h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On average, about once a week. Grading student work and planning lessons keeps me busy. How 'bout you?

With very few exceptions, like the last week, I've been living here.
The floors are so much nicer and there is less dog hair.

There's also less cat hair.
I've been thinking that that "Love Islam, Hate America" thread was becoming a little too serious. Thanks for throwing in the appropriate non-sequitur. I had begun to dread going back to it.

Well so have I, which is why I'm not.
If I'm going to be involved in controversey, I want to start it.
Thou art a teacher?
Are your fellow instructors bareable?

Most of my colleagues are wonderful, which is a good thing because I go from room to room, seeing as I am a migrant worker within the school system. We've learned one of the most important things to remember about education is to keep a sense of humor. They tell me I'll have my own room in 2 or 3 years. Wahoo.

You are a remedial teacher or one of those 'an hour here and an hour there' carry all your stuff with you or roll around a cart types?
Where are you again?
Even the janitors have rooms around here.

I teach ESOL and transitional classes for advanced ESOL students who need to pick up English 1 and 2 so they can graduate.
The school district is doing a massive remodeling job on the building, that will take the next 4 years, so there will be about 30 of us migrants next year. I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that I have a year to get used to it before everyone is on wheels. Actually, about like a quarter of the teaching staff will be roving next year. Good thing I really like my job, otherwise I'd be looking elsewhere asap.
I'm in Kansas, Midwestern USA. Where abouts are you?

Texas.
ESOL? I don't know that one.
We were taught in Journalism to always spell out an acronym before using it in the body of the text.
Kansas. That's funny. I was just talking on another thread about having flashbacks from driving through Kansas on my way to California.
I grew up in southern Illinois.
Four years to rebuild a building? What are they using, the shop class?Or the lowest bid from the School Board chairman's brother-in-law?
How many students in the school? Is it one of those county-wide districts?
Let's see, hmm. ESL is English as a Second Language, so what's the O for? You have a migrant population up there or immigrant? What's the first language?

We've discovered that since English is often the third, fourth or even fifth language of many of our students, ESL no longer fits. ESOL stands for English for Students of Other Languages. I thought about spelling it out, but it's so much fun to see if people already know.
We have both migrant and immigrant populations. Total student body is about 2200. Our ESOL population is between 250 and 300. The number varies depending on the time of year and expulsion rate of do-nothing students. Mostly hispanic and Vietnamese, we also have a few Africans from various countries, Pakistanis, Cambodians, Iranians, etc. Most don't plan to go back to the home country since they would probably be killed or couldn't live nearly so well as here.
Wichita has 7 high schools and we're the largest, for better or worse. The building is 78 years old and needs a major overhaul but they can't shut it down for 2 years so they'll be working on it while we have classes for 3 or 4 years. Sounds like fun huh. There was a big vote last year for a bond issue to pay for it, which passed will little argument after the good citizens toured our facility. After 40 years with out renovation, it was trashed. They say we'll all have airconditioning, our own computers and our own rooms when it's all over. We'll see.

What part of southern Illinois? I spent a little time in that area.

Mt. Vernon.
I'll be back. I'm just catching up on some backlog.

So I assume the building has some historical significance?

And your job means that you are multi-lingual?

Well at least you got your bond issue. We've got a bunch of old widows around here who keep voting down property tax increases and the property taxes are for some stupid reason attached to the school funding and the feds are making nasty noises about matching funds.
One of the school districts around here has been under federal supervision for the last fifteen years because of malfeasance with bussing funds and title IX violations.

I've studied Spanish, Hebrew and Mandarin Chinese, but have only passed beyond beginner level in Spanish. Not much use for Hebrew this far from the Mid East. I do on occasion have a Chinese speaker in class but my Chinese too very basic for anything other than making a personal connection with a student. Amazing how people warm up to a teacher who has actually attempted to speak their language, no matter how vainly. My students, however, need to practice using English, so I tend to avoid speaking anything else unless for a few words of explanation when someone is completely lost.

We also had a group of people who didn't want to deal with the property tax intended to fund the improvements. Fortunately there were enough people, who saw the benifit of educating these kids they keep griping about, to pass the thing. And malfeasance is a big problem. A little town just south of Wichita fired its superintendant for using his district charge card for the wrong things. Lots of editorials about that one and asking who will be supervising all those tax dollars going into the renovations.
What part of Texas would you be presently inhabiting?

Little pimple on the face of creation called Temple, near Belton and Killeen, which is on the edge of Ft. Hood.
Just came back from a school band skating party going to watch 'Osmosis Jones'.
I've been learning to recognize words in european languages by hitting on foreign language sites. Passed a quiz on a Swiss site by guessing what the Romansch words meant.

