New Year's resolution
I have a lot going on in my life: I've started peddling my own books, and writing four or five of them a year; I am still tutoring for Texas Tech, although that has died down a little; I am raising three teenagers, having just sent another off to college at New Mexico State (requiring occasional drives across the White Sands and Tularosa Basin), and we're basically still trying to maintain a kind of rural outpost where my wife can ride horses and I can look several directions without seeing anyone or anything but pine trees and mountains.
But I still have my eye on linguistics, because I feel my purpose in life is not complete until I address one major question. the world of linguistics is still relying on Chomskian universals, even though nobody has come up with any, except for recursion, which is a kind of nebulous idea that I don't quite buy. In other words, now that universalism is reduced to claiming that recursion is the main thing that sets us apart from animals, and makes our languages more complex (read: better?), we have a system that is based on a number of false precepts. Besides, and this is what I've said all along, we don't know
anything about animal languages, or alien ones for that matter. How do we know if they have recursion? And what is it about recursion that makes it a masterful enough stroke of genius that it moves us up as a species into a class of our own? I just don't buy it.
What I'm saying is that linguistics at this point is like a glass castle. Once they start in on morphology, phonology, and semantics, they know what they're talking about, but when they start out, the first two weeks, with this universalism and recursion kind of stuff, I think they're learning to skip over it real fast before people start asking questions. And when I look back at my linguistics training, I find that I'm still asking those questions and not getting good answers.
To get back to my New Year's resolution, it is, to put it bluntly, to set the record straight. I hope to finish my book this year, and when I do, you will be the first to know. If Chomskian linguistics is a glass castle, it's time to build a realistic framework from which people can study the science of language. Let's let go of the "language acquisition device" until we find a device that actually teaches people language. Let's let go of "restrictions" that are supposedly genetic, that just tell you that you can't use a noun this way or that way. The genetic world does not go around making pointless restrictions; it doesn't do that with blue eyes or five fingers, so why should it do that with language? If you are trying to describe nature and natural actions scientifically let's start with what we know about human behavior and then say that language is a phenomenon that fits into human behavior as we know it. And there is order in this world, I swear to it. It's my resolution to show it to you.
Labels: chomsky, language, linguistics, personal, self-organized systems
What keeps me off the street
I am finding retirement to be as busy as working if not more. It's partly because we still have three teens at home and they are all in sports; we live out at the end of a mountain road and there is quite a bit of rough driving and keeping vehicles going.
I am still a writing tutor at Texas Tech and they would like me to keep up a professional front, perhaps studying and presenting at conferences online. But mostly what occupies my time is that, having written a novel and several other books, I've become obsessed with marketing them. And I do that by reading other books.
The setup is simple: I agree to read and/or review someone's book; someone else agrees to read and/or review mine. I choose carefully so that I read a wide variety of things I like. I'm retired, so I should be able to read, right? I'm reading a wide variety of mostly indie books. I'm surprised at what gramatically passes for publishable, but I also realize that not everyone can afford an editor at a decent wage. I could edit myself, having years of proofreading and grammar experience, but I still have books I want to write myself.
The current one that I'm writing revolves arund my great grandmother on my mother's side; she was an elocutionist, and was part of a movement around the turn of the nineteenth century, whereby women wanted to become elocutionists to have a voice in national debates. There was a National Association of Elocutionists, and they met and discussed matters of the day. Elocution was, in general, much more integrated into our education system than it is today. It was, in fact, in its heyday, since the organization had just recently sprung up, soon to be changed into Speech Com, Speech Path, and other fields. My great grandmother was at the cutting edge of the trends, in other words.
Meanwhile I'm reading all this fantasy kind of stuff that in short, makes writing harder. It makes me fall asleep late at night. I have to make a better effort to get the books in front of me more to my liking, less disruptive to my general life setup. Life is busy, what with kids to drive around and a home to maintain - the winter's coming, and the deer and elk all give me the big eyes as they stand by the side of the road wondering if I'm just another hunter.
Labels: personal, reading, writing
Scottish Gaelic
Carrell, Severin. (2020, July 5).
Scottish politicians call for urgent action to stop Gaelic dying out,
The Guardian. Online. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/05/scottish-politicians-call-for-urgent-action-to-stop-gaelic-dying-out. Accessed 7-2020.
I plan on answering this call for several reasons.
One is that I have some Scottish heritage but I am barely in touch with it. About eight or nine generations ago, a couple of Scottish boys crossed over to Northern Ireland, and from there to Pennsylvania, and so, to make a long story short, my mother was a Wallace. Like most Scots in the US, they lost touch with their heritage. But when I hear Scottish music, I always feel like it's there for me. It is partly in respect to my mother's side and her family that I would pursue it.
