Teaching ... or not Teaching

Over at the Science Blogs the Seed Overlords have asked the bloggers "What makes a good science teacher?" You can read their answers over there, but reading all the posts got me thinking ...

Not that I'm a science teacher, but I do teach. And while I most certainly don't think that "if you can teach something, you can teach anything", I do believe that many things are common to all teachers.

So I'd like to talk about something that happened earlier this week.

I had a student making up some grammar work. I was looking over her shoulder as she sat there, staring at her paper... it was short form adjectives.

A brief digression for those who don't know (which is probably most of you): Russian adjectives come in two forms, called (not surprisingly) long and short. Long form adjectives are attributive, that is they directly modify nouns: chelovek vysokiy = the tall man. Short forms, on the other hand, are predicative, meaning, they 'really' mean "is handsome, is sick, is sufficient" and so on: chelovek vysok = the man is tall. Russian adjectives also agree with their nouns in number, gender, and case.*

Back to the story. The question she was working on was simple: there were a number of long form adjectives in masculine nominative singular, and she was to provide the short form. She had filled in a few of them - the ones that she'd obviously memorized.

Looking at what she'd filled in, I could see a pattern: she'd gotten the ones that take what's called a fugitive (or fleeting) vowel: bolnoy - bolen; spokoynyy - spokoyen; dovolnyy - dovolen. She had blanks for the others: krasivyy - ?; vysokiy - ?

So I thought I'd give her a hint. "Why are you putting the E in?" I asked.

"I don't know... It's supposed to be there, isn't it? Isn't it?" She started erasing it out of bolen.

"No, no," I said. "Not 'why are you doing that, dummy?' It belongs there! I meant, 'what's the reason for it?'"

She honestly didn't know. Somewhere along the way, she'd memorized these not-really-irregular, very common short forms, but no one had ever explained to her what was going on.

So I started off with the Socratic method, trying to make her understand that she understood. "What does the E do?" She looked at me, uncertain. "What if the E wasn't there?"

She looked at the words. "You couldn't pronounce most of them?"

That's close enough. The fugitive vowel is placed between the final consonant of the root and any consonant-beginning suffix. You certainly could pronounce "spokoyn", and probably "dovoln" for that matter, but she had focussed on the consonant cluster, which is the key. "So," I asked, "these others, you don't need the E. But what makes you need the E in this group? What did you do to make that cluster show up?"

"Took off the ending," she said, paused, and then wrote krasiv.

"That's it," I said, and she confidently filled in the rest.

Now - she went at it backwards, having memorized what she called the "irregular" ones. They aren't irregular: the fugitive vowel is a perfectly regular and predictable phenomenon. You just need to know a little bit about where they come from and when they show up. (It has to do with Russian root and syllable forms, and an historical loss of certain vowels... Think of it as similar to the way the E shows up in the past tense of some English verbs - in pronunciation, I mean, not spelling - but not others: hated, batted, but played, skied.)

To make a short-form, predicative adjective you replace the long-form ending with the short-form one. For masculine, that means replacing -YY (or IY or OY) with the zero ending, meaning that, for instance, krasivyy is krasiv and vysokiy is vysok, and so on.**

If the stem of the adjective has the adjectival-making suffix N, so that it's root+N, as in bol-n or spokoy-n (Y is a consonant), you have an impermissable consonant cluster. (It's the adjoining of stem and suffix that makes it impermissable, not the actual consonants involved.) So the fugitive vowel comes in (back, actually - it's as if we didn't write the silent E in words like "hate" until we added the D of the past tense so that we didn't have T+D together). So, instead of boln, it's bolen.

The point being, whoever had this woman for basic grammar should have made it clear that making the short form adjective was a completely regular process: remove the ending, insert the fugitive vowel if required. Instead, someone assumed she'd just figure that out when the "irregulars" were listed.

It didn't happen. She memorized those few forms and floundered without the rule.

