Mary (the wife) has started a blog. Initially intended just for her reading group, like all good blogs it has now expanded to include anything she feels like writing about. She writes real good for a science teacher, I told her maybe even better than that guy Stephen J. Gould, or Stephen Hawking, or even Stephen Darwin or Stephen Einstein.
I'm now a follower and you could be, too, by pasting this address into your browser since I never have figured out why I can't post hot links anymore:
http://kf-biblioblog.blogspot.com/
Friday, June 18, 2010
Week one progress report
This is great: The Panamanian Drill Sergeant brooks no complaining: if you miss a day, you miss a week’s worth of material and your grade drops by one. One student asked if he could leave an hour early one day a week because of his job, and she said no. Just “no.” I used to get requests like this all the time, and I also said no, but I’d add a long explanation about how important class time is, and if I make an exception for one student. . . . I once had a young woman ask if she could finish the class two weeks early because she was joining the Marines and going to Officer Candidate School, which started before our class was over, and her recruiter told her if she didn’t make this OCS class, she might not have a shot at another one. I told her she should get a new recruiter.
And but anyway,
Class is four hours a day with a five-minute break at the hour: she doesn’t hesitate to switch to English occasionally to explain something (which was just not done when I took French at UCSC exactly one hundred years ago), but otherwise class is almost completely in Spanish. I can understand her quite well, though if I hear her talking in the hall to another Spanish teacher, I can’t understand a word they say.
I’m at just about the perfect level to start this course. It’s a challenge, but it’s the workload and not yet the material that is close to overwhelming. After class I spend three or four hours on campus using my laptop to access the Website which has all of our film and audio materials (my WIFI connection at the trailer park is slower than a constipated turd), then back to the trailer to study from the book and do other written homework. I go to bed feeling like I need at least one more hour of study to be ready for the next day, but I long ago made the vow that I would never miss sleep over work or a class. It’s worked for me.
The other students are all about twenty and seem to have formed circles of friends before I got there, so I’ve been a little isolated, but finally yesterday a young woman sat down and visited with me during the break. My kind of kid. She and her husband left Boise State where they were studying business and came to Ashland, known for it’s lefty orientation and whole foods ethic, to study international relations. Jobs? They’ll worry about after graduation, and I expect they’ll sooner or later find the kind of work they want to do.
The class has dropped from 25 to 15 in the first week. Now I’m home for the weekend, where I can relax a little and do some things other than study Spanish. Still, I have a lot of work to do to be a little ahead when we start week two on Monday.
You don’t finish an eight-week class like this fluent, or even generally conversational, in a foreign language, but at last I’m actually learning fast in a structured program, and if I take time to stand back and look at it, I’m really enjoying it. I have to find a way to also eat during the day, but that’s not so important yet; I’m thinking microwave burritos (“Little burros”; who knew? ).
And but anyway,
Class is four hours a day with a five-minute break at the hour: she doesn’t hesitate to switch to English occasionally to explain something (which was just not done when I took French at UCSC exactly one hundred years ago), but otherwise class is almost completely in Spanish. I can understand her quite well, though if I hear her talking in the hall to another Spanish teacher, I can’t understand a word they say.
I’m at just about the perfect level to start this course. It’s a challenge, but it’s the workload and not yet the material that is close to overwhelming. After class I spend three or four hours on campus using my laptop to access the Website which has all of our film and audio materials (my WIFI connection at the trailer park is slower than a constipated turd), then back to the trailer to study from the book and do other written homework. I go to bed feeling like I need at least one more hour of study to be ready for the next day, but I long ago made the vow that I would never miss sleep over work or a class. It’s worked for me.
The other students are all about twenty and seem to have formed circles of friends before I got there, so I’ve been a little isolated, but finally yesterday a young woman sat down and visited with me during the break. My kind of kid. She and her husband left Boise State where they were studying business and came to Ashland, known for it’s lefty orientation and whole foods ethic, to study international relations. Jobs? They’ll worry about after graduation, and I expect they’ll sooner or later find the kind of work they want to do.
The class has dropped from 25 to 15 in the first week. Now I’m home for the weekend, where I can relax a little and do some things other than study Spanish. Still, I have a lot of work to do to be a little ahead when we start week two on Monday.