Nationwide, there are millions of Scots like me, millions in Texas and New Mexico alone. I could start a kilt store, or sell bagpipes, but who would buy them? People are not aware of their heritage really, and I don't think I can make them that way.
I have always wanted to learn Scottish Gaelic, though, and it's a new day. It's a day when I don't have to go to those western hills and islands in order to use the language. Someday, I will get there, yes, and it will be good to hear it being used just in the course of one's daily life. But I live my life, and will have to keep living it, without meaningful chance to actually go and experience that. I can do it on zoom, and that will have to do.
So here's my plan: a weekly zoom meeting to encourage people to learn and keep and use Scottish Gaelic. It will be a one-room schoolhouse in the sense that some weeks it may have high-level learning going on, and beginners will have to just sit and listen. I haven't quite resolved that problem, but obviously, one way would be to keep the beginners' meeting separate. I will say that the purpose of the meeting should probably be more social than practical, in the sense that our first job will be to simply welcome everyone and encourage their study and use of the language. If they hear and understand but a few words each week, that's still better than nothing. And there's nothing stopping people from starting companion meetings that get more in depth.
I have a zoom account. I know that it's doable. My plan is to think it out, and then spring. Right now I'm thinking Saturday mornings (afternoon in UK).
Labels: languages, personal, scottish gaelic
New book - Eighteenth Century Leveretts
paperback
on Amazon $8.40 + shipping
on
kindle $4.99
Tells the story of an incredible family - actually several families - that lived through the times of hardship in Boston before the Revolutionary War. It was an uncertain time - some records may have been lost during the witch trials, and again during the revolution itself, but this book tells how the families intertwined and finally came to leave the city.
Labels: personal
Keres part I
I have moved to New Mexico and become a substitute teacher in the high schools and middle schools in the Alamogordo/Cloudcroft area; I love New Mexico history best although I am far from an expert on it. I have not entirely given up on all of my ESL goals, my life, my research, my passions, but for the moment, I've had to do this for personal reasons, and my path is leading me to being a high school history/social studies teacher. New Mexico needs teachers, so it is making it easier for me to do it. I also needed a break, but needed to keep working, since my wife's experience as Chair led to what can be best described as a healing recovery period in the mountains.
So, I was subbing in a New Mexico History class on Monday, and opened up an old textbook (2005?) by Joe Sando called "Nuevo Mexico." It was slightly more comprehensive than your average textbook, and when it came to the part about the nineteen Pueblos up by Albuquerque, the author claimed that those nineteen fell into three camps based on origin of their language: the Zuni were in a camp of their own (possibly having come from Mexico), the Tiwa/Tewa/Towa were in the biggest camp, accounting for most of the Pueblos, and then there were the Keres, or Keresan, or Queres - these accounted for seven of the Pueblos, including the Zia Pueblo (who gave us that cool Zia symbol on our license plate). Then, he claimed that he believed the Keresan people started in the Caribbean, based on similarities in the languages, and that they had come to New Mexico via Florida, where they had learned about putting shells on the leader's house and calling it the "white house." He also said that they had stopped at Chaco Canyon for a while, before settling in the Pueblos that we recognize today as the Keresan Pueblos around Albuquerque.
I was stunned, but I hastily jotted down some of the information that he claimed. When I asked the students, I found out that it was generally known that there were 19 Pueblos; it was generally known that the Pueblos at one point had rebelled against Spanish rule; nobody knew anything about the Caribbean. I came home and researched links between Keres language/culture and the Caribbean. No mention of Sando's claim. No nothing tying these people to the Caribbean whatsoever.
Joe Sando was actually from the Tiwa/Tewa/Towa side of the Pueblos, a place called Jemez Pueblo, but he was a respected scholar of all the Pueblos, and wrote many books. He was best known for not sharing details of the Pueblo religions with the outside world, though he was a prolific teacher of other things related to the people of the Pueblos. He died recently. I have found no other reference to this book or to his claims. Did people ignore them? Hate him for making them? Dislike the inference that ancient people (1300?) could travel from the Caribbean to New Mexico?
The heck of it is, in graduate school, I studied ancient Caribbean languages, or at least Arawak, which was spoken in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived. I still have those notes somewhere. I had found this worn out book that translated what was left of Arawak into French, and made my Historical Linguistics paper on it. It was the crowning achievement of my graduate school career, though that had some low points too. Those Arawak people were generally thought to have related people deep in the Amazon, and the Garifuna of Honduras had a related language too. I considered it my job to find out whether the languages were indeed related, based on the principles of language change that we had used. I got an A on that paper, I believe.
