Language Hack: thoughts on language, coding, life

Transitive copula

2012-01-02T10:48:00.001-08:00

Holding a lego in her hand, Clara, 2, says:

"I want to be this a car."

I've heard lots of words transitivized before, but never this one.

Prepositions: About, Por, and Gracese

2011-07-02T03:24:00.001-07:00

After I read Grace (for what turned out to be the 3rd total time) the chapter about Malaria from Little House on the Prarie, she was all aflutter about the different theories presented in the chapter. Mrs. Scott thought the fever was about the watermelons she said, and Ma thought it was about the night air, she added, but they didn't know that it was because of the mosquitos.

The reason Grace found the chapter so interesting was that it ends with a little coda that says "they didn't know that..." and then explains how mosquito bites carry malaria. That simple phrase -- "they didn't know" -- was quite captivating and led to another homily from Grace about the limits of human knowledge (sometimes little boys and girls don't know... and sometimes mommies don't know... and sometimes daddies don't know... and sometimes teenagers don't know...).

What I found interesting was her use of about. Particularly, it struck me because in teaching Spanish to English speakers, the pronouns "because" and "about" (both of which often translate as the same word, "por") stick out.

Grace's use of "about" seems in line with Spanish "por" which can mean anything from "by way of" to "by cause of" to "by means of." What's odd, though, is that none of these uses of "por" translate to "about." In fact, the only clear case where "about" translates to "por" is the spatiotemporal sense ("it's about five" or the somewhat antequated "somewhere about").

The most common use of "about" I can think of is the meaning that "it has to do with" or "its topic is." I suppose this makes sense... "Mrs. Scott thought the fever had to do with watermelon but it was because of mosquitos."

Still, it all gets me thinking about our friends the prepositions, all of which have multiple meanings applying across multiple domains (causality, space, time). It seems totally natural even at a much younger age to expand meanings (Clara's language constantly demonstrates this). What is trickier is how the meanings get cut off, so that we learn to say "she thought the movie was about pandas" but "she thought the fever was from watermelons."

Semantic Innovation Starts Early

2011-05-14T04:38:00.000-07:00

Clara's language has been exploding since I last blogged, more in how much and how persistently she uses it than in how many words, but really in all ways.

This morning, Clara wanted me to read to her but needed a diaper change. I asked if I could read to her after she got a new diaper and she said "mo mo" and pointed at her book a couple of times, then happily went off to get a new diaper.

It's hard to convey in text why these things are so clear, but what was crystal clear from the way she uttered the word and the way she subsequently behaved was that Clara was using "more" to mean "in a little bit," and then emphatically repeating it to make sure I would do it.

The concepts aren't actually that different. You could use both "a little bit" and "more" to mean "I want more cereal", so why not use both to mean "in a little more time."

Of course, these kinds of innovation are incredibly common (and useful), especially when you're dealing with a tiny vocabulary like Clara's at present, but I still think they're neat. One of the most common questions I get from students as a language teacher is why words have multiple meanings. This usually comes up when some common word is revealed to have a new meaning they didn't know or when a word in Spanish has two meanings they need to learn (every new turn in a foreign language is perceived as a personal affront). Watching kids learn language I always think is the sort of linguistic version of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," the point being, if you want to know why words have multiple meanings, just watch kids talk. They're constantly mapping new meanings onto words, expanding the territory they cover. Of course, we only tend to notice the mappings that aren't (yet?) part of standard English, like Clara's use of "more" this morning -- the mappings that are in keeping with our language tend to go unnoticed entirely.

Thoughts on Ed Tech, Technology and Attention

2011-03-18T08:27:00.001-07:00

I just came back from an interesting technology forum (a Massachusetts Superintendent's Forum on Transforming Teaching & Learning with Technology). There's a number of thoughts I have from the conference, but the first thing I wanted to blog from it was some thoughts on attention and technology that sprung both from the content and the form of the event.

