Krashen

Imagine, if you will, in your mind what a doctorate in linguistics looks like. Pocket protectors? Pasty complexion? Greasy hair? Notebooks full of sentence trees? Dry humor referencing prepostional phrases? Overly caffeinated sweats? Saggy belly? A little too excited about bilingual research?

Anyone who has ever studied linguistics or language acquisition knows his name. Mainly, if you know what letters like TEFL TESOL EFL ESL ELD ELL have in common, you probably, or at least you ought to know who Krashen is.

edit: okay, perhaps we should narrow the linguistics field a bit to applied linguistics, the area specifically of language learning, which is where this Krashen fellow is the most prolific...

This guy basically put out some pioneering research centering around fancy terms like "Comprehensible input" "Affective Filter" and "Acquisition v. Learning". Most of these things are terribly, terribly basic ideas. Affective Filter is that people learn less or not at all in anxiety or fearful circumstances. Acquisition is how a baby learns English and Learning is how most of us learn foreign languages: slogging through grammar sheets and verb conjugations. Flashcards and memorization and practice.

I am a terrible linguistic nerd myself. I delight in breaking the rules, observing the patterns in languages I have learned and just speculating on how it is that I picked up that one word in Russian, and how I forgot it. I like to sometimes speculate on "bad words" in foreign languages and how it is that that they can be bad when if I say them when I hardly know what they mean. I actively avoid ending sentences with prepositions. I love just listening to spoken Russian or Spanish, like I would enjoy the voice of someone I love. I am just wierd that way.

I am not terribly sweaty, I can be rather pasty here in Portland here (more on that later, I got a product that has elicited some interesting comments), but suffice it to say, I am in no position really to be critical, I am always interested to hear what Krashen says.

And today was even better because in between hearing the jokes I heard 2 or so years ago, I got a mountain of papers corrected. Thank God, they sat there mocking me for so long. Have you ever heard papers that need to be corrected mocking you? It goes like this:

Me: To heck with you, I am going on a date with J, you will just have to wait.
The papers: Haha! You go! Have fun! But no wine for you because I will be here waiting for you when you get home! MUAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!
Me: icanthearyouicanthearyou. (slam! of door)

Krashen has a rather hilarious personality beyond the "skinny sweaty man in a green suit" fashion of his life. His wit is a razor, and is as irreverent as they come when it's the politics of grammar (don't ask) and teaching literacy/bilingual education. He makes fun of just about everything, which is good. He gave a crazy number of breaks (we started at 830 and had 2 breaks before an hour long lunch and 3 breaks afterward)

There is no doubt in my mind this man is making a massive killing on these things. We paid 175 dollars each, at 250 people, about 3 to 5 thousand for the space...no wonder he retired. He could do about 4 of these a year and call it good at if he cleared 35K a crack after expenses and before taxes.

And teachers are the exact right audience. They studied him in college, so he has credibility. He doesn't have to produce a college level chunk of research to impress his findings on his audience. He is pretty relaxed in these things. But it is well tolerated because he isn't saying anything that is particularly hard to swallow.

So what did I get out of this?

He cites some statistics relating to the availability of books in libraries and homes and how they compare with literacy test scores. The results are not surprising, so why in the world would anyone think that a school library with a certified librarian is an option? Kids with less access to books have lower reading scores. Not rocket science.

He talks about how bilingual education takes longer because the kids are digesting more information but ultimately result in a better educated individual. I buy this, but I understand how taxpayers are more interested in buying the economy sized education at the bottom of the line rather than the high end education with a good option package that really should be standard.

That is what Bilingual Ed is, it is the education for those who know what education should be. Still, the idea of paying a whole lot more for educating immigrants is too much to ask of taxpayers in general.

I am not going to nerd out on y'all, it would take me forever to do a good job of that.

El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba (Nobody writes to the Colonel)

I took a major in Spanish Lit in college and wangled my way onto a study abroad in Ecuador in 95. I could safely say that those 4 months were among the most transformative I have experienced yet.

Largely it was due to a whitewater rafting trip in the Ecuadoran jungle. The water in the river was running much higher than our guide was used to and in the course of the 6 hour trek that was supposed to be 2 hours, we all fell out of the raft at least twice. We (about 6 girls, all between 19 and 22) went hurtling down crazy white rapids, over rocks and into holes without paddles or helmets. We were all newbie rafters. So after nearly dying, everything looked more interesting.

Our guide, a sort of uber-macho, pot-smokin', tooth-around-his-neck and always shirtless latino jungle man of nature (for whom most of the girls had the screaming thigh sweats), cursed his clueless gringas for losing the paddles (at least 40 bucks each!) I, in my sheltered suburban existance, thought for once that there was an outside chance that I might perish on that river. Thankyou Kenny for plunging me out not once, but twice.

On that trip I made two friends. Laura and Sarah. Laura we referred to as El Coronel.

As Spanish Lit majors, our worlds revolved mainly around Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Don Quijote de la Mancha, with a little Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, San Manuel Bueno and Lazarillo de Tormes for good measure. Never once in any interview yet has anyone asked me about my extensive knowledge of these authors and works, but never mind that, let's get back to Laura.

After class, if we wanted to go to the office where our program was located in order to get mail or communicate with the lady in charge, we simply walked to the building where the office was located on the tenth floor. No biggie, until you connect the rolling brownouts that were constant all day every day in the fall in Quito in 1995. No electricity meant no elevator. Okay, well, 10 floors, we're young let's hit it. Until the remembrance that an elevation of nearly 10,000 leaves one depleted of oxygen far more rapidly than in our Oregon home. Still we are young, and I had daily letters from boyfriends as did Sarah.

If we were really lucky, and there was electricity, the elevator functioned. That is, it functioned if it wasn't broken. Then we would get to ride in the elevator with at least 2 people who smoked in the elevator and each person took their chance at pressing the button of their floor not once, not twice, but at least 273 times. Apparently in Ecuador this makes the elevators work faster.

Laura, who was by far the prettiest of us three, and also of Mexican heritage lending her the capital of looking if not native, at least a whole lot less gringa, got the nickname El Coronel. Everyday she came and looked for a letter, and never did she get any mail.

edit: In this story, an old military man, El Coronel, near starving living in a small town, in a humble shack waits everyday for a letter that is (if I recall correctly) either money, or a pension of some sort or perhaps a recognition (?). The mail never comes and the story takes the reader through their poverty, their scraping by in this economically depressed state. Throughout he maintains hope and certainty that this thing will come in the mail, and the thing that is supposed to arrive will save him (and his wife) from their starvation subsistence.

We laughed quite a bit about El Coronel, not in a mean way, but probably because all the lit we were studying sometimes seemed so obscure and to refer to things that we had no connection with--it was nice to finally make a connection.

But after we gave her the nickname, whenever I feel like I am waiting for a message or a piece of mail that never comes, I think of El Coronel. Marquez was the master of solitude, and maybe that is why his stuff is so deep...even philosphical and so dry.

At this point I feel I am supposed to make some sort of deep philosophical purpose for having written all this out. About as close as I can get is to recommend Marques for his exquisite imagery of our solitude as humans. The Spanish galleon, the families and the idiosyncrasies. But how he carves out so beautifully the lives of his characters, with all their experiences which all seem to point to solitude. Even now, ten years later, I still feel like I knew them, like they were daily characters in my life at one time.

Maybe it is because I did my undergraduate thesis on this that I think of this.

Anyway, sometimes with this blog I feel like El Coronel. Anyone else ever felt that way?