I have a new theory, which is that the ancient peoples traveled more than we give them credit for. They knew the stars and planets far better than we do. The mound people of the Cahokia area traveled the rivers, from present-day East St. Louis to Canada, Idaho, the Appalachians, the Gulf. There is proof that they did thousands of miles on the rivers, but no proof that they ever saw the Aztecs or Incas. But this was all before 1200, when they disappeared from the East Saint Louis area. If they could do that, then the Keres people could go from the Caribbean to New Mexico. They would have had to have taken the Rio Grande (most likely) - through Big Bend, El Paso, Las Cruces, etc. They would have had to have had a reason. I'm still stewing on that.
Joe Sando said in his book that they'd stopped in Florida; also, that they stopped in Chaco Canyon for years before they settled in their Pueblos. Hmm. He also said that they have an expression in their language, "When we were in the east..." that indicates that they are about to tell a story from the old times. He was convinced that this referred to the days of the Caribbean. He gave linguistic evidence, which I have copied poorly but will retrieve at the first opportunity. It's all on p. 28 of "Nuevo Mexico."
In the Wikipedia entry for the Keres language, it says that there is some disagreement about what the Keres languages could have been related to; there were no known languages that were close to it. Sapir studied them but couldn't get the hang of the tones; one of his assistants stayed behind and got a better idea. Greenburg thought they might be related to Caddoan, which is interesting because the Caddoan people claim the Cahokian sun god as their own, and all three (Caddoan, Mound people of Cahokia, and Keres) had elements of sun worship in their culture. Remember, Cahokia was empty after 1200, though it had been the biggest city in the Americas for over a thousand years. Archaeologists have placed the arrival of the Keres in the 1300's though I haven't seen the Caribbean mentioned
anywhere. My guess is that if they knew the stars as well as they did, they also knew the land. They didn't have Wikipedia, but they knew how to make boats and use them. They weren't necessarily afraid of the Gulf of Mexico.
They didn't even discover Cahokia, really, until they were building the interstates, in about the 1950's. They had to build a bunch of cloverleafs in E. St. Louis and they kept running into the bases of what came to be known as "Woodhenge." Eventually they realized that this was the capital of the Americas for a thousand years and that much of it, across the river in particular, had already been destroyed. But what they saved was still quite intense. And some of it is still there.
These days I drive past a place with ancient caves. It has the feeling of ancient, canyon, river, mountains and elk, all that stuff, on the border of the vast Tularosa basin and the Sacramento Mountains, where the ancient people would have had access to everything they needed - meat, plants, water, shelter, security. I know one could find stuff by digging. But instead I shoot down that road at 45, going from 9000 ft. to 3500 feet every day, paying close attention to staying on the road and not craning my neck to look for rock drawings on the walls of the cliffs. These too were ancient people, before the Apache and Comanche came around with their horses, before everyone. We're in the habit of calling them "primitive." That's because they didn't have laptops. But hey, I have an idea. That is, every time a huge rock falls from the cliff and lands in the road, that's because the ancient people are watching us, and saying, basically, wake up. You think you're so great. You'll be lucky if you have descendants in this world, because you have no respect. And if you scorn travel, you're an idiot.
Labels: endangered languages, languages, linguistics, personal, wikipedia
hallelujiah, the new york primary
In 1972, I was still in high school, and opposed to the war. The draft loomed over me as I was turning 18, but I had studied enough about Vietnam to know that I didn't agree with our wholesale going in there, with bombs and kids and toxic chemicals, and doing what we were doing. Regardless of what would happen to me, when I got my draft number and was assigned to some camp, there was a political process I could follow to help determine who would be president of the country. On the democratic side, it was very much like it is now: a peace candidate, on the socialist side, and a machine candidate, protected by the Democratic establishment, who was much more beholden to the corporations.
The peace candidate was McGovern, and I joined his campaign, even in high school. My high school was near Buffalo, NY, so I went down to the Buffalo campaign headquarters, and they told me, yes, we need poll watchers, you can go to such-and-such polling place, in the City of Buffalo, and watch. Just make sure they aren't pulling one on us. You'll know when you see something sneaky. The machine has a way of making sure the votes go their way.
The machine candidate was actually Muskie, who I kind of liked, since he was a nice old guy, but he was wishy-washy about the war; had actually supported it; much like Hillary, he provoked and agreed with several conflicts and was unable to say clearly that he was unwilling to get sucked into a conflict that wouldn't help this country at all. Muskie, however, being a moderate, was seen as much more likely to win it all than McGovern, and in fact he probably was. The country at that time had a middle class, and they were more likely to vote for a guy like Muskie than for McGovern, who was clearly more favored by the young.