Early in the conference, we went over some of the new National Education Technology Plan, in particular, the need to focus less on content (which changes too fast anyway, the reasoning goes), and more on creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and research, which will be the key to creating the highly adaptable citizens and employees we'll need in the future. All of this strikes me as true, although not in any fundamental way different from the what much older reformers (think Dewey) have had to say about skills vs. knowledge, which means valid and interesting objections to those theories that have been raised by some (think E.D. Hirsch) probably apply to this as well.

The first presenter, a superintendent of a school district that's done a lot of work to put technology front-and-center, talked about the importance of the shift from direct instruction to more collaborative models to support these goals. Much was said about the mountains of information created and consumed every minute on the internet and how obsolete modes of instruction couldn't cut it anymore. I was struck, as many participants at ed conferences before me surely have been, by the irony of the fact that I was sitting at a session that was, in fact, two hours of direct instruction hearing about how direct instruction was obsolete.

Looking around the room, I thought about us as a group of learners: the group consisted of superintendents, principals, technology coordinators, and teachers. I'd say about 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 people there had an iPad or a laptop out. A similar number had a smartphone on the desk in front of them, a number of which beeped and chirred during the event (though none actually rang). Of the screens in front of me, I saw only one that was engaged in notetaking the whole time, the rest all wandered to emails or other distractions at some point.

From what I could see, I was the only person actively taking notes with pen and paper. I'd actually run to CVS to buy a new pad of paper before the conference, knowing that I can't really focus in a big room without something to write on. With my pen and paper in hand, I was thoroughly engaged through and through, writing notes both on things I thought useful and things I found frustrating (I was frustrated by inane things, like the fact that a presenter bungled the definition of virtualization and also by substantive things, like a video we were shown of a group of students taking several minutes to do a task on linked iPads that could have been done in 30 seconds with poster and markers). At the front of my notepad I kept a list of useful references or concepts I wanted to look up later to learn about. When something a presenter said set off a spark of an idea for me about something I wanted to do at our school, I immediately sketched the idea on my paper. When it was time for Q&A, I had something to ask each presenter. After the presentation, I went up to talk further with the presenters, took down names and emails, and made plans to try to make further connections in the future. I came back to school energized and with a clear list of action items based on the connections I'd made at the conference. All of this is as it should be.

Which is to say is that I know how to sit at a lecture in a conference and get something useful out of it. On another day, I might be writing that we should have had a more collaborative structure at the forum -- that we should have had BOFs break off, or at least some small group work or paired conversations -- surely educators know how to do such things. There are lots of kinds of work for which this would probably be more useful and it may be this would have benefited some of the people at this forum as well. However, this conference was really about sharing best practices and showing what's possible, about disseminating information to people who are in a position to do something useful with it. Given that goal, direct instruction actually made a lot more sense than something more collaborative would have.

Given that direct instruction was the chosen format -- and I think direct instruction is actually a good format far more often than progressive educators tend to admit -- the skills I learned in school for learning from direct instruction -- how to take notes, how to keep my mind engaged even when I'm a little bored, how to maximize the usefulness of what I'm hearing for me -- those skills all played a key role in me having a useful 2 hours. I imagine those skills serve lots of people well in their professional life -- after all, lots of professions require learning at every level, and lots of learning happens through lectures and conferences.

That said, for the professionals around me, as for all of us, I think, the technology in their hands actually presented a real challenge to their learning. There was no one off-task the entire time -- these were generally people at the top of their field -- but lots of people were off task for good parts of the presentation, and there was far more rudeness (chatting, beeping technology, etc.) than I would have expected. It was hard not to think that technology was eroding our ability to learn from one another effectively.

I know that, for me, my decision not to break out my laptop was crucial to my engagement in the conference. Had I had a laptop, I would have immediately started writing the emails when I had an idea for a connection I wanted to make, I would have looked up links to new software the moment I heard about it, I might even have installed and tested that software out there on the spot, all of which sounds like "engagement" but in fact would have distracted me and ultimately disengaged me. What's more, I would have checked the New York Times to see if France had started bombing in Libya or if they'd made any headway on the reactors in Japan and, had it turned out that something had happened, I would have read the articles in the entirety, not wanting to miss out on the events of the world. And that's just the distractions I would have initiaited myself: I also would have been receiving emails and instant messages from people who needed help with tech at school, from friends and family updating me with photos of little ones or plans for dinner, and so on.

