Here’s a bit of ESL stuff I’ll be using with my class: handout on using tables to build lists of contrasts in writing.

Here’s what we’ll be cooking with my kids tomorrow: Malfoyland French Toast. The fried chicken thing is a bit of an in-joke with the kids. And yes, I am posting this from my dorm room (where my net connection actually WORKS!) for the simple purpose of having it somewhere accessible so I can download it and print it once I arrive at the office across campus.

Over at This IS London, there’s an article up about dyspraxia , which is the new dyslexia, a medical term now bandied about by both parents and teachers who sometimes use it as an excuse for academic underachievers. The woman in the article relates a story which is, after all, pretty damning; it shows how medical labels sometimes get misused in the educational system. It’s something I know for a fact happens with the term “dyslexia”, and the story the woman tells is tragic. But there are other stories out there. For one, there are dumb kids. I’m not talking …

Well, over the weekend there was one other thing I did, which was to mark my writing class’ essays. I caught one plagiarist out of two possibles; one guy I am semi-certain cheated somehow, but I can’t find his report on the net. The other guy’s movie review was two separate reviews from the Net, copied and pasted together. I’m giving the proven cheater an F in the class. It’s downright insulting. But there was, among the day-late submissions, one essay that knocked my socks off as far as the quality of thought and humor that went into it. I …

Last night I taught the funniest exercise to my Language Education Center class. It focused on the grammar used for describing the function of things, but also involved an alien invasion and students lying through their teeth to one another, as well as the chance to leave the classroom in pairs… all of which are good for livening up a class. But I think it’s really of little interest to those who don’t teach ESL so I’m putting the bulk of this post into an extended entry. If you’re really interested, there’s a link just below this sentence that’ll allow …

Students in my undergrad writing class were to write descriptive essays about people they know. A lot of people wrote about their boyfriends or girlfriends, especially confessing secret desires to marry them. One of the most interesting lines was in an essay a boy wrote about his secret love for a friend of his who lives in Seoul. Singing her praises at great length, he wrote, I don’t know if all these things are true, but I believe they are true, and I want them to be true. That’s young love for you, isn’t it? Quite a wonderful line, I …

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 in different fonts often look startlingly different, to a native Chinese reader they’re instantaneously recognizable as the same character. But it’s the same with fonts. It seems that there are a wide range of things that are highly variable in a written character’s (read: “letter’s”) makeup that …

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 be friendly although I am, at this point in the term, and especially after their atrocious exam, disgusted with this particular class. They’re my outright worst class, hands down, and even the best students in this group are kind of dragged down into mediocrity by …

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