You don’t finish an eight-week class like this fluent, or even generally conversational, in a foreign language, but at last I’m actually learning fast in a structured program, and if I take time to stand back and look at it, I’m really enjoying it. I have to find a way to also eat during the day, but that’s not so important yet; I’m thinking microwave burritos (“Little burros”; who knew? ).
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
What is the meaning of this?
I've always got a kick out of the question, "What is the meaning of this?" because it's like the worst essay question you ever saw on a test. Or your boss walks into your cubicle with a memo you just wrote and demands, "What is the meaning of this?" and you can only look baffled for a minute and then say, "What, so now I'm a philosopher?"
But it seems an appropriate title to the following excerpt from a wire service story
on the Web today:
MONROE, Ohio (AP) — Hundreds of sightseers drawn to the remains of a six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ that was struck by lightning and erupted into flames stopped Tuesday to snap pictures or gaze at the ruined structure.
The "King of Kings" statue, one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.
The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m. Monday, Monroe police dispatchers said.
The sculpture, about 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained Tuesday.
But it seems an appropriate title to the following excerpt from a wire service story
on the Web today:
MONROE, Ohio (AP) — Hundreds of sightseers drawn to the remains of a six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ that was struck by lightning and erupted into flames stopped Tuesday to snap pictures or gaze at the ruined structure.
The "King of Kings" statue, one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.
The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m. Monday, Monroe police dispatchers said.
The sculpture, about 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained Tuesday.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Primero dia
Off to a great start. My instructor is named Lady Vanderlip, which led me to expect some kind of Dutch Noblewoman, but in fact she’s from Panama and speaks Spanish like a native.
Class was just as I’d hoped. Most students are at or a little above my level. We had lots of practice in Spanish, often working with a partner. Tonight I have homework that would usually be due over the first week. Sacre Bleu!
Fortunately, I got the book and other materials last summer and am a few chapters ahead, so I think I’ll survive the first couple of weeks. After that, well, it’s all just from grins, right?
Unlike at OIT, all the students are twenty-somethings, which made me feel a little self-conscious for about two minutes until we got to work. The good news is no one pointed and laughed. The bad news is the little bastards have working memories I can only vaguely remember having.
Steel traps vs. the rusty bucket. Pero, recuerde la tortuga and el conejo ( but remember the tortoise and the hare).
Hasta la pistola.
Class was just as I’d hoped. Most students are at or a little above my level. We had lots of practice in Spanish, often working with a partner. Tonight I have homework that would usually be due over the first week. Sacre Bleu!
Fortunately, I got the book and other materials last summer and am a few chapters ahead, so I think I’ll survive the first couple of weeks. After that, well, it’s all just from grins, right?
Unlike at OIT, all the students are twenty-somethings, which made me feel a little self-conscious for about two minutes until we got to work. The good news is no one pointed and laughed. The bad news is the little bastards have working memories I can only vaguely remember having.
Steel traps vs. the rusty bucket. Pero, recuerde la tortuga and el conejo ( but remember the tortoise and the hare).
Hasta la pistola.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Joe Hablo
“No estoy seguro si es posible aprender una lengua nueva a mi edad.”
Or,
“I’m not sure if it’s possible to learn a new language at my age.” Probably with a few errors illustrating my point. (Just edited to correct a few errors even I could see.)
This comment was part of a short speech of introduction I made the last time I was in a Spanish class, about two years ago. The class was one in the first-year sequence offered at Oregon Tech, my former employer. Since all of the students except me were majoring in either engineering or one of the health professions, everyone was there only to satisfy a requirement. There wasn’t a lot of involvement or preparation by anyone else, and the overall quality of the class was poor at best. It ended up being a class in which we spoke about Spanish in English, kind of a Spanish Appreciation course.
Since then, I’ve studied on my own and managed to make some progress, though you can only go so far without instruction and opportunities to speak and practice. Not very far at all, really.
Today, I’m moving our trailer over to a little RV park outside of Ashland, home of Southern Oregon University, a liberal arts and teaching college with a Spanish department that has a good reputation. Monday, I’ll be starting an intensive Spanish summer program, all of year two in eight weeks. I’m a bit nervous that either the course will be way over my head and go much too fast, or that it will be badly taught with yet more unmotivated students and will prove of little value. My hope, of course, is that the reality will be somewhere in the middle and I’ll be able to make more progress in the next eight weeks than I’ve made in the last two years. We’ll see.