So... what's my point? I guess it's that language teachers need to remember that adults aren't acquiring their second language, they're learning it. This means that many, probably most, of them will not generalize the rule the way children do. Things need to be explained to them.

I don't teach beginners; the students I get are intermediate level. Most of them have memorized a lot of patterns, but have no feeling for the reasons for what look like exceptions. I've had a lot of students tell me they "never understood it before." It's very gratifying to see them understand - to actually see the moment when it becomes clear.

That's why I teach. My evaluations say I'm good at it. I like that.

---

* Russian has two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and six cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, instrumental, and prepositional (also called locative) - plus remnants of a couple more, found mainly in fossilized phrases).

** For those who are wondering, for feminine you replace -AYA or -YAYA with A or YA; for neuter you replace -OYE or -YEYE with O or YE; and for plural you replace -IYE or YYE with I or Y. Easy peasy. That means, no fugitive vowel in the short form, since the N becomes part of the new final syllable: bol+n+- = bolen, but bol+n+a = bolna

What It Means

Another great quote from LtCmdr Charles Swift, the military lawyer who took the Guantánamo tribunals case to the Supreme Court - and won:

It means that we can't be scared out of who we are. And that's victory, folks.

Exactly.

Because, as I (and others) have said before, this case - this whole argument - isn't about them, and what they do. It's about us, and what we do.

And who we are.

And whether we intend to stay who we are, or turn into them.

Shadows on Saturn

Wow. What a gorgeous shot of Saturn's rings casting shadows on the planet.

This will be one of Cassini's last shots of the rings more-or-less edge-on. Towards the end of July (after two close flybys of Titan), they'll begin moving Cassini by 180 degrees with respect to the sun - which will give us, at the end of the year-long manuever, a view "looking down" at the rings. It's going to be a spectacular year!

Such good law, even this court can see it

In "a stunning rebuff to President Bush" the Supreme Court ruled the military tribunals at Gitmo to be "illegal under both American law and the Geneva Conventions" (quotes from BBC World News).

Bush said he'd "conform with the ruling of the Supreme Court" - said it with a shrug and a grimace, as if to convey how freaking annoyed he is that he couldn't get the Court to announce that Congress had in fact given him "a blank check". Instead, the Court said that the rule of law is everywhere, not just where Bush (or indeed any President) wants it to be.

Lt Commander Charles Swift, the military lawyer who took Hamdan's case and fought it all the way, said, speaking of the Court: "They brought the law to Guantánamo Bay."

LtCmdr Swift - you deserve a nation's grateful thanks.

I hope you get it.

Jesus is not a Republican

That's the title of an article a friend sent me, an article written Randall Balmer and published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. You need to be a subscriber to read that, so I'm providing it here.

It should be obvious I'm no evangelical. I'm not even, really, a Christian, except by heritage. But this article strikes me as important.

A couple of excerpts to whet your appetite:

Evangelicals have come a long way since my visit to Edman Chapel in 1972. We have moved from cultural obscurity almost invisibility to becoming a major force in American society. Jimmy Carter's run for the presidency launched us into the national consciousness, but evangelicals abandoned Carter by the end of the 1970s, as the nascent religious right forged an alliance with the Republican Party.

In terms of cultural and political influence, that alliance has been a bonanza for both sides. The coalition dominates talk radio and controls a growing number of state legislatures and local school boards. It is seeking, with some initial success, to recast Hollywood and the entertainment industry. The Republicans have come to depend on religious-right voters as their most reliable constituency, and, with the Republicans firmly in command of all three branches of the federal government, leaders of the religious right now enjoy unprecedented access to power.

And what has the religious right done with its political influence? Judging by the platform and the policies of the Republican Party - and I'm aware of no way to disentangle the agenda of the Republican Party from the goals of the religious right - the purpose of all this grasping for power looks something like this: an expansion of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the continued prosecution of a war in the Middle East that enraged our longtime allies and would not meet even the barest of just-war criteria, and a rejiggering of Social Security, the effect of which, most observers agree, would be to fray the social-safety net for the poorest among us. Public education is very much imperiled by Republican policies, to the evident satisfaction of the religious right, and it seeks to replace science curricula with theology, thereby transforming students into catechumens.

