Yesterday, I got to take the first steps on actually being a teacher. Today, I got to resume being a student. I’m taking two classes this semester: Syntactic Theory with Barbara Fox, and History of Linguistics in the 20th Century with David Rood.

Both classes have a historical bent, the latter obviously, but the former in that it is taking us through the development of discourse-functional syntax from the seventies (when people began to think that Chomsky’s approach might have some weaknesses) up to now, decade by decade.

Barbara was giving an overview of some of the ideas in discourse-functional syntax, and one really interesting idea stood out: some people have described syntax as being fossilized discourse. I find this idea wonderful—it opens, potentially, a mechanism for answering some of the “why”s that have, in my experience, always been dismissed or hand-waved as part of the set of arbitrary systems in language. Of course, as Barbara warned us, in this field, there are many more questions and notions than answers. That’s OK by me.

History of Linguistics was interesting, too. We had occasion to read some in French, and I am looking forward to reading de Saussure in French. Sadly, no one in the class speaks German—David was thrown for a bit of a loop there, and is gonna try to find some translations or workarounds for all the Prague-school stuff he was going to have us read in German.

This should be good.

However, that’s utterly irrelevant to what I intend to write. Today was the first day of my real graduate student career. I had a TA meeting and attended the lecture for the course I’m TAing. Bhuvana gave a nice lecture, for introductory linguistics, and I observed it, I realized, with a different eye.

The material is all well-known to me. So rather than being focused on ideas and concepts, I focused on the structure of the lecture, and the projected structure of the semester. I began to have thoughts about how I might, someday, teach an introductory linguistics lecture. I began to see this as an apprenticeship. I have had four (well, more than that—seven?) years of seeing college teaching from the student’s point of view. Now, I get to see it from a semi-teacher’s point of view.

So, I’m inaugurating a new category for posts: teaching. Linguistics, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

There were some new people in town, as well, so we all chatted. I sense impending community.

Boulder is as great as ever. Tonight, we had a celebratory dinner at Himalayas, the best restaurant in town. I’m full of the best chai and yak momos. Life is profoundly good.

All of these bits of news today made me double-check the date. The Wave one is the only bad one, and it’s offset by promises to open-source a lot of the work so far.

And I leave for Boulder in mere days.

I’m pretty excited for being back in Boulder. I can’t wait to see y’all there. And for those I am leaving—let’s try to see each other before I go, yes?

So, resolved. No backups for now, not until I pick up a new TB drive.

Earlier this year, I saw Kick-Ass and I thought it was the best movie I’d seen all year. Then, I saw Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) and I thought it was the best movie I’d seen in the past few years. Now, Fitzcarraldo has blown them both away.

I wish I could say more about it. Ultimately, you should just go see it. It’s too dense and I’ve not yet digested it enough to say more.