When I got down to the polling place, they weren't about to let me sit there. Their reasoning was that a Republican and a Democrat were required at the polling place, to watch, and they already had one of each. Wait a second, I said. In our Democratic primary we have two different candidates, opposing each other. We Democrats need two poll watchers to make sure the Democratic primary is run properly.
No, they said, and they repeated their line. We need a Republican and a Democrat, and we have one of each. Get lost. We don't need a McGovern pollwatcher. They were bigger than I was, and they might have been wearing Machinist Union polo shirts. There were several of them. I gave up and left.
The following day voting irregularities were found across the City of Buffalo. Muskie had won by a wide margin, but there were allegations of vote tampering at several locations. I scanned the paper to figure out if my location was one of the places where they suspected vote tampering. Unfortunately the paper did not indicate the exact locations. I'm almost sure there was; if they hadn't intended to tamper, why didn't they just let me sit there? Nevertheless I never found out the truth about that specific district. To this day I can't remember exactly where in the City of Buffalo it actually was.
The lesson for me was that even a sweet old guy like Muskie is not always totally in charge of what the machine he controls is doing beneath him, and thus I didn't trust anyone from then on. Carter, in fact, rolled through Iowa, with a couple of coke-sniffing hardball cutthroats running his campaign, stole a caucus vote right out from under me (I had cast the deciding vote against him, and he won my district anyway), so I came to the conclusion that anyone, no matter how religious, righteous, sweet or reasonable, is capable of stealing any election in this country and altering the course of history. I saw George dub do it twice; the machine, in those cases, was capable of controlling county courthouses in Ohio and Florida, and even swaying the Supreme Court in their favor.
With the New York primary being a huge prize and an important milestone in this primary as well as many others, I can only say, if you can't win by getting the actual votes, you can always win by cheating, but I'm not actually in favor of that option, because cheaters in government have done so much damage to this nation that we may never be able to recover. Six trillion wasted on illegal wars, hard feelings across the globe, and a general inclination toward throwing bombs and drones at anyone who speaks against us, and it's sure to come back to haunt us at some point, if we aren't going so fast (what is this handbasket we are riding in?) that it can't catch up to us yet.
I don't trust anyone who's running for president anymore; in that same year, Nixon's operatives made a charge that made Muskie break down dramatically, so that in effect Nixon got McGovern elected. Nixon also was responsible for the break-in at the Watergate, but everybody knew that; they knew he was crooked, and forty-nine states voted for him anyway. Now as it happened, he also ended the war; I had a draft number of forty-two, and was pretty sure I'd go, and was getting ready, in my own way, to go fight a war I didn't believe in. I was in no way prepared to tell them I was a conscientious objector, or to simply slip into Canada, which was barely ten miles away. No, I was ready to fight, but I didn't have to. And I didn't quite understand that, because Nixon, before that, had been a wartime leader, telling us all along, keep the faith, keep sending our boys over there, keep dropping bombs, it's all good.
I've come to be resigned to the fact that forces are at work, over our heads, ensuring that wars start or continue, especially as our entire economy is bound up in them, and some of our economic engines, like the military, are too big to fail. The Republicans, this year, are probably too disorganized to use their millions to influence the Democratic primary; they may be too busy using their millions to influence their own. But also, since there's no middle class anymore, a more centrist candidate is not necessarily more likely to win, but rather, someone who can hang onto, and even energize, the sizable disaffected young. But the money, and the powers that be, aren't beyond getting into the machines themselves, and changing the actual count. And there's a lot of money out there, with a big stake in who exactly gets elected. Excuse my ramble, just consider yourself prepared for whatever happens in New York tomorrow.
Labels: personal
TESOLs
2016 Baltimore*
2015 Toronto*
2014 Portland
2013 Dallas*
2012 Philadelphia
2011 New Orleans*
2010 Boston*
2009 Denver*
2008 New York
2007 Seattle*
2006 Tampa Bay*
2005 San Antonio*
2004 Long Beach*
2003 Baltimore*
2002 Salt Lake City*
2001 Saint Louis*
2000 Vancouver*
1999 New York*
1998 Seattle
1997 Orlando*
1996 Chicago*
1995 Long Beach*
1994 Baltimore*
1993 Atlanta
1992 Vancouver
1991 New York
1990 San Francisco
1989 San Antonio
1988 Chicago*
1987 Miami Beach
1986 Anaheim
1985 New York
1984 Houston
OK so I'm not as consistent as I thought. 19 in 23 years; 20 in 30, and I missed quite a few. There are some I'm not sure about: have I been in New York only once? Or Seattle? Or Chicago? I may come back and star a few more of these.