It’s hard to say exactly how my interest in this all started. At first, living in a bilingual and bicultural community, I thought it would be the least I could do to learn a few phrases, be able to say “excuse me” when I reach past someone in the supermarket, or “what a cute baby you have.” (A dangerous comment in Spanish since “mono” can mean both cute and monkey. “What a baby monkey you have!”)
Beyond my vague initial interest, I began to feel more and more that as an Anglo-American, I’m missing out on something important if I don’t at least speak some of the language I hear all the time around me. I reflected on the often-heard comment, “If you’re going to live in this country, you should learn English.” The corollary being that if you’re going to live in any bilingual community, you should speak some of both languages.
But I continued studying not because of some sense of a social imperative but because I became once again fascinated by the structure and astounding complexity of language, a complexity mastered with no study or effort by any average three- or four-year-old. Maybe in another year or two, I'll be able to have a meaningful conversation with a Mexican four-year-old.
And it gives a retired person who doesn’t play golf and stopped drinking four years ago something to do. Otherwise, I risk taking up shuffleboard.
This is all so exciting. I’ll be living in our trailer four days a week, studying as close to full time as I can, riding my motorcycle to school, and coming home on weekends. A perfect way to spend the summer.
Or maybe not. What if I can’t find my room? What if they all make fun of me? What if I can’t find the bathroom and wet my pants?
What, (my greatest fear), if the class is a dud and we spend four hours a day speaking English about Spanish?
I’ll post the occasional update here on my blog.
Or,
“I’m not sure if it’s possible to learn a new language at my age.” Probably with a few errors illustrating my point. (Just edited to correct a few errors even I could see.)
This comment was part of a short speech of introduction I made the last time I was in a Spanish class, about two years ago. The class was one in the first-year sequence offered at Oregon Tech, my former employer. Since all of the students except me were majoring in either engineering or one of the health professions, everyone was there only to satisfy a requirement. There wasn’t a lot of involvement or preparation by anyone else, and the overall quality of the class was poor at best. It ended up being a class in which we spoke about Spanish in English, kind of a Spanish Appreciation course.
Since then, I’ve studied on my own and managed to make some progress, though you can only go so far without instruction and opportunities to speak and practice. Not very far at all, really.
Today, I’m moving our trailer over to a little RV park outside of Ashland, home of Southern Oregon University, a liberal arts and teaching college with a Spanish department that has a good reputation. Monday, I’ll be starting an intensive Spanish summer program, all of year two in eight weeks. I’m a bit nervous that either the course will be way over my head and go much too fast, or that it will be badly taught with yet more unmotivated students and will prove of little value. My hope, of course, is that the reality will be somewhere in the middle and I’ll be able to make more progress in the next eight weeks than I’ve made in the last two years. We’ll see.
It’s hard to say exactly how my interest in this all started. At first, living in a bilingual and bicultural community, I thought it would be the least I could do to learn a few phrases, be able to say “excuse me” when I reach past someone in the supermarket, or “what a cute baby you have.” (A dangerous comment in Spanish since “mono” can mean both cute and monkey. “What a baby monkey you have!”)
Beyond my vague initial interest, I began to feel more and more that as an Anglo-American, I’m missing out on something important if I don’t at least speak some of the language I hear all the time around me. I reflected on the often-heard comment, “If you’re going to live in this country, you should learn English.” The corollary being that if you’re going to live in any bilingual community, you should speak some of both languages.
But I continued studying not because of some sense of a social imperative but because I became once again fascinated by the structure and astounding complexity of language, a complexity mastered with no study or effort by any average three- or four-year-old. Maybe in another year or two, I'll be able to have a meaningful conversation with a Mexican four-year-old.
And it gives a retired person who doesn’t play golf and stopped drinking four years ago something to do. Otherwise, I risk taking up shuffleboard.
This is all so exciting. I’ll be living in our trailer four days a week, studying as close to full time as I can, riding my motorcycle to school, and coming home on weekends. A perfect way to spend the summer.
Or maybe not. What if I can’t find my room? What if they all make fun of me? What if I can’t find the bathroom and wet my pants?
What, (my greatest fear), if the class is a dud and we spend four hours a day speaking English about Spanish?
