A student just sent me a completely garbled, incomprehensible email that had obviously been written in Korean and translated using a service like Babelfish. So here’s what I put in my response: 너가 이 원본에서 볼 수 있는다 대로, 전산화한 번역은 흔하게 아주 잘 일하지 않는다. 형은 불가해한 나오고, 기계가 사용된 독자에게 명백하다. 너가 그같은 프로그램을 사용하면 외국어 교사를 이메일로 보낼 때 특별하게 좋지 않다. 간단한 형 너자신을 쓰는것은 낫다. 이해하기 간단한 형은 쉽다. 너가 나에게 보낸 무엇을 어떤 이해되지 않는다. (As you can see from this text, computerized translation usually does not work very well. Sentences come out incomprehensible, …

One of my students today used the work “isomeric”. (Which I find now, looking it up, means “of the opposite sex”.) She was trying to say, “self control”. I couldn’t understand what she meant until she finally decided on the synonym “self-control”. This, I explained, is what makes dictionaries so dangerous. Heh.

My 8:30am morning class on Wednesday is a wonderful bunch of kids. They’re young, so very, very young. All college sophomores, advanced level, and really nice kids. They’re still getting used to me, and my class, but they’re the kind of students I dream of when I am teaching a class of unresponsive zombies. They get into the discussions, when they change partners it doesn’t feel as if they’ve been traumatized by the experience, they ask questions when they don’t understand something, or are having trouble expressing an idea in English for the first time… They’re a great class, which …

I’ve already written to exhaustive posts about this subject, but I have finally found the way to express my thoughts on certain elements of a program change we’re just starting in on, where I work. I’m going to use an analogy here.

… and then it was lost to the aether. It was about curriculum, program changes, and levelling programs, and how an educational institutions can effectively implement programs and program changes in a way that is centered on student benefit. It’s not really a whine-and-bitch session, but it does focus on the fact that realistic, honest assessment of negative factors is necessary if any real improvement is to be made. It also focuses on the idea of student-centered program implementation, and how this relates to interdepartmental politics. While it’s particularly true of the program change I’m witnessing now, it’s also true …

Here are a bunch of listening exercises for ESL students. And here’s a funny page lampooning, uh, well, our profession. There are some rather pithy observations in there, to boot. via Hypersonic Beams

Adam’s just posted about how one student in Texas is wisely resisting state-wide standardized testing: Mia Kang stared at the test sheet on her desk. It only was practice. Teachers call it a “field test” to give them an idea of how students will perform on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. But instead of filling in the bubbles and making her teacher happy, Mia, a freshman at MacArthur High School, used her answer sheet to write an essay that challenged standardized testing and using test scores to judge children and rank schools. “I wrote about how standardized tests …

Found on Zen Teachings of Master Lin-Chi, this quote could as easily be applied to therapy, language learning, or many other subjects: There are Zen students who are in chains when they go to a teacher, and the teacher adds another chain. The students are delighted, unable to discern one thing from another. The risk as an ESL teacher of adding another chain to a student is perhaps not as pronounced one might think, just as one’s effect on a student may well be less pronounced than we imagine. However, the damage from such a mistake is minimal, and limited …

I’ve finished the first day of camp, just fine, but I came home to pick up some bedding and my PC and I found a big piece of dog poo in the inbox of my email. It’s an email all in Korean, asking why the guy got an F in his English class. Not a single word of English, not even an attempt to communicate with me in the language I was grading him on. And he’s wondering why he got an F. And it’s not signed with a name at the end, but the user’s handle is the name …

I’m home today, working through the monumental task of marking the essays and journal work of my students in my writing class. Of course, this is all the evaluation that they’re getting all term—while I provided feedback in class during writing exercises, I simply wasn’t provided with enough time to mark assignments along the way. Still, I noticed who among the students dug in and tried during in-class assignments, and who usually wasted an hour staring at a blank page, embarrassedly writing nothing and saying only, “It’s very hard” to me when I asked why he wasn’t trying. Well, the …