When I imagine our teenagers faced with these same challenges, it is, frankly, terrifying. When I think that average class times are somewhere around 45 minutes in many schools, I wonder where on earth they are going to learn focus. One solution would be to just eliminate the two hour lecture format from the world, but I'm not sure that's optimal for reasons I've already mentioned.

People talk about technology as if the key to mastering it is using it more, as if we need to make sure our kids have lots of experience in front of screen to be prepared for "21st century jobs," but I don't for a second think that's true. I would love a chance to survey top programmers (the people who actually do master technology) to learn more about their habits. I highly doubt that they spend more time on facebook, or playing video games, or balancing three chats and two emails while working, than the rest of us do. My guess is that they work hard to find ways to fight distraction. I'm also guessing that they have an ability to focus that they may well have learned somewhere other than just coding -- I wouldn't be surprised to find that good programmers include a higher-than-average number of musicians or painters or readers than the rest of the population.

When I think back to the educational plan's learning objectives: creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and research, only research involves computers in a fundamental way. There, it seems, learning to evaluate and understand digital resources has to play a key role in what we teach our kids. Knowing the difference between this and this is vitally important for every adult, and schools need to give kids experience with both the good and the bad and help them learn the difference. But for the other skills -- creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking -- technology can be as much a hindrance as a help if not more. That's not to say I want to purge all the computers from our classrooms, but to say I don't think tech itself is the key to success in an increasingly tech-laden world. We will need students who know how to use a computer, sure. But, more importantly, we will need students who have more self-discipline, more ability to focus, and more ability to tune out distractions than students of the past. The road to those abilities may have more to do with music and art classes than it does with iPads and smartboards.

Clara's first protosentence

2011-03-14T15:44:00.001-07:00

Clara has a favorite sentence, but alas it doesn't involve anything you would recognize as a word.

It goes like this:

1. She hides her hands in her shirt.
2. She makes the sound of a car moving (her version of this sound is identical to her dinosaur roar).
3. She moves her hands (hidden in her shirt) back and forth in the motion of a steering wheel.

The meaning of this sentence, which only makes sense in the context of our family, is: "Oh no! Clara left her hands in the car!"

I can confirm this is the intended meaning because Clara gets more and more frustrated and insistent until we say this sentence outloud in confirmation.

Other emerging words in Clara-ese include:

bəbəbə: basketball (Clara's favorite sport, which is particularly interesting since we never watch basketball on television -- she's picked up on this mostly through the big screens at beerworks).
hæt: "that"? A generic deictic word used frequently and enthusiastically while pointing at things.

əməm: yum (used for food and eating).

We are particularly interested to see that Clara has a word for basketball well before she reliably has words for "mom", "dad" and "Grace." Her most common word by far -- far more common than any of her family members -- is her word for car (really just a roar and steering wheel motion). Second most common is "up" (pəpəpə).

The joys of transivitizing (more notes from Gracese)

2011-03-01T13:45:00.001-08:00

Just now, Grace and Katharine are looking at a map of the world.

Grace says:
"Let's wander our fingers."

This is the latest in the pattern of Grace over-transivitizing Every time she brings out a new one of these, it wonders me if these follow an underlying conceptual pattern I haven't spotted yet or if transitivization or no is just one more element that must get lodged in the mental dictionary.

It would be fun to try to design an experiment where I tried transivitizing lots of words and waited for Grace to correct me (I realize waiting for her to correct me seems like a bad experimental design, but given that Grace has started conversations about language on at least two other occasions, it might just work).

Grace's e/ɛ distinction

2011-02-27T09:55:00.001-08:00

From Grace, today:

Me: Do you want to play legos ('lɛ-goz)
Grace: No, I call them legos ('leɪ-goz). Why do you call them 'lɛ-goz but I call them 'leɪ-goz.
Me: I don't know. I call them 'lɛ-goz.
Grace: I call them 'leɪ-goz.
Me: Ok.
Grace. Logos, 'lɛ-goz, 'leɪ-goz (laughs)

And so Grace shows off the perfection of her e/ɛ distinction (my poor Spanish-speaking friends of course mostly can't do this). The question is how did she come to learn the word legos as leɪgos and not lɛgos... I'll have to follow up and ask Katharine how she pronounces the word. Do any of you pronounce this word like Grace?

