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The Passionate Skeptic |
Research [Applied Linguistics] [Formal Linguistics] Fluency and Accuracy in Language Teaching Abstract : This is the outline of a seminar on teaching methodology given as a teacher inservice for Chinese English teachers in Zhengzhou, Henan, China, in November 2009. The seminar indicates a fundamental difference in objectives between language learning for certification and learning for live use. Whereas accuracy is an absolute goal within schooling contexts, its value on the street is highly variable. This difference is reflected in teaching perspectives. ... Other articles on language teaching herePhotos A photo essay from students in Zhengzhou photo index
Thor's New China Diary - The Big Parade at Dragon Lake The deal was 8am. I’m a just-in-time guy, but here she was knocking on the door at 7:15. Jeez. Can I offer you some breakfast? We sat looking at each other across a big wooden coffee table, the golden drapes suffusing a soft glow of early sunshine. She’d never tried anything like my special concoction of oatmeal mixed in with raisins, sunflower seeds and yoghurt. Foreigners are funny. She picked at it experimentally.... more... SHORT CUTS 225 War by Any Other Means For food security, they made their clubs into ploughs, but for swagger, they developed kitchen knives into swords. Machine gun slaughter was orgasmic, but unpleasant when the other guys got them too. So they chanelled glory into business and World Cup football. When some geeks made fire crackers into atom bombs, mutually assured destruction forced the lads to look for virtual violence substitutes : proxy wars in 3rd World countries, DVD Rambos, and computer games (now grown up to UAVs - remotely controlled bombers). And the latest punch up is .... a power-obsessed Chinese Communist Party and a testosterone-fueled US military establishment find themselves in a paralyzed embrace of debt-for-profit. Solution? They channel agression through, well, the Internet. Boys will be boys. So now we have Google-Sarajevo. _______ 224. Celebrity as Aphrodisiac Celebrity is amongst the most powerful of all human motivators. It is a potent aphrodisiac: witness the camp followers. It drives Hollywood wannabes, pop stars, sports 'heroes', would-be terrorists (thanks to George Bush et al with their trillion dollar 'eternal war on terror' ), politicians and stunt men. The spermatozoa's race for the egg has a lot to answer for. _______ 223, Innovation is not Problem Solving Innovation is the habit, or the knack, or finding new premises. It is problem questing rather than problem solving. Our best schools and universities hone problem solvers of a certain kind. Give the finest graduates of these places a problem with well-defined premises and they are awesomely efficient at finding a solution that fits the premises. In fact, their education is largely a matter of fitting their brains out with a list of acceptable premises. They are clever twits. Historically universities have been holding pens for clever twits, but the high paying habitats of corporations and government departments have attracted them in increasing numbers. Witness Wall Street's financial whiz kids for a recent consequence. Most human problems have long been familiar, especially the social and economic kind. That is, their premises have been defined, typically by culture and tradition. In each culture, the local clever twits enforce their solutions based on accepted premises. Yet the human social and technical matrix, mixing and whirling ever faster, also crashes repeatedly. Injustice is rife, incompetence endemic, happiness elusive. When things fail utterly, the clever twits in desperation seize, in the most amateurish way, upon any stray proposition thrown into the ring, In such unstable environments the clever twits frequently have neither a moral compass, nor a skeptic's trained eye, nor the eccentric habits of innovators who can cast old premises through a new prism, and find the hidden catalyst in an unsuspected premise, the key to unlock those old problems that we thought we knew so well. more short cuts .... Unwise Ideas 47. The contest for Competence If some people don't break the rules sometimes, then a normal society will cease to function. Breaking the wrong rules for the wrong reasons is like breaking legs though. And if everyone breaks the rules, then a society will disintegrate. A paradox? Yes. See how this cake is baked... more. Poetry [ also see Thor's Poems at http://thormay.net/literature/poems.html ]
Feature Life, Content Mangagement Systems, and the Answer to Everything From time to time I have picked at CMS/blog machines, and wondered how to migrate the now denigrated "static" html of my sprawling site to the tidy content of databases. The main attraction has been the incorporation of some way to give readers a voice, assuming there are any readers left out there. A few years ago, they used to send a steady stream of e-mails, but now expect something more instant and public. The voices have fallen silent.... more
WRITING Managing Downward Spirals - Getting from Here to There Hey, will you be here tomorrow? Seg back twenty years and all the news was of a planet overrun by recklessly breeding humans. Today in the media of rich nations, the slightly hysterical whisper is that liberated women are on a baby strike and we’ll all be doomed to robot care in our old age. This downward spiral of fertility is an almost sedate affair in the grand scheme of things. Compare it to the supposed disappearance of dinosaurs after the nuclear winter from earth's traffic accident with a giant meteor. People though, count for more than dinosaurs, don't they... (continued ...)
<> Bus to Heaven (a story for learning English) Every morning Helen put her left shoe on before her right shoe. She combed her hair before she put on any mascara. And she made her bed before she ironed her dress. There wasn't any special reason for doing things in that order. It was just a habit, and she never thought about it... (continued ...) <> Mr Dog Looks for Breakfast Mr. Dog woke up one Spring morning and yawned.He stretched his legs and wrinkled his nose.Then he sniffed the breeze. There were many interesting smells in the air.He could smell the jaoze steaming in Mrs. Li's kitchen. That made his to tongue hang out, and he panted a little with pleasure.Presently he caught another scent. It was that damned Tabby cat. He frowned, and growled deep in his throat.The silly thing was watching him for sure, hiding behind a fence or something. He looked around suspiciously, but Tabby was not to be seen... (... continued)
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