My Ideal Class: World Literature "Transloosely Literated"

If I could teach absolutely anything, I would love to teach a senior English class in world literature in translation. It would blend together my loves of languages and of literature, as well as my general belief that education should serve to expand the world view of students.

One of the major themes of the class would be the challenges presented by translation--the ways in which perfect translations are impossible and all translators are always making their own choices about the works. I would show the funniest scene from Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray is being instructed by the Japanese director of the commercial he has flown to Tokyo to shoot. The director talks and talks, but when the interpreter translates it into English it comes out as just a few words. The scene is Bill Murray at his best.

I would also pick a page or a paragraph from a famous work--Don Quixote comes to mind--and present multiple translations of the same material, in order to talk about the places where different choices were made.

And now I would have the students read this piece from Sunday's NYT Book Review. A classic!

More on the Research-to-Teaching Relationship

While we were up on Long Island this weekend, our friend Dan discovered this blog for the first time, and was reading through some previous posts. When he got to the post about language evolution, he asked me if the things I had learned from Steven Pinker's, The Language Instinct were helpful to me in my everyday teaching of Spanish. My short answer was that, while I found the book completely fascinating, there was very little in it to inform my day-to-day practice of teaching. Knowing more about how we acquire our first language, and what mental structures are in place to assist and guide that process, does not necessarily tell us anything about learning a second language as a teenager, or even in elementary school. The idea that our brains have innate language structures may reassure me that we can learn language, but it doesn't necessarily provide a guide for how to do it.

The conversation reminded me of a video I had seen on a couple of different education blogs. The video is by Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. In it he explains some of the difficulties in applying the discoveries of brain research to education. It is a good warning against thinking we know too much, and especially against the tendency to jump on the brain based research bandwagon.

Here it is:

My Friends Are Even Cooler Than I Am

My blog project is now reaching the end of its second full week, and so far I am enjoying the process immensely. There's nothing like forcing yourself to write every day to help focus your thoughts. But while I am fantasizing about the idea of starting a new school, my friend Kristen has actually gone out and done it. Check out the website for her new preschool:

www.toritschool.org

Montessori and world languages are topics I plan on spending a lot of time on for this blog, so I'm very excited to follow the development of her school. Maybe one of these days when starting a school and being mom to a two year old leave her some extra free time, Kristen will share a guest post or two on her experiences getting a brand new school started up. In the meantime, I wish her the greatest success, and look forward to following the progress of her exciting project.

My friends are so awesome!

Language Evolution

As a Spanish teacher and general word nerd, I love stories about language; so I particularly enjoyed the coming together of a handful of stories related to changing language habits last week. First there was the coverage on both NPR and The New York Times of a new study from The Pew Internet & American Life Project on how the informal habits of writing used for IMing and text messaging are bleeding into students' school work. No one who has received a paper written by a teenager in the last five years or so can be very surprised to hear this news. I spend more time then I care to admit adding capital letters to the beginning of my students' sentences in large, angry, green pen.

As Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, points out in the NYT article, my efforts at teaching this important aspect of correct writing may be doomed in the long run. Since the capital letter at the beginning of the sentence holds no intrinsic meaning of its own, it could very well fade into extinction. We can imagine it becoming as quaint as words like 'hath' and 'quoth'; or, for that matter, the custom of capitalizing all nouns, proper or otherwise, long since faded from common usage.

My boy Steven Pinker covers the ever changing landscape of language usage, this time in The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.), another fascinating read which I recommend highly:

Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any
level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons
several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For
as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical
plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century.
(The Language Instinct, p 373)

Needless to say, Pinker uses the expression "language maven" pejoratively.

Teachers on the whole are pretty conservative folks when it comes to language. We place high value on established writing conventions as indications of a quality education. My personal pet peeve is the use of 'myself' in non-reflexive contexts such as, "Please hand in your form to Mrs. Calvert or myself." It makes me cringe. But it's also very much a part of the common usage, and I've even seen it used in this way by some very able and reputable writers, so I try to let it go.

When I'm having trouble letting it go, I try to remember the French and their eternal quest to save and protect the French language. The French have the Académie Française to regulate the language, laws on the books to forbid the use of anglicisms, and a pretty healthy national pride in their language and culture. Which is why it's sort of funny when I turn on NPR and hear stories like this one. If, after all that effort, the French can't hold back the English invasion, what hope do we have against IM English?

For me, the answer to this is not to give up on teaching correct usage or good writing. No one denies that there is still such a thing as good writing and bad writing, or at least effective writing and ineffective writing. But the discussion of what makes good writing is so much richer when we talk about the ways that language evolves and grows, and allow the students to work through the problem of whether those changes are for the better or not. It also opens up the possibility that we might learn something from our students as well. I love it when that happens.

A chance for all the language mavens out there to vent: what are your pet peeves in your students' writing? I know you've got some.