Pronunciation note: lɛ is the vowel sound in "leg." leɪ is the vowel sound in "lay"

Early Claraese

2011-01-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

At long last, Claraese is starting to emerge. I'm guessing that over the next two months so many words will emerge that I'll quickly forget this stage entirely, so before that happens I'd like to record what we have so far.

1st clear meaningful words: Three words all have been intermingled for some time -- "mom", "milk" and "more." Needless to say these are usually uttered at moments of desperation. Over time, these are starting to distinguish themselves, with "mom" often articulated as "mə mə" or "mə maaaa", milk articulated with a mid vowel ("mɪ" or "mɛ") or "more" articulated more like a single long "mə"

1st clear, common animal sound: "roar", first made in response to dinosaurs, then to other roaring animals as well. Hard to describe this sound, except to say it's kind of throaty and that there's nothing cuter than a tiny person trying to roar.

2nd clear animal sound: "moo." This one is more interesting because you can hear her articulating the "moo" as she goes -- she starts the sound at "ma" and then moves to "oo", resulting on something that sounds like "mao" or, occasionally, makes it all the way to "maouuu"

Several new words are emerging this week with more frequency, including:
- dad (də də)
- up (pəpəpə) - this sounds more like a play sound than a word, with the vowel almost unperceived and the main focus on repeating a "p" sound
- yes (ya ya) - this was produced after extensive coaching by big sister Grace.
- bye (bə bə) - this was learned as part of a fabulous game involving repeatedly hiding behind the shower curtain. She mostly still prefers to wave for this though.

Clara still prefers to communicate mostly with simple signs -- yes and no nods and pointing. It can take a fair amount of work to elicit a word from her, since asking her questions about me, say, will get her to point to me or to pictures of me or to the door (if I'm at work) but rarely to simply say my name.

As far as recognition, her vocabulary is big enough that it's impossible to enumerate what she knows and hard to estimate how many words. An example of words she certainly knows: names of all family members & friends, names of common foods, diapering and bathroom related words, guitar, music, book, radio, baby, doll, couch, table, and on...

I still find the notion of a "first word" baffling: I have no idea what her first word was.

Hybrid Economics... family haulers

2011-01-16T16:43:00.000-08:00

We're possibly in the market for a new more family-like vehicle. Like many, we're interested in sacrificing as little fuel economy as possible if we leave behind our civic.

One thing that occurs to me is that it might make sense to get a bigger hybrid vehicle, thus offsetting our decision to buy a larger car with a decision to buy a more efficient engine. Except the economics are rather astounding.

Looking at one such vehicle (the Toyota Highlander), the hybrid costs an astounding extra $10,000 and gets only ~6MPG better. Now these 6 MPG make a bigger difference in a SUV or minivan than they would in a sedan (the marginal benefit of each MPG is bigger the lower the MPG you start with), but still, this is pretty insane.

If I assume the price of gas rises to $6 a gallon (pretty hard to imagine), it would take a smidge over 14 years for this thing to pay for itself if we drive the same amount as we've driven over the past decade or so (that's 12,000 miles a year, or 171,000 miles total). It I assume a more reasonable price of $3.20/gallon, it will take almost 27 years or 320,000 miles. It's hard to imagine a battery lasting that long...

This problem is slightly exacerbated by my looking at a bigger-is-better car market -- the wise folks at Toyota figured that ecoconscious consumers wanting a hybrid would still rather have less efficient 4WD for example -- but only slightly.

Capturing some features of Gracese before the New Year

2010-12-28T11:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted on the evolution of Gracese. Thinking back to a year ago, I realize that this blog is all the record I really have of changes in her language -- my own memory proves far from a reliable tool. That reflection makes me realize I should be blogging her language much more frequently if I want to remember anything at all.

In that spirit, here are some unique features of Gracese as of 12/28/2010.

