EFL Geek 3.0 - ESL & EFL in Korea

Random Quote

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar

Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster!
---- unknown

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
---- John Ciardi

Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
---- Kin Hubbard

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
---- Albert Einstein

A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats.
---- anonymous

Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow

The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
---- Pablo Picasso

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
---- Fred Allen

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
---- Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer

I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
---- Albert Einstein

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
---- Doug Larson

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill

study and more…

Last semester I wrote a total of 5 essays for my masters program. Today I got the first three of them back. The earliest was submitted September 10! Good turn around time there, this is the longest return time I have had yet. Anyhow I am happy to say I got good grades on the essays especially the essay comparing qualitative and quantitative methods for which I recieved a HD (High Distinction). I am now waiting for the final two essays in order to figure out my final grade for both courses.

I have additionally decided to not do the dissertation option. There were a number of reasons both personal and beaurocratic that brought me to this decision. I will now be taking two classes this next semester and completing my degree in June. I must say that I am definately looking forward to the end - I haven’t yet decided exactly which classes I will be taking but I will of course write about it here.

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The Raging Debate

The debate rages on (and here, here and the original) about doing my dissertation, well at least it is raging in my mind. There are a large number of factors outside of the actual work involved in doing the dissertation vs doing two more courses. Anyhow here goes and I suspect that this may get rather long.

One of my friends who is a couple of semesters behind me in Macquarie (selected Macquarie on my recommendation) has never intended to do the dissertation. He just wants to get the parchment so that it will help secure a future and better jobs. He does not see himself as an academic and rails against the strict stylistic requirements when writing papers. I previously wrote about that as well

However I have come to the realization that I truly dislike the rigidity of academic prose especially the need to write in overly wordy, pedantic sentences when there are much clearer easier ways to express your thoughts. But of course if you write like that no-one takes you seriously. The more cryptic and enigmatic your style the better a writer or researcher you are. I don’t buy it.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Dec 2, 2004 at 02:17 PM
general_linguistic_study | Dissertation | Teaching |

Questions

I’m still debating whether to do the dissertation option or not. To get further advice and input I wrote an email to the professor in charge of dissertations, who just happens to also teach the research methods class which I just completed. Anyhow I’m including the email here, so if anyone would like to provide advice or personal anecdotes I would appreciate it.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Dec 1, 2004 at 10:08 PM
general_linguistic_study | Dissertation |

Not an Academic

I have come to the realization that I am not an academican. I thought it would be fun to get published someday; wriiting books or journal articles. However I have come to the realization that I truly dislike the rigidity of academic prose especially the need to write in overly wordy, pedantic sentences when there are much clearer easier ways to express your thoughts. But of course if you write like that no-one takes you seriously. The more cryptic and enigmatic your style the better a writer or researcher you are. I don’t buy it.

Additionally spending all this time writing essays has taken the pleasure out of reading authors l like such as, David Nunan, Joy M. Reid, & H. Douglas Brown to name but a few. Additionally this semester I feel that the quality of my teaching and lesson planning is suffering due ot a severe case of burn-out. I know that my writing is not up to the quality that it should be either, in fact it feels to me like this entire semester has been one academic and professional disaster. It even got to the point where I considered quitting the M.A. altogether, but I decided against that.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Nov 10, 2004 at 11:24 PM
general_linguistic_study | Dissertation |

Graduate School

Both Tensor and Semantic Compositions have recently written about returning to graduate school and their experience as re-entry students.

Like The Tensor, I too was worried about getting accepted into graduate school based on poor academic performance with my B.A. - I graduated with a B.A. in Asian Studies (same as a B.A. in basketweaving with regards to employability) but only after quitting Engineering. I dropped thermodynamics in order to attend the Engineering Beer Olympics! How’s that for not have your priorities well organized. Fortunately I no longer drink like a fish and have priorities, which brings us back to graduate school.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jun 17, 2004 at 02:38 PM
general_linguistic_study | Dissertation |

Adrift with options

What to do? what to do? That is a question I have been asking myself for the last while. I am referring to graduate school and my options. The first decision has already been made: I finished the second essay for my class about Leading and Managing Language programs. I am not happy with it, but my wife tells me that I say that for every essay I write - this time I really mean it. I did not enjoy the course and have decided to drop a related course this fall. In it’s place I will be taking pragmatics which will be infinitely for interesting and practical.

The second decision is a little more comlicated and involves a number of conditionals and missing information. Should I take the dissertation option? my answer is YES. But, I do not know if I have sufficient time remaining to do that. I have been doing the masters course work very slowly for a couple of reasons but primarily because of unforeseen financial expenses and not being able to afford more than class per semester. I cannot remember how much time is alloted for part time study and the Macquarie web site is difficult to navigate. I sent an email off to the linguistics department earlier today and am waiting for a reply.

updated
I got an email back and it looks like I have enough time to do what I want. Additionally I got an email address of the professor in charge of dissertation approval.
end update

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Jun 1, 2004 at 04:38 PM
general_linguistic_study | Dissertation |