Mina P. Shaughnessy, New York: Oxford University Press (1977) “… [T]he young men and women who were to be known as open admissions students fell into one of three groups: (1) those who met the traditional requirements for college work, who appeared from their tests and their school performance to be competent readers and writers…
A last speaker with no one to talk to exists in unspeakable solitude. Increasingly, as linguists recognize the magnitude of the modern language die-off and rush to catalog and decipher the most vulnerable tongues, they are confronting underlying questions about languages’ worth and utility. Does each language have boxed up within it some irreplaceable beneficial…
While singing to each other after class today, Curtis and I made a discovery about Mr. Rogers: he’s the modal man. It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, A beautiful day for a neighbor, Would you be mine? Could you be mine? It’s a neighborly day in this beauty wood, A neighborly day for a…
Berlin radio producer Jens Jarisch: “I always knew you could do in radio what you’d never dare in print: spread words, give ungrammatical clues, condense thoughts… I am quite surprised that … the message comes across undisturbed by wide omissions, in fact, that a story can be told without really telling it.” http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/library/258-hong-kong-song
This was on the office door of one of the professors.
Elka handed out this quote in class. “‘A’ inclines toward the unfamiliar… ‘The’ is anchored in the known; ‘a’ sets sail toward horizons unforeseen, undefined, undisclosed. Where ‘the’ entitles, ‘a’ unsettles. Preachers need ‘the’s’; poets need ‘a’s.’ ‘The’ meets its (already made) match, ‘a’ meets its (unmatched) maker. ‘The,’ by its very nature, is famous;…
Some proverbs related to teaching that I came across at Wikiquote: The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. The teacher has not taught until the student has learned. Repetitio Mater Memoriae (Repetition is the mother of memory)
“Sometimes I’ll call upon an attitude of some of my old teachers. If there’s a character of, say, a rather pompous man who lays down the law but is actually very amiable, I will think of a man called John Brantston. And say, ‘May I have a word with you?’ “Or a rather more steely…
“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.” — James Joyce