1st. The incredible, flexible why question

At first I thought this was something common to all 2/3 year olds, but I now believe that my darling Grace asks more why questions per hour than any other creature on the planet. Among my favorite are the questions where she asks about her own motives "Why did I do that." Here's a brief taxonomy of Grace's why questions:

Know what's going on with everyone at all times: Why did Grampa go to the basement.
Understand full context of all actions at all times: Why did Grampa go to the basement to get a hammer?
Confirm what she has just learned from asking a "why" question: Why did Grampa go down to the basement because he needed to get a hammer to help Uncle Dave?
Make a Veiled request: Why did you go to the kitchen? (when she suspects I just went to get a cookie and would like one herself)
Point out humorous situation: Why did Clara think I wanted the doll! (when Clara brings her a doll over and over)
Process her own bad behavior: Why did I want to eat in that room? (when she's just been eating in grandparent's living room where eating is forbidden)
Process own good behavior: Why did I want to share with Clara!
Learn about the world: Why did grandpa say there's a deer in the back yard?
Process own mistaken perception of the world: Why did I say there were reindeer in the backyard earlier?
Clarify parent's explanation of own mistaken perception of the world: Why did I say there were reindeer in the backyard earlier because it's christmastime?
Process parent's explanation of own mistaken perception of the world: Why did I say there were reindeer in the backyard earlier because we talk a lot about reindeer at christmastime?

2nd. Total Refusal to Make a Direct Request

This fits more into social learning and pragmatics than grammar, but it's astonished me this year to see that before the age of three Grace has learned that making a direct request is risky business, to be avoided at nearly all costs. Of course, this prohibition is codified in the way we ask questions and make requests -- "Would you mind...", "Could I bother you to...", etc. -- but I would have thought that child would learn these questions as mere forms and that the basic logic that accompanies them (e.g. that in most circumstances there is no polite way to make a request of another person) would come much later. Not so.

Here is a typical conversation with Grace:

Parent: Grace, what would you like to eat?
Grace: I don't know.
P: Would you like some cottage cheese?
G: No.
P: Would you like a cracker?
G: No.
P: What would you like?
G: You can just give me something.
P: serves something
G: Why did you give me something?
P: I thought you'd like it. Do you want it?
G: Can you tell me?
P: Would you like something else?
G: Can you tell me what I would want?
P: No, I don't know what you want. What would you like?
G: I was thinking you could tell me what I would like.
P: Were you hoping to have a cookie.
G: (eyes light-up) Yes!

I'm pretty sure that throughout this interaction, Grace believes that parent knows that she wants a cookie and that she has to do the dance of indirection correctly in order to get one. This is actually rarely the case -- usually we're simply frustrated that she refuses to say what she wants. Now, at 3 years and 2 months old, Grace almost never says what she wants. And I dare say we almost never say "no" to her, so it's not like this is coming from a long history of failed direct requests...

3rd. Grace's delightful Christmas semantic innovation: "make ideas"

This one is short and charming. About half-way into present opening, Grace caught onto and thoroughly enjoyed the part where before opening the present we guess what might be in it (we were making up particularly absurd and silly guesses for her amusement). Before opening a present, Grace began to request we start guessing by saying: "Let's make ideas about it."

Later in the day, she switched to "let's make up ideas" which became much less charming. How quickly they learn!

4th: Grace uses the past tense instead of the infinitive with "did" questions

Grace has used "do" correctly to ask questions for quite a long time. I've often wondered, however, if she understands the somewhat complicated "DO + INFINTIVE" construction the same way we do (where we first form "DO + INF" then split it apart to form a question) or if she thinks that "DO" is simply a question particle (like "ma" in Mandarin or "ne" in Latin).

I suppose she can't think "do" is merely a particle -- she conjugates "do" correctly as a verb (using do/does/did appropriately). However, interestingly, she frequently also puts the verb that should be in the infinitive in the past tense when making "did" questions, such as:

"Did you went to the store"

"Why did I wanted that?"

