don’t believe me. Or the people I work with, who can tell you horror stories about TOEIC preparation book questions that make absolutely no sense. Me, I just wonder how anyone convinced so many people to accept …
I sit down alone with myself and think over the things I should have done, the things I have done, the things I wish I hadn’t done, the things I want to do. I do this around this time every year, a cup of coffee in one hand, a pencil for doodling in the other. The doodling has nothing to do with memories, regrets, or hopes. It’s just something to do with my hands while I think. I’m not going to write all of my reflections here, because what I think is more important is the trend of the thing.