Category: Journal Entries
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My First Weekend at Kansai Gaidai
The New Life The weather cleared up today, and the forecast shows clear skies through Wednesday. Both moving days in Pasadena fell on cold, rainy days, and the weather in Hirakata was no different. I arrived Friday night, and tomorrow I will attend my first meeting. The campus is small but well-kept, and the apartment…
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A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss
After eight and a half years, I taught my final day at the USC International Academy today. I am leaving USC to begin teaching at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan for the University of North Texas. Having come to the field of ESL later than many, I never experienced overseas teaching. Since I want…
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Add Sapir-Whorf to Post-Modernism and You Get an Orwellian Ministry of Truth
One of the deterrents of regular exercise is the time it consumes from my daily budget of productive hours, so I’ve developed a habit of catching up on podcasts at the gym to fill more of my day with literature and quality language. It so happened that tonight’s listening regimen struck a serendipitous chord on…
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Top of Week 3, 2023
Small changes Create Workflow Hiccups This was week 3 of the year but the first week of class. The holiday break was not especially long, but I sure was rusty. My mental state drifted far from its workflow state in those few weeks. On the first day, I couldn’t even find the PowerPoint I had…
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Bottom of Week 1 – 2023
The first week of 2023 has already passed, and the spring semester looms on the Monday horizon. I’m spending the weekend populating calendars and uploading syllabi. Conferences, curricula improvement, and major moves will make this a hectic semester. In the midst of it, I’ve resolved to blog more. This year I will incorporate more pragmatics…
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Edge Effect — Conversation Analysis and Art Criticism
I returned today from my first post-pandemic visit to the Getty Center in Los Angeles. I enjoy visiting museums, but I always wish the visits were more productive. This post represents the fruits of that impulse. My trade is applied linguistics, so I considered what insights can be gleaned from the world of art by…
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Barbara Ehrenreich – A Rare Good-Faith Intellectual – Dies
Barbara Ehrenreich, the author, activist and self-described “myth buster” who in such notable works as “Nickel and Dimed” and “Bait and Switch” challenged conventional thinking about class, religion and the very idea of an American dream, has died at age 81. Barbara Ehrenreich, Activist and ‘Myth Busting’ Writer of ‘Nickel and Dimed,’ Dies – NBC…
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The Ramifications of Post-Modernism in Music
On April 26th, linguist John McWhorter took issue with the 12-tone approach to music and the damage it wrought on modern art music in The New York Times: He alluded to the political undercurrent of atonal classical music, pointing out the comments of Pierre Boulez and the historical fascist response to 12-tone and atonal music.…
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Mapping the musical mind: the link between musical and language processing — Music Education Works
I’ve posted before on the link between linguistic syntax, music, and the research opportunities music could afford a conversation of syntactic acquisition. This article from Music Education Works discusses research out of Japan on the link between music and language. Researchers in Japan have found a specific link between musical processing and areas of the…
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Week 4 of Summer A – 2022
The arrival of week 4 means I’ve surpassed the midpoint of summer A at school, and the jacaranda seem to have reached the zenith of their bloom. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has reappeared on the radar at work, so masks and periodic testing will remain in my life through the summer, it seems. This week, I finally…
Ezra Vasquez 