I’ll post the occasional update here on my blog.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Mea gulfa, mea gulpa, mea culpa
It’s taken Sarah Palin fifty days to figure out a way to blame me for the Gulf Oil Spill: we environmentalists did it. Because we blocked development of safer sources of domestic oil, such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and from oil rigs closer to shore and in shallower water, we forced the oil companies into the more risky task of deep water drilling farther offshore. It was an accident waiting to happen.
What a bunch of mooseshit.
Let’s be clear about one thing: The Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven men and unleashing the greatest environmental disaster in American history, for one reason and one reason only: BP malfeasance. Dozens of current and former BP employees have testified that BP cut corners, rushed deadlines and ignored warnings in their zeal to bring the well into production on schedule, which is to say as fast as possible. BP proceeded with insufficient data about safety issues and solid evidence that failsafe systems had failed tests. Workers on the rig have testified that they saw the accident coming and feared for their lives. As the evidence mounts, independent engineers, including distinguished faculty from the best engineering programs in the country, shake their heads in wonder.
One of the few pieces of good news that has been missed by the media is the slow rate at which the massive body of oil has approached the Gulf coast. Despite the horrific images—fouled beaches; dead and dying birds, fish, and endangered turtles; thick oil and tar invading fragile marshlands—the diagrams of the growing leak have demonstrated an amazing concentration offshore that has yet to make anywhere near its full impact on coastal communities. This is meager comfort given the disaster at hand, but it has at least given authorities and BP itself time to respond as best they could to contain and minimize impacts.
If even a smaller leak had occurred in one of the shallow-water operations close to shore, it’s easy to imagine that the result would have been far worse far sooner.
Blame the environmentalists and blame Obama; the loonies try every tactic to shift blame to their targets of opportunity, however specious their arguments.
I expect no less of Sarah. I’m just surprised it took her so long.
Drill baby.
What a bunch of mooseshit.
Let’s be clear about one thing: The Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven men and unleashing the greatest environmental disaster in American history, for one reason and one reason only: BP malfeasance. Dozens of current and former BP employees have testified that BP cut corners, rushed deadlines and ignored warnings in their zeal to bring the well into production on schedule, which is to say as fast as possible. BP proceeded with insufficient data about safety issues and solid evidence that failsafe systems had failed tests. Workers on the rig have testified that they saw the accident coming and feared for their lives. As the evidence mounts, independent engineers, including distinguished faculty from the best engineering programs in the country, shake their heads in wonder.
One of the few pieces of good news that has been missed by the media is the slow rate at which the massive body of oil has approached the Gulf coast. Despite the horrific images—fouled beaches; dead and dying birds, fish, and endangered turtles; thick oil and tar invading fragile marshlands—the diagrams of the growing leak have demonstrated an amazing concentration offshore that has yet to make anywhere near its full impact on coastal communities. This is meager comfort given the disaster at hand, but it has at least given authorities and BP itself time to respond as best they could to contain and minimize impacts.
If even a smaller leak had occurred in one of the shallow-water operations close to shore, it’s easy to imagine that the result would have been far worse far sooner.
Blame the environmentalists and blame Obama; the loonies try every tactic to shift blame to their targets of opportunity, however specious their arguments.
I expect no less of Sarah. I’m just surprised it took her so long.
Drill baby.
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Friday, June 04, 2010
Little enough
I've just made a donation to the National Wildlife Federation towards their ongoing efforts to save and protect wildlife affected by the gulf oil spill. The people of Louisiana need our help, too. I hope you will join me by contributing in whatever way you can.
Thanks,
ross
Thanks,
ross
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Good news at last!
This just in from the Washington Post:
"A cap is in place over the Gulf of Mexico gusher, live video footage provided by the company showed Thursday night, but the spewing oil made it very difficult to tell if the cap was fitting well."
BP also stated "Spewing oil is pretty much the only reason we're not sure if we've
stopped the spewing oil."
As soon as the oil stops spewing so much, BP promises to issue an optomistic press release and BP President Tony Hayward can take a well-deserved week off.
"A cap is in place over the Gulf of Mexico gusher, live video footage provided by the company showed Thursday night, but the spewing oil made it very difficult to tell if the cap was fitting well."
BP also stated "Spewing oil is pretty much the only reason we're not sure if we've
stopped the spewing oil."
As soon as the oil stops spewing so much, BP promises to issue an optomistic press release and BP President Tony Hayward can take a well-deserved week off.
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