America's grossly disproportionate consumption of energy continues unabated, prompting demands for oil exploration in environmentally sensitive areas. The Bush administration has jettisoned U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which called on Americans to make at least a token effort to combat global warming. Corporate interests are treated with the kind of reverence and deference once reserved for the deity.

The Bible contains something like 2,000 references to the poor and the believer's responsibility for the poor. Sadly, that obligation seems not to have trickled down into public policy. On judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with regard to abortion. At the same time, it approves a corresponding expansion of presidential powers, thereby disrupting the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances.

And, after some discussion about other issues, including torture and abortion, he declares:

Equally striking is the rhetoric that leaders of the religious right use to motivate their followers. In the course of traveling around the country, I have been impressed anew by the pervasiveness of the language of militarism among leaders of the religious right. Patrick Henry College, according to its founding president, Michael Farris, "is training an army of young people who will lead the nation and shape the culture with biblical values." Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church, in Ohio, issues swords to those who join his organization, the Center for Moral Clarity, and calls on his followers to "lock and load" for a "Holy Ghost invasion." The Traditional Values Coalition advertises its "Battle Plan" to take over the federal judiciary. "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare," Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, famously declared about his political tactics in 1997. I wonder how that sounds in the ears of the Prince of Peace.

Such rhetoric and policies are a scandal, a reproach to the gospel I honor and to the Jesus I love. I went to Sunday school nearly every week of my childhood.But I must have been absent the day they told us that the followers of Jesus were obliged to secure even greater economic advantages for the affluent, to deprive those Jesus called "the least of these" of a living wage, and to despoil the environment by sacrificing it on the altar of free enterprise. I missed the lesson telling me that I should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, even those designated as my enemies.

This article is insightful and provocative. Read it - you can use it in conversation even if it doesn't apply to you.

Happy Birthday, Antoine and The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

author of The Little Prince,

was born today in 1900

I am... Green Lantern?

Er... I am Green Lantern!

I guess... (I have to confess, I never read much DC ...)

Your results:

You are Green Lantern

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Green Lantern 80%
Superman 70%
Hulk  55%
Catwoman 50%
Batman  50%
Robin  47%
Supergirl 47%
Spider-Man 45%
Iron Man 35%
Wonder Woman 32%
The Flash 20%

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

O-for-three! O frabjous day!

America squeaked by.

By one vote, the Senate struck down the "flag-burning" amendment. (Oh, well, it'll look like a line drive in the box score of history...)

Freedom of speech stays more important than symbol-worship.

Whew!

And see my earlier post The thing the symbol stands for for my full thoughts on the matter.

the brief absence

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging recently. My ISP has been down (except for a couple of minutes here or there) thanks to the monsoon-like rains (well, I don't know what a monsoon is really like, but they've been steady and strong) we've been having. Mudslides maybe, maybe a downed tree? I don't know, but we seem to be back up!

Yay!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Wordplay (wanted to see Water, but it was sold out - Wordplay was quite enjoyable, though - I never finish a puzzle that fast!)

DVD: Watched Serenity (again!) ... and it won't be the last time, either.

Read: Finished Bones, Rocks and Stars - The Science of When Things Happened, also Postscript to Poison and When Last I Died.

The thing the symbol stands for

Jonathan Alter over on the Newsweek site has an excellent essay about flag-burning - or, rather, about the proposed amendment.

As he points out, flag burning is very rare - maybe half-a-dozen cases in the last 15 years. Even at the height of the Vietnam War there weren't 50. But even if people were burning a flag every day, no one should let their outrage at this form of protest lead them to amending the Constitution to make one symbolic act unconstitutional.

