I was catching up on This American Life today, and heard about the Brooklyn Free School. It sounds great. Having homeschooled (or possibly unschooled?) myself through high school, I like the idea of it.
And then I’m confronted with taking attendance for my students, and it feels a little ridiculous.
I think those are the truest self-identifications ever applied to me. Everything else about me is relatively ancillary.
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.
I’ve never understood the Quaker use of First Day for Sunday. It makes sense only if Saturday is your sabbath—He rested on the seventh day, right?
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.
So, classes, and thus TAing, begin Monday. I’ve been going to some How to TA meetings, and it’s been good. I’ve realized that I have some relevant experience, from explaining ling to my friends all the time, to wrangling classes of 4th graders, to GMing games. As to classes, I remembered that I took a ling grad seminar at Princeton while I was in highschool. I can do this. It’ll be great.
I need to get back in the baking habit; it’s hard when weekends are the only time available for it, and it’s a two-day process. But beyond that, I want to make pickles, ginger beer, and cheese. My forays into each have been small.
I’m hoping to give some cooking lessons to a few friends in the not-too distant future, just basic stuff. It should be fun; I do love teaching, and I have come to realize that I love cooking, too. It’s just an excellent way to practice basic improv skills, and sense memory, and sense imagination. I feel like it’s so applicable to the rest of life, as well as having the potential to be both a meditative private ritual and an invigorating social ritual.