TESOL had its 50th anniversary this year. There were mostly good feelings; anyone who is mad, doesn't come around anymore. A surprising number of my friends actually run the place. I myself am kind of a stringer, but, in the end, I'm proud to be associated with it.
More later.
Labels: personal, tesol
TESOL session report
Session Report:
Leverett, T. (2016, Apr.). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the ESL writer. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL International, Baltimore, MD, USA.
This appears on my weblog which is specifically about the topic; unfortunately, this weblog was not advertised in my handout. The handout will appear on Google docs soon, but I'm reorganizing my google docs, and I'm not sure how soon.
Labels: grammar, internet, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing
It's all about liability, my wife said, when I asked her about why the university would want me to go through this computer program that essentially showed me about why I had to report Title IX violations. The university wants to make sure that you know you are supposed to do the right thing.
What was complicated was that they set it up on this program that really didn't run too well on all computers; on mine in particular, it seemed to be having some problems (I have a mac laptop that I use for most things). There was a movie and a test. Originally I watched the movie, then, it wouldn't let me take the test. I went back and watched the last 1/3 of the movie again. Still, it wouldn't let me take the test. It got mad at me. I was frozen out of the test.
So I wrote to the guy, and he wrote back. He said, watch the movie, then press such-and-such button, and this is what happens, you go back to the start page and take the test. OK, but that's what I just did. Anyway, I did it again, and it didn't work again. So I wrote him again. It didn't work, I told him. This time he didn't answer.
Wait a couple of months. I thought, if I told them it didn't work, then it's not my problem. This time I get an e-mail saying you have to take the Title IX training. Click these links. I click the links and they both bring up blank screens. I sit there for a while waiting for them to load something, but they don't. Back in the e-mail it tells me I have to log in to my e-raider account. So I do, and click the links again. Still blank screens.
But there is another e-mail address in that e-mail, and I write to her. This time, a day or two later, she writes back and says she's reset my account and now I can take the quiz. Unfortunately I have lost the URL of the original movie. I assume it's on those blank screens somewhere but I can't get to it. I search TTU/Title IX and eventually I find something, but it's very hard to navigate and it's not obvious what to click to just get in, watch the movie, and take the quiz. Finally though I did it, and I watched the movie. And this time, it allowed me to take the quiz, which was difficult, but interesting, and I passed, I even got a hundred.
It seems that if I find out about any kind of sexual discrimination, stalking, harassment, etc. I should report it immediately to the Title IX Coordinator. It's actually not that simple. As I mull it over, I wonder about the kinds of things I've heard over the years that, under these regulations, I should have reported to somebody. Reporting rapes, assaults, harassment, etc. seems obvious; lots of things, you want to pass along in some way or another. But discrimination? Hmm, makes you wonder.
Having passed the test, I'm in an elite group who figured out the technology, and actually did it, without yelling at anyone, tearing up paper in the secretary's face, etc. They want you to do it, just do it, it's like the Illinois Ethics Test, what's the point of questioning the source? It's all about liability. Speaking of Illinois, the main reason I don't go to the doctor is that they don't pay their bills.
Labels: personal, ttu
2015 report
OK, I'll be the first to admit it. I got one foot into retirement (I am now teaching 3/4 time, writing 1/4 time), and I realized how tired I was, after about thirty years of teaching. I still have lots of ideas. I do lots of things in my class. But a lot of times, I come home from teaching, and all I want to do is rest.
Part of the problem is that, having ten children, I never get that rest, whether I do extra ESL stuff or not. In fact, the ESL tends to be kind of a break from the children, an enjoyable, academic kind of break, like having conversations with interesting people I know, but I don't have time for it. I'm taking kids to their sports practices, or to the dentist, or getting groceries, etc. But another part of it is that I really
love writing, and I also
love music, and these are sides of me that went undeveloped for many years. So, when I apologize for failing a little at this end, just consider me as backing off a little. I can't possibly keep up the pace I kept for many years.
Nonetheless, here are some interesting things I've been doing in 2015.
First, I became almost entirely a writing teacher, so I had two advanced writing classes. My students are very high level graduate students who are trying to maintain and improve what they consider their weak point. The stronger ones take the class on their own, knowing that there's always a lot to learn. The weaker ones are pressured to take it by their departments, where they really don't want to teach graduate students writing, but just want them to crank out good useful dissertations and articles regularly. It's high-level; the students are bright. I had one do a blog on
gay marriage (their choice) and the other
campus carry (gun control, also their choice). We published everything we wrote, and it was good, and interesting. I helped teach them formatting things online, as well as the usual writing things - citation, reference, etc. I had the usual run-ins with plagiarism. I taught a lot of students a lot of things.
