This document contains a couple of conversations and then a schedule grid. The idea is to work through the sample conversations, highlighting the idioms and common expressions that are in bold, and then have students book their social life for the week solid through practice conversations. This lets students practice present continuous (what are you doing tomorrow night?) and also gets them a lot more fluid with making plans in general. Which, if you spend time with them outside of class, is a skill that’s helpful not only for them, but for you, too…
New Song, Old Song, Prison Song, True Song
I’m trying to work on a new song for the band, something to expand our sound somewhat; the song is, I’m thinking, going to be a kind of warped version of the story of Bodhi-Dharma, the famed and highly mythologized Indian monk who went abroad and reputedly spread Buddhism across Asia. So, of course, I have a nice musical sample of what I’m going for. Lately I’ve been gravitating toward older and older styles, such as the road-country of Spiritwood as I intend it to be sung, and while I flirted for a while with a somewhat warped blues form, …
Coming Soon…
Coming soon is a tenuous title for this time of the year… after all, I’m about to embark on a protracted period of overtime work, and my time will be short for a while. Still, there are a few posts I want to make.
Who Are You?
Okay, I was spelunking the stats application for my website, and I have to say, some of you people are quite odd. Someone actually found my site by searching the keywords “bob marley belly button rings” over at msn. And I also discovered hits from places like California (a massive number of hits in fact), Taiwan, Israel, and other places. Now, I know the hits misattributed as coming from “North Korea” are accounted for by my own visits to the site, and by those of some friends and students in Korea. I know of a few people in Virginia, Saskatchewan, …
Freakin’ Trackback
Trackback should be working now… now on to getting my Awasu news aggregator all set up, and testing my own RSS feed (and making it available on my site). No rest for the wicked…
The Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata (…and my musings on Western and Japanese modes of reconciling civilized life with human emotions…)
(I should begin this by saying I don’t know a damned thing about Japan. I know a few books, a few movies, and I’ve known a few people, but my knowledge of Japan relies solely on this. Therefore what I am writing about here involves a lot of what I imagine or induce from the literature and art I know about. It could be grossly erroneous. As always, if you think so, please do comment and tell me what else I should see, read, listen to, or look at. That said…) I have just, a few minutes ago, finished reading …
Times and Activities
Here’s a handout to be used with 20-sided dice, which works on present perfect and on telling times. The idea is, the students roll twice, to obtain a time and to obtain an activity. Then they role play phone calls from one to the other, at first just answering the phone and roleplaying as if they were in the middle of that activity. After a few tries, get them doing followup questions. Of course, the phone call is coming from overseas and the friend who is calling has no idea what local time is. So students get practice at transforming …
Pain
So here’s what I have learned in the last few days… 1. It’s amazing how radically your view of a situation can change. Sometimes pain is self-inflicted, and very often I think the effects of emotional pain of this type can be overcome far more easily than one imagines. 2. It’s amazing how quickly back pain can result from improperly executing the head motions in the butterfly stroke. We’ve just begun learning to do it. I made a joke in Korean about how our classs used to look like a bunch of retarded frogs, but now we look like retarded …
Illicit/Impossible: Romantic Neuroses and History
History isn’t always what is convenient, comfortable, or acceptable to us, as I’m reminded reading this article sent to me by my friend John Wendel, about what’s going on at Thomas Jefferson’s old estate, Monticello. Here’s a snippet: The country has been fascinated for the better part of two centuries with the question of whether Jefferson followed his father-in-law’s example and fathered children by Elizabeth’s daughter, Sally. Leading historians who doubted this have done an about-face since genetic evidence linked Jefferson to one Hemings child. There is a growing consensus that Jefferson fathered most, if not all, of Sally’s children, …
trying some more…
GatorLog: All things Weblog This fellow left a trackback on my website, but it’s not working I think I shall have to spend Thursday figuring out why. Anyway, it was very nice of you, Gatorlog, and I really appreciate your thoughts and explanations. I realize that power means different things in Korean. I knew about the electricity because I tried saying it to one of the office girls the other day, my CD player is out of “him” and she looked at me like I was crazy for a second. Anyway, your thoughts were interesting. And believe me, I find …