“I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary--you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.” ― Georgia O'Keeffe
". . . the implicitly acquired epistemic contents of mind are always richer and more sophisticated than what can be explicated."Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 118(3), 219.
Wherefore Converse?
Preface I started this post a couple of months ago--before Covid-19 foisted itself upon the world. The point remains relevant, nonetheless--perhaps more so. On vacation last winter, I booked a tour from Sedona to Antelope Canyon. It was my first time traveling with a group of strangers in a small rental van, and I ended... Continue Reading →
The V of Cups
Today those from my past who are no longer with me occupied my thoughts. That, in tandem with the forces driving the global health crisis, has accentuated themes of life and death. That's probably why I woke up with Yeat's "Among School Children" stuck in my head. Yeats wrote the poem in his sixties, while... Continue Reading →
I've developed an aversion to the phrasal preposition "as well as ...." It reads as though one couldn't find a sensible way to incorporate an addendum, so he has stuck it on the end of something else that's well-formed.
MEXTESOL 2019: Santiago de Querétaro, Estado de Querétaro, México
MEXTESOL marked my last conference of the 2019 calendar year. Somehow I pulled off three presentations of various mediums in the middle of the fall semester. I chose practical topics this time around--a demonstration on various styles of written corrective feedback, a poster session on computer assisted language teaching (CAPT) with MS Class Notebooks, and... Continue Reading →
The language carrot …
“I don’t speak,” Bijaz said. “I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.”"Dune Messiah" (1969) by Frank Herbert Today, the BBC published an article on what it means to be fluent in a language. Fluency might be the unicorn sighting of the second language universe--that thing everyone carries on... Continue Reading →
Sun shower in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor
Monday culminated in some shopping in Madrid's Plaza Mayor, where I got locked down by a torrential downpour. The intensity of the sunlight doesn't show up so well in this video, but the green dot moving around the screen is where the sun was hitting the lens of my phone's camara. https://youtu.be/fTEmuMDwEvE
Hace mucho tiempo no nos escribimos
Blog updates succumbed to summer ennui this year, but there's nothing like refreshing time away from the U.S. to get the words flowing again. It's remarkable what a reliable metro system with occupants who know how to act in public will do for my overall humor. I'm writing this from the patio of my hotel... Continue Reading →
The trouble with books …
The next time your students ask if they can rely on books for their research, you can tell them this: Book publishers don’t normally fact-check books. They’ll run sensitive material by lawyers, but otherwise it’s on authors to make sure their work is accurate. Generally, this works out fine. Sometimes, it does not. When books... Continue Reading →