One of my graduate students became interested in the concordance movement, so I became reacquainted with it. The first step was learning more about it as a tool, how to use it, whether it really works. I am genuinely interested in the process of learning how students integrate tools into their writing process - how, why, how easily, etc. They are not especially forthcoming about the tools they use, being convinced, I guess, that so many of them are illegal. Nevertheless, as a class (both of them, really), we discussed opening up the concordance, seeing what it can do, applying the simplest of grammar problems to it, etc. It was interesting. My Graduate Assistant was fascinated. And, interestingly, even the students found one aspect of it interesting: they are stats people. They like to run the numbers. To be able to run the numbers on the words you use, that's an interesting concept. They are still shaking their heads.
We have a conference in the spring; there is some doubt about whether we'll do it this spring, with its main organizer gone now. Last spring, I was caught unprepared, and didn't even present. There are many things I could present, but I presented zip, I didn't even go. I believe I was out of town, but I don't even remember where; perhaps New Mexico. But I
did present at TESOL, the usual, and I could have presented on various subjects of interest, if I could keep from being drawn into the world of personal fiction publishing.
The first would be on cultural flexibility as a requirement of good language learning. I feel that the characteristic of cultural flexibility, being able to unhinge your self-image from its cultural trappings, is measurable, and crucial in the process. I'd like to define it better, and work toward writing about what I mean. I gave a presentation at our 2014 spring conference, and very easily could have given another. But I was interrupted, and, I'm sorry to say, I dropped the ball.
In the course of doing that one, I became interested in Order of Acquisition as a given construct in Language Learning. Actually, I'm more interested in proving that there
isn't one; it's part of my constructivist belief that each learner decides for himself/herself what order to acquire anything in, and each learner has his/her own idea of what is crucial, or what should go first. And, it would be possible to manipulate the system. For example, one could convince a learner to learn all the religious words first (salvation, heaven, savior, etc.) and skip the ones having to do with cooking, if that learner were proselytizing ten hours a day, and never cooking. One's viewpoint determines what one acquires, not an innate natural order. But I'd like to prove that, if I had time.
My TESOL presentation is basically about how grammar programs have messed with people's heads. That's putting it lightly. But something has come up that is tangentially related to this. The War on Passive is something we researched, and wrote a little about, and learned how to teach. In essence some departments, specifically social sciences, dislike the passive intensely; others, namely the hard sciences, still cling to it. There is a wide variety. Read about it on this blog. I could easily ride this one to another TESOL, but I haven't...why not?
Finally, there is the language-as-a-self-organizing-system project; this has been dormant for a while now, and is beginning to fossilize in its dormant phase. I have written voluminously about it. I haven't given up on it. It needs to be published before I give up altogether. Hello?
Meanwhile I help out at the office. My classes are full. I enjoy teaching, and I also teach American students these days; I like that too. Texas Tech is benevolent and enjoyable to me. I avoid politics. This year, due to wife's surgery, mother's near-death health experiences, and family issues, I avoided all office parties, poetry readings, etc. as well. I am in demand at the poetry reading, as people like haiku, and believe it or not, one
can write bilingual haiku that pulls on both language universes in seventeen short syllables; I am one who could do it as I've been literally immersed in poetry for months now. However as I said,
I was busy. Life is full here, the nights are beautiful, and there are lots of stars out, even in the city. And the mountains are even better; the 9000 feet woods beckon. I am, in the end, partially retired.
Labels: creative, krashen, personal, plagiarism, self-organized systems, tesol, ttu, weblogs, writing
short stories
Available at
Amazon and soon on Kindle
Labels: personal, writing
poetry reading
Labels: personal, ttu
e pluribus haiku 2015
Labels: creative, personal
Leverett, T. (2015). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the language learner. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL Convention, Toronto, Canada, March.
Here is the
Session Report.
I have to admit that the actual material for this presentation is now pretty much spread out. A lot of the new things I've written have been on the
For Better or Worse weblog. I have been unable to change the
original presentation page, which now holds FBOW 2013 and earlier, because servers now require encryption for any new pages or any uploading.
My goal is to compile information. I will update you here. I also want to put the presentation handout on Google docs and link to it here (this should happen soon), and expand what I've written a bit and do the same thing with it. Google docs will at least
hold it, and make it available.