Just a little message to say Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it, and Happy Holidays if you don't.

Learning another language is a mind expanding experience. Do you think you might want to study Romansch more thoroughly some time?

What's your opinion (if you have one) of the English Only controversy?

Well, I think with modern translation technology moving ahead as it has, it will be possible for people to be part of a global community without sacrificing their native tongue.
On the other hand, I think it would be nice if there was some way to teach sign language to everyone so they won't have to shout so much and it would be nice for everyone to have something to do with their hands besides the usual stupid gestures that don't mean anything.
So, what was that about Southern Illinois?
I grew up in Mt. Vernon.
As for Romansch, nah, but I would like to have a good dictionary on hand. I'm busy beating the crap out of this language.
I did buy a British English/American English dictionary the other day.
The differences are frightening.

A few years ago I toured with an itinerant drama group called the Conenant Players in Southern Illinois/Indiana. I think we performed in Mt. Vernon. In fact, after checking a map, I know we did. I don't remember much about the place since we performed in a lot of small towns in both states. They tend to blur together after a while and that was at least 7 years ago.

I know what you mean about British English / American English. That's what go Dan Quayle in trouble. Good thing they didn't ask him to spell jail. Or is that gaol?

Do you think we'll ever progress to the Star Trek universal translator type device?

One of the goals of AI research is to take speech at one end and within a few seconds produce speech in another language at the other end. Unfortunately, this means teaching a computer to learn about things it cannot care about. Questions asked by the AI project at MCC in Austin a few years ago were ,"What sex is a car", and "Is yellow happy?"
All humans perform basic functions with their brains and their bodies.
But either can be 'wired' in many different ways.
English is considered one of the most difficult languages in the world. This is because of the 'ghoti=fish' and the fact that similar or identical words mean very different things. The English language is an accretion. Most of it's words are far removed from the geographic area in which they were conceived. It is clunky, it has almost none of the music of French or Spanish or even German. Japanese to me sounds more harsh and clunky than Mandarin. Korean sounds natural to my ear, far more natural than some of the African clicking languages.
It is easier to translate almost any other language into another than it is to translate to or from english. It involves an enormous amount of memorizising. Most expert spellers and writers of English have well-thumbed dictionaries. Most inexpert spellers don't even bother.
Many people in the US speak a patois or dialect that they can't even begin to spell and spelling correctly is a bother because it has no relationship to how they speak.
About half the languages in the world lack a widely used form of writing them. And very few of the speakers will ever bother to learn to read and write. So immediate translation will be verbal or, in the case of the deaf, visual.
ASL has almost no relationship to written language.
That's why I like sculpture and painting. They are languages that require little translation. But they require thought.
Many people speak and write without thinking about all of the consequences of their words. An artist has to think in order to make the viewer think.
I rarely think of film as art because it's basis, even if it is a silent film, is in words. Somebody wrote something as a script, the director had to talk to the cameraman and the people. Some idiot had to ask,"What's my motivation?"
Covenant Players? What's that?

Wow. You sound like my psycholinguistics professor. (Are you familiar with psycholinguistics? The study of how the brain produces language?) Have you heard about the early attempt at computerized translatioin between Russian and English? They entered "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," translating into Russian, then when they retranslated to English the computer came back with "the wine was good but the meat was spoiled," which is partially why I ask the question. A computer's mind can't expand as far as a person's.

One of my most prized books is a Spanish/Hebrew, Hebrew/ Spanish dictionary.

The Covenant Players is a traveling drama company that tours all over the US and many countries of the world. We performed in churches, mostly, and also schools, nursing homes, prisons, virtually anywhere they would have us. The plays have all been written by a man named Charles M. Tanner, who founded the company in the 1960's. Last I heard there were more than 3000 of them, ranging from 10 lines to 20 pages. CP has been in a bit of a slump the past few years and may be on the decline now that Chuck is in his 80's and "up to the "M" in Alsheimers," as one CPer put it.

What do you think of the work of MC Escher?

A Spanish/Hebrew dictionary? Have you ever heard of Ladino?
Yes, I'm aware of the experiment you mentioned. I was going to say something about it but I couldn't remember what you just remembered.
Yes, I am aware of psycho-linguists....
I have a couple Escher books. I am fascinated by him. And Maigret(sp?), the guy with the pipes and the bowler hats. And Dali.
So, what were Tanner's plays like?
I wouldn't say a computer had a mind.
The correlation between nature and cybernetics will be more similar to an ant colony or a plant than a human. See if you can find the newer edition of Frank Herbert's 'Destination: Void'. It is a long narrative in-joke about creating an AI navigational computer from scratch after the purpose-grown human brains fail.