He explains his belief that this amendment is a true, valuable litmus test:

The flag burning amendment is in a category by itself: the only argument for it is based on pure emotion. But ours is supposed to be a government of reason, not emotion, especially when it comes to the most precious repository of our rights. The American Constitution, the apogee of reason in the history of self-government, is real; the American flag, for all of its beauty and deep meaning, is symbolic. For more than 200 years, we'’ve occasionally used the amendment process to expand rights. This would be the first time we would enshrine their restriction. Polluting the Constitution is far more dangerous than burning the flag.

I agree with him. But there's more.

As - what will people do instead? I mean, assuming that more flags aren't actually burnt once it becomes such a loaded and 'unconstitutional' action, of course. What will people do next to protest?

And more importantly - What will we have to do to stop whatever that is?

We've always had a fringe of people who make the symbols of our country almost more important than the substance. Torture our enemies? Okay. Warrantless wiretapping? If that's what it takes. Kick down the doors of innocent people? Omelets and broken eggs. Burn the flag? Off with their heads!

Perhaps if we spent more time making sure the country was a thing whose symbols people would cherish instead of seeking instead to force people to act as if they cherished them we'd have fewer problems.

As Mark Twain once observed, you attack the flag at your peril.

I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I conceded and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration.

That was in 1901 - in 1907 he expressed the same emotion from the other side:

Yet to-day in the public schools we teach our children to salute the flag, and this is our idea of instilling in them patriotism. And this so-called patriotism we mistake for citizenship; but if there is a stain on that flag it ought not to be honored, even if it is our flag. The true citizenship is to protect the flag from dishonor -- to make it the emblem of a nation that is known to all nations as true and honest and honorable.

That's the real trouble here. We need to remember why it is that this country is different. It's the Constitution -- it's the enshrinement in Law of Reason, not emotion. It's our honest attempt to make a nation governed by Reason, by reasonable men and women extending the Rule of Law to all citizens, not just a favored few.

If we lose sight of that ideal, then we've lost much, much more than a single beloved symbol. We've lost everything that symbol stands for, and everything that makes that symbol worth defending.

Two years ago now someone I work with insisted that when Iraqi insurgents behead Americans, it gives us the right to strike back. "My country is better than that," I insisted.

We're hearing the same thing now, after two American soldiers were tortured to death, that this is so horrible that nothing excuses it - a position I agree with - and that anything we've ever done is somehow retroactively excused, or at least justified. "They're monsters," we're told. Maybe they are. And yet - as John McCain (a man I have serious disagreements with on other topics) once said, "It's not about them. It's about us."

My country is better than that.

I still insist that.

Oh, yes, it's easy to laugh at Dale Arden in the movie Flash Gordon, when she tells Ardala that she must marry Ming, because she promised to. "We keep our promises; it's one of the things that make us better than you," she says.

But there's something real and meaningful in that line. Because unless we are better than they, why do we have the right to exist at their expense? Mere might makes right? Then anybody bigger than us has the right to squash us like the proverbial bug?

Isn't there more to us than that? Isn't our embrace of liberties as important as our preaching of Liberty, of democratic laws as of Democracy? And what is that Democracy we intend to spread around the benighted world if it's just authoritarianism in pretty clothes? Why should anyone kill, or die, for that?

Our flag is the symbol of something very precious. But part of that something is allowing the symbol to be destroyed sometimes.

Cory Maye - injustice in action

I am late learning about this. It's thanks to Alon over at UTI that I even heard about it. He provides a on-line petition to free Cory Maye which you may sign if you like (I have doubts about the usefulness of such things, but as long as that's not your only response I don't see how it can hurt. I signed it.).

Cory Maye's door was kicked in four and half years ago by armed intruders. His baby daughter was sleeping in the room whose door was kicked in. Fearing for his life and for hers, he shot one of the intruders as they came into the house, and it was then that they identified themselves as police, at which point he instantly surrendered. Unfortunately for all involved, the policeman he shot died.

