Lnaugage Werdinses

Isn't it raemrkable taht you can raed this whtiuot too much dfificltuy eevn toghuh the lteters are all mxied up? As lnog as all of the lteters are tehre and as long as the frist and lsat lettres are corecrt, most ppeole can read athinyng, reardgelss of how the ltteers are arngerad wthiin the wrdos thselemves.

Guantanamo Rant

I expect that this won't be up for long, but it's scathing and brilliant. James Spader is one of the finest actors on TV and this clip proves it.

Getting Some Seoul

The free trade agreement between the United States and South Korea hasn't received much attention. It's too bad. It's an important deal for both countries. One of these days I'll have to blog about my support for free trade policies (and outsourcing!). For now, though, suffice it to say that I'd like to see the Conservative government pursue a similar deal for Canada. Actually, you'd expect the Conservatives, particularly Stephen Harper, to be interested in this sort of thing. I see the NDP has already started its anti-trade scare campaign, so maybe there's reason to be hopeful.

Pardon The Interruption

Apologies for the light blogging lately. I've rediscovered sleep and exercise after both went on hiatus for several months. Unfortunately, my obscene workload for my TEFL class means that I have less time to spend online. On the bright side, however, it looks like my class will help to streamline my writing. Studying the English language and learning how to teach it are better ways to develop good writing habits than writing endless academic papers, even, sadly, English papers.

I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself

The White Stripes, Buddy Guy, and Herbie Hancock all make their way to Saskatoon this summer from June 23-July 1. It'll be one helluva week for live music--and an expensive one once I get my Visa statement!

My Name's Serendipity, What's Yours?

I can see that there'll be several benefits to my TEFL class. Certainly, I'm glad I decided to take it, despite the non-negligible cost of doing so. But one thing I didn't expect was to meet someone else intent on teaching English abroad at the same time as me. We're two of only three university (soon-to-be) grads in the class. The other one wants to teach English in China so that he can be with his girlfriend, who lives there.

Anyway, this woman I met is a psychology major, interested in grad school but also interested in some time away from academia. I can relate to that, definitely. We're both the same age. And we're both set on going, alone or not, but we'd both love to have company. It's a bit premature to make plans now, but we talked about it a bit today, and things might work out well. We'll see. Employers love to hire two people who know each other because it reduces the risk of homesickness, which leads to broken contracts, which cost them money. So we'd have that going for us.

Ethics Is Hard

I began a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) Intensive class on Monday. Today we had the opportunity to observe some TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) classes. (The difference, by the way, is where the class are taught. TEFL classes are taught in non-English countries and TESL classes are taught in English countries). Awesome experience. I loved it. We get to tutor some of these students later, and I absolutely cannot wait. Besides the practical experience, though, we have classroom time, which tends to include lots of exercises. These mainly act to reinforce the theory in our texts. This, too, I find valuable.

Today, we had to match teaching materials with the appropriate skill level. One of the reading materials centered around ethics and moral philosophy. There was a brief description of the subject and some etymology of its terms. Apparently this stuff is tougher than I thought because I underestimated the classification of its difficulty, which was at the highest level; the others were lower, and I guessed all of them correctly. Everyone else, of course, not steeped in moral theory, correctly assessed the difficulty of the ethics material. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, right? Well, apparently, so is a lot of knowledge.