Brand New Alphabet for Northern Caucasian Languages

Tweet I am copying into this blogpost an email which appeared on the  Language Policy List lgpolicy-list@groups.sas.upenn.edu about the ancient languages of the Caucasus Mountains. I have edited out some parts of it which were technical, in order to make it a tidy size for a blog post, and to make it accessible to non-specialists.  The […]

Contemplative pedagogy: Names

Tweet Naming things is an important concept in linguistics.  People have cute, or crazy, or insulting names for people and things in their lives, and that is an area for productive study. Grandmother names are my present fixation — I am called Granna. I remember the struggle after 9/11 to find a name for the […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: “Eat it immediately.”

Tweet This post is part of an ongoing series on Contemplative Pedagogy which often focuses as much on the absence of language as on its form. In his book Meditation in Action, Chögyam Trungpa writes: “…one usually finds that books, teachings, lectures, and so on are more concerned with proving that they are right than […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: Going Deeper

Tweet This post is part of an ongoing series on contemplative practices in the writing classroom. It is about the absence of language as much as language itself. Following a challenging autumn, during which we had a terrible hurricane, a contentious election, and the shootings at Newtown in which little children were mowed down with […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: Activating the Imagination

Tweet This post is one of a series on contemplative pedagogy, where the subject is as much the absence of language as language itself. In an essay writing class, a fictionalizing imagination is not necessary, but students must think of everyday events and reactions in new ways, and must link these events and reactions to […]

Contemplative pedagogy: Disrupting time

Tweet This is one of an ongoing series of posts on contemplative pedagogy. It focuses on lack of language rather than on language itself. One of the bugabears of essay writing is making too many assumptions, from “everybody” thinks this, to “My father never uses swearwords.”  One of the challenges of the writing teacher is […]

Concentration, not Meditation

Tweet My class has asked (by vote of 19-1) for regular meditation exercises. We do them once a week. I will document those in subsequent posts, but yesterday we did a variation — a concentration exercise. A case could be made that because of multi-tasking and the constant electronic intrusion into their lives, students rarely […]

The ideal writing class

Tweet I asked my class today what the ideal writing class would be like.  I haven’t analyzed all that they said, but was surprised by a couple of comments in our class discussion. 1.  They hate peer review, find it useless.  I agree, as presently structured (though I don’t follow the recommended structures).  They do […]

Slowing down the class

Tweet Research has shown (as if we needed much research to know this!) that some students process questions slower than others.  This may be for a variety of reasons, among them that the student may be an introvert or shy, or may be a detailed thinker who wants to pause over certain parts of a […]

Naming baby

Tweet My friend Pamela Satran has a delightful blog called Nameberry which is a treasure trove about peoples’ first names, in American culture. As illustrated below, it would be of limited use elsewhere. When my children were born, their father didn’t want any of the usual names and, since he was Australian, went searching in an […]