I should be writing

"Your older blog posts were better."

"You haven't been writing much."

"You should be writing."

Yeah, I know. Writer-artist Mary was traded away at the end of August 2010, when I bought textbooks at the UBC bookstore. "Here's my debit card and my creativity." Classes started. Analysis began. Critique. Literature review. Sure, the professors invited discussion and welcomed "I" in papers and encouraged that touchy-feely collaborative atmosphere. But all along, in the back of my mind, knowledge: I am not making anything I value. Mostly we critiqued what other people wrote.

Fear not, though. Grad school ends tomorrow--tomorrow I have my last class. It's in #10 at the bottom of this list.

Classes I've taken toward the M.Ed in Teaching English as a Second Language:

Theories of Second Language Acquisition

Theory and Research in Teaching English as a Second Language

Research in the Teaching of Literature

Advanced Creative Forms and Techniques of Non-Fiction

Culture and Politics in Second Language Education

Theory and Research in Teaching Second Language Writing

Advanced Workshop in Literary Translation

Multilingualism and Multimodality: Diversity as a Resource

Research Methodology in Education

Applied Linguistics for Teachers

The program has been valuable, absolutely. But I really do look forward to talking to non-school people, to reading literature, to personal projects, to writing, to making things I value.

And to being less serious!

Linguistics and kids

Believe it or not, I've never taken a linguistics class. Now I am taking one. It's my last class in the M.Ed. program. I'm learning that almost all linguists who write about first language acquisition in kids are talking about their own kids. They record the kids at home and in the car and then analyze.

Stephen: I wonder where you get tiger food.

Brother: Tigers eat meat.

Mother: [teasingly] Give it a little boy.

Stephen: [pause] Is a boy meat?

Stephen is four.

Mother: A creature is anything that's alive.

Stephen: [sounding astonished] Are we creatures?

The linguist reporting these conversations, Clare Painter, is talking about how kids learn to draw inferences from linguistically presented information. In the margins, though, I just have "Hahahahaha" and "AWESOME" and "!". I'm less interested in analysis, and more interested laughing at the hilarity of kids. Yeah, I totally want one.

I'm back

exigency

the Foundation

interstices

the seawall

hegemony

the Biltmore

ontology

the Downtown Eastside

I'm back in school (Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia). I'm back in Vancouver. I'm back on the blog.