Here is the Google docs link.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19p1eL1W0ZB8qEhJ9Jmv87bHtFLkHSLAinjcyxd5U9XE/edit?usp=sharing
Labels: grammar, internet, personal, tesol
TESOLs Past - the big picture
One reason I'm going to Toronto is that for years, as the TESOL Convention was in various cities, Baltimore, San Antonio, St. Louis, I would just tell everyone that I thought it should go to Toronto. Little did I know that it actually
was in Toronto, maybe in 1983, but that was well before my time, as I didn't really start attending them seriously until about 1994. From '94 on, though, I went to a string of about sixteen or seventeen of them, and really only missed a few from then to now.
I know that TESOL as an organization has an institutional memory of its very first international TESOL Convention, which was in the late sixties, in which a terrible airplane accident near Mexico City killed all the leaders of TESOL, most of whom were all on the same plane. There was no question for many of the following years that TESOL as an organization was still hesitant to have a Convention outside of the USA, but I think another big reason for avoiding Canada was simply the weather. The Convention is always in late March (sometimes early April) and draws people from all over the world, but especially from some of the warmer places. How many of these people will truly be prepared for Canada in late March? Of course, how many people are prepared for Canada in general, one could argue, and I tend to jump in here as a person who has always loved Canada, in all its forms, stormy, gray, snowy, windy, a little conservative, with its kilometers and grams and liters, and good youth hostels in the centers of its cities.
My first TESOL Convention, or the earliest one I remember best, was in Chicago in 1988, and I badly needed a job in the USA, having had a baby back in Korea. At one point I climbed in an elevator of a major hotel, perhaps the Palmer or the Sheraton, and Dick Gephardt and a few of his goons were in there. He was running for president of the US at the time, and all the candidates were in the fancy Chicago hotels on that day for some event; others who were probably in the building at that time were Dukakis, who eventually won, and Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, who lost that campaign but was probably the best of the candidates. The elevator closed around us and I could feel the tension as everyone read my name badge, which had a Korean university's name on it. Dick Gephardt almost had to restrain his goons to keep them from having two or three of them just pick me up and push me out of the elevator. I pressed a floor button so that the elevator would drop me well below their floor, and everyone was relieved when I simply got out of the elevator at the right moment. I still laugh about that time, because I still remember so clearly the stress resulting from the idea that every voter is still to be courted; a bad story about being roughed up in an elevator could cost a person hundreds of votes at that point and I'm sure he wanted to avoid that; at the same time, being a kind of south-side (St. Louis) kind of guy, maybe he had some other opinions too. on my trip, i will fly through Chicago in one direction, but through new york on the other. a friend of mine claims that Toronto '83 was his first, and that this gives him nostalgia. ah yes, me too.
I could go on and on about various conventions, or tell a little about what kind of things a Convention encompasses, but I won't. TESOL took applications to be a convention blogger (long-time attendee) and I almost took them up on it, but I didn't. The main reason is that I've become like the guys in my bluegrass band, thoroughly uncompromising, and not caring especially whether I please a professional audience. Why should I reach out to a wide, far-flung, professional, TESOL audience? I haven't published a single ESL book, so I have no special reason to attract such people to even this page, which is about the best of my professional writing these days. I'm going to this one to connect with many old and beloved friends, and to do my schtick in another country, which is always fun, and partly, because I need a break from warm and dry, relentlessly conservative Texas. Down here, Cruz is more liberal than most, but he was able to capture the center (by calling his opponent a
moderate), so....he edged his way into office, and actually shut down the government once. I'm not getting in an elevator with him; instead, I'm leaving the country. It's really for everyone's benefit.
Labels: personal, tesol
SIUC Linguistics Alumni Coordinator
I am asking for help with this job because I am semi-retired, I'm busy, and I don't know how many more TESOL Conventions I will be able to attend. I think it's extremely important, to SIUC, to its graduates, and to the future of Linguistics. I hope somebody will help.
There is a Facebook page which one keeps an eye on. I could be more aggressive about being sure each of its members is an actual graduate, but I consider it good enough to keep it free of spam and keep its messages related to the department. It does not specify that it is for alumni, but the current students have other active pages that they use more regularly, and this one is mostly for alumni.
Every year at the TESOL Convention, we try to have an SIUC gathering. Sometimes it is poorly planned, nonexistent, or poorly attended. SIUC Linguistics has a huge community, important in the TESOL world, and if those who attend the conference know about the gathering, and are able, they will usually drop by and say hello. Most are successful ESL/EFL professionals spread around the world. One year the President of TESOL was a Saluki and he stopped by. Many of our grads were at SIUC at a different time than I was (I was at SIUC 1994-2012) but I have come to meet some who were there before me, and some who have arrived since. Needless to say this would be true for any alumni coordinator. You would get to know them and learn what era they occupied.