The police were executing a warrant on a different man, one who didn't even live in the same half of the duplex as Maye. It's unclear if they thought Maye's half of the duplex was empty, part of a single residence, or what - but he wasn't the target of the raid.

Now he's on death row. Read the background and details here and then write to Gov. Barbour of Mississippi. A real, snail-mail letter, to Gov Haley Barbour, P.O. Box 139, Jackson, Mississippi 39205.

Silly Humans: Carnival of the Godless #43

Silly Humans is hosting the 43rd Carnival of the Godless for this fortnight, and my post Angry, scary men in black is one of the attractions. Check out the whole Carnival for some tasty freethinking goodness!

Happy Birthday, George!

Born today in 1903, Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984 from his experiences in Spain with Stalinism - which taught him that any idealism carried too far became corrupt.

My Brazilian Soccer Name

Blame this one on Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life.

(At least mine's pronounceable!)

What's Your Brazilian Soccer Name?

Language Quiz

Here's the new quiz - and always remember, maybe nothing is wrong!

From the Biography Channel's ad for Sherlock Holmes:

He thrives on the dizzying, delights in the bizarre, and relishes in the puzzling.

And here's the previous one:

From the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve site:

So, although the oak moths can periodically wreak havoc on certain trees, oaks and oak moths have been coevolving for a long time and can be viewed as one of the many conspicuous insects of the Reserve

The answer here is:

There's a problem with the coordinated subject of the matrix clause (or the main clause, if you prefer that term) and its predicate in the second part. The sentence, as it stands, tells us that "oaks and oak moths" (subject) "have been coevolving" (first part of coordinated predicate) and are "one of the insects of the Reserve" (second part).

Oaks are an insect? Not when last I looked.

For comparison, look at this:

The Johnson brothers and the Smith sisters have been playing tennis for a long time and are among the best players on the women's team.

It doesn't work.

English permits - almost demands - deletion of repeated parts of sentences. But here, the deleted subject of the second part of the matrix clause is only part of the subject which was overtly stated in the first part.

That subject, if deleted, must be assumed to be the subject of the second predicate in its entirety. In other words, the only way to have two predicate verb phrases with only one expressed subject is to have the exact same subject for both verb phrases.

If the predicate verb phrases have different subjects (as here, where one is "oaks and oak moths" and the other is only "oak moths"), then the subjects must both be stated.

Something along the lines of:

So, although the oak moths can periodically wreak havoc on certain trees, oaks and oak moths have been coevolving for a long time, and the moths can be viewed as one of the many conspicuous insects of the Reserve.

Or, to eliminate the repetition of "oak moths" (three times in the above version!), this:

So, although the oak moths can periodically wreak havoc on certain trees, they have been coevolving with oaks for a long time and can be viewed as one of the many conspicuous insects of the Reserve.

And previous quizzes can be found here.

Happy Birthday, Ambrose!

Ambrose Bierce, born this day in 1842.

He left us

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,

The Devil's Dictionary,

an opinionated style manual called Write it Right which is more fun than Strunk's "horrid little book",

several fantastic short stories,

and the abiding legacy of a mysterious disappearance...

(Are you still out there, somewhere, Old Gringo?)

Natural Wonder

Nice. I've always been partial to thunderstorms - and recently that's been a good thing.




Which "Natural Wonder" are you?

Ignoring the Road Ahead...

Remember how GM is going to give new Hummer owners a year off from reality?

Tom the Dancing Bug has a take on it:


GM: paying off America to Ignore the Road Ahead.

The Paris Hilton Tax Exemption?

The so-called "death tax" has been neatly repackaged by the Republicans into something that threatens virtually all Americans, instead of the top 1%.

Here's what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about the "Paris Hilton tax exemption" (anachronism for the effect of it):

"No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered--not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective--a graduated income inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against invasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

For more on the debate - and the way it's been framed recently - head on over to Matthew Nisbet's Framing Science. You'll be glad you did. (Well, maybe you will. Depends on who you are, I guess.)