Language counciling
Pretty good day today, but mighty long. Had a lovely surprise evening with our friends Heather and Kevin who kept me company (and took me to Sudwerk!) while Lewis was out with his padre tasting some tasty cheese and beers in SF.
Section this morning was great! I skipped the stuff that I thought was crappy from the earlier section, and went straight to the exercises and group work. I think it went really well, and there was a great vibe with the students. I’m feeling quite good about both sections this quarter, and I hope I can keep that feeling rolling for a while. Had office hours after that, which was kind of a disaster. I only had one kid come in, sort of at the end of my time, and I spent a full 90 minutes with him. Arg. I don’t know quite what to do with this kid, but I’ve never seen anyone completely lacking in any kind of linguistic intuition before. I never even got to the point where he could tell a consonant from a vowel.
I feel bad, cause I know he’s really struggling with his phonetics homework, but I just don’t know what to do to teach him this stuff that should theoretically be intuitive. He keeps blaming it on being a second language learner, but I’ve had tons of esl kids before, and that’s really not a valid excuse. As a linguist, I think I’m more atuned to the difficulties language learners face since we spend so much time talking about SLA and bilingualism. This really turns me around in application though – it’s impossible to know when you’re being too hard and when you’re not being sympathetic enough. I don’t think asking people to memorize the IPA and the position of your articulators. I think there’s a leap of faith you need to take as an ESL student that what we’re saying isn’t some kind of crazy conception of how the English language should be done. [t] is the most common sound cross-linguistically, the least marked if nothing else, so asking an ESL student to decompose a [t] into it’s phonetic parts isn’t ridiculous – they should be the same parameters in their native language as they are in English, more or less. I have a lot more sympathy for the vowels, because I know English has a middling-to-terrible vowel system. Urgh. I’m doing my best, but by the time I explained what the questions on his homework were supposed to be asking (and spending 90 minutes doing that…) I was just so totally drained. I want to help him, but I really can’t keep this level up all quarter.
Thankfully, my afternoon class was great. Lots of interesting discussion on typology, and I got my assignment for the presentation I’m giving for that class. Got the paper (book?) I wanted, and I’m looking forward to getting my one presentation out of the way early (I’m going the first day) since I’ve got my cogneuro presentation on the last day of class. It’s probably time to start thinking about paper topics, I suppose. The quarter system is rough that way – it’s just the end of the second week, and it’s already time to start hammering out final papers. It’s at least good to get your topic started so you don’t get blindsided later when you’re completely lacking in time to do research. My topics for both classes are completely open, so it’s almost more difficult to start thinking about whether I can work these papers into the thesis-y master plan. Or something like that.