To me, these grads are SIUC's greatest resource, yet SIUC barely knows about it. If the Alumni Office ever tried to reach me or find out who or where these folks were, I never knew about it. It could be that many of them have joined the Alumni Association separately and want to maintain relations with their specific department separately, but I tend to believe that, since there is a price to maintaining a relationship with the Alumni Office, they prefer to stick with the department itself.
Our shining moment came a couple of years back when the department was in danger of being extinguished entirely, and the Chair asked if alumni could simply report where they were, what they were doing, and how they were using their MA degree. I used the list of e-mail addresses that has been passed down to me, and simply asked everyone. The response was significant, and I forwarded it all to the Chair. People higher up got a sense of who our graduates were and what they were doing. To make a long story short, the department was saved (there were other reasons, too, I'm sure), and I felt vindicated.
I maintain that e-mail list, but I'd like to hand it over to someone. There's an unspoken rule: I use it only to tell about the convention reunion, in other words sparingly, and since it doesn't overpower anyone's inbox, people stay connected to us. We don't sell their e-mail addresses and they remain loyal Salukis.
Keep in mind one other thing. Folks who worked at Nakajo for many years have no alumni department, that I know of, so we are it for them as well. They come to the TESOL reunion, and find each other, but rarely do many of them know many of us very well, unless they actually worked in both locations. I don't know about you, but the people I've taught with over the years are in many ways my closest friends; I don't want to lose touch with the lifeline that helps me find them, or at least find out what may have happened to them. Sometimes, if someone is looking for a certain colleague from their era, and this isn't my era, I can't help them right away, or use my meager record-keeping system (I have only e-mail addresses, besides their personal accounts) to find someone who
can help them. But as long as we keep some form of reunion / gathering / accounting system alive, there is hope. And that, I think, is important, and I don't want to let that go, and let that fall silently into the depths of my un-dealt-with e-mail. Thank you for reading this far; contact me if you're still interested!
Labels: cesl, personal, siuc, tesol
TESOL presentation
I will be presenting at the TESOL International 2015 Electronic Village Classics in Toronto.
Presentation Title: For Better or Worse: Grammar technology and the language learner
Presentation
Description: This presentation shows the technology that students are
using to learn and write, so that practitioners can adjust accordingly
Day and Time: Friday, March 27 2:30-3:20 PM
Computer Station: MAC 4
All invited!
Labels: google translate, grammar, internet, language, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing
5 Years of Semantics
My son's new poetry book...
I'm really proud of him!
Available on Amazon...click on the picture!
Labels: personal
conversations with Siri
My 9-year-old son started a conversation with Siri this morning, so I listened in. First he argued with her and told her that he was not Jennifer, his mother, but Corey. Siri didn't believe him. But it didn't matter. Eventually he asked her if she was his friend, and she said, I'm not only your friend, I'm your bff. At this point I decided to listen more carefully. He asked her over for dinner, and she said, I already know where you live, but I don't eat much. He said, no problem, since I can't cook anyway.
Really, he was looking for someone to tell him it was ok to cheat. He asked her if it was ok to cheat. She said that one time she had cheated on a metaphysics exam by looking into the soul of the kid next to her. This I believe went over his head; he's only nine. So he asked her again if it was ok for
him to cheat. She clearly has no moral compass, but it didn't matter; she said she couldn't answer that.
When I told my older son, he reported that some kid had asked her where the best place to hide a body was, and she'd said, "in the Terms and Conditions." This could actually be a story off the internet, but nevertheless it shows that people have become creative in the questions they ask Siri, and sometimes Siri is quite well-prepared. It's made me curious about the kinds of questions anyone could ask her and what kind of responses might occur as a result. Clearly she's not prepared to notice that the voice talking at her is that of a nine-year-old, or a boy, unlike the voice she had heard earlier. She may not yet be programmed to set up different accounts for different speakers, thus using stored information from each to tailor her responses based on what she already knows.
I think it's conceivable that someone could get quite used to asking Siri a whole range of questions; whereas I don't mind asking her how to get to the Starbucks, I'm not used to asking her a whole range of other things. My son of course is clearly prepared to ask her all kinds of things. My point is that depending on how much time one has, and what one needs, Siri could be queried in all kinds of matters; the possibilities are infinite. I'm sure the people at Apple could tell us some of this. A little research might do wonders here!
Labels: internet, personal