I haven't really adequately researched what's going on here. I wonder if there are any other constructions that allow two tensed verbs in this way, without a subordinating structure and without any coordination going on. I also need to focus more on just what Grace is doing. After Grace's nap today I'll have to try to get her to say a third-person present-tense question (the only kind where the tensed verb would look different from the infintive) so that I can see if she says something like "Does Clara likes to eat?" I should also tease out whether she in fact uses the tensed past-tense verb with both "Wh-" questions and yes/no questions as my examples above suggest (I can't attest she uttered those actual sentences, just ones like that).

Why don't people correct punctuation aloud?

2010-12-14T09:24:00.000-08:00

I've just started listening to the New Yorker's podcasts of writers reading favorite stories. The most recent one includes the following sentence early on:

"Ahmed", she asked the Turkish student with the magnificently drooping mustache, who always wore the institutes janitorial keys hooked to his belt, "Where are they holding the symposium."

Like many a sentence that has graced the New Yorker's pages, this one is a mouthful. What immediately bothered me on hearing it read is that the reader put a comma in where it doesn't belong, like this:

"Ahmed", she asked the Turkish student, with the magnificently drooping mustache, who always wore the institutes janitorial keys hooked to his belt, "Where are they holding the symposium."

This comma throws off my whole reading of the sentence. By adding a comma, my brain takes "with the..." to be non-restrictive and assumes (nonsensically) that "with the... mustache" applies to her asking the student (I'm not sure why my brain doesn't allow a non-restrictive clause here, but it doesn't -- I assume that any restrictive clauses would apply to "she" or "she asked"). I don't know exactly how to describe what an oral comma is (in this case she clearly takes a breath at the comma, but I think there's also the change in stress in the way she pronounces the next word that tells you what's happened), but I know it matters to understanding. I'm sure they carefully edited this audio, and I'm sure that had she mispronounced a word they would have rerecorded. So why not fix this one? (I'm making two assumptions that could be wrong: 1. That others hear this as a comma and 2. That a comma here is wrong).

At any rate, I hear this kind of error all the time and was excited to have one in a recording I could actually relisten to (the downside is that this is not nearly as clearcut as many such examples are). When my students make this sort of error reading aloud in class, I make sure they correct it. I find that especially when reading long sentences (Dickens, Shakespeare), allowing mispronounced punctuation to stand can quickly render a beautiful text hard to make out. I'm constantly annoyed when radio hosts and readers don't hold themselves to a similar standard.

It seems we're much more likely to let stand an error in punctuation-pronunciation than other types of pronunciation errors. That leaves me wondering: do others hear these as errors as well? Am I right that we are less likely to correct errors in punctuation than other types of pronunciation errors? Can you think of a time on the radio when you heard an announcer correct their punctuation outloud?

Science, the Soul and the Brain

2010-12-14T03:48:00.001-08:00

Just read an article on ADHD which pointed me to a statement by a consensus of scientists on the matter. Like many who work in schools, I am something of an ADHD skeptic, which is not to say I believe the disorder doesn't exist but that it seems from my anecdotal evidence to be overdiagnosed and overtreated (I realize the same inconsistencies I see may lead others to believe it it underdiagnosed and undertreated -- when in doubt, my tendencies lead me away from meddling with nature, so I assume over- rather than under-).

The article in the Times cited brain imaging and gene studies (two kinds of studies I am particularly skeptical of, since so many of the gene studies involve needle-in-haystack approach likely to produce false positives and so many brain imaging studies involve such small numbers of study participants -- both the Atlantic and the New Yorker have had interesting articles on the tendency of the results of studies like these to "diminish" as they're studied further).

What bothers me about including these kinds of studies in an article defending ADHD's disease status is that the question of a condition's environmental or genetic origin or physical manifestation in the brain doesn't have much to do with whether it is a disease. Including this information prominently when discussing this (or any other mental condition) always makes me imagine the writer is leading some portion of readers down a logical path that goes like this:

1. We can see it in the brain!

2. We can link it to a gene!

3. It's a disease!

I suspect this logic is tied to an ancient mind/body or soul/body divide, in which we have a breakable treatable body and an immortal unbreakable soul. Assuming some portion of readers subscribe to that worldview, the problem is that mental illness affects the domain of the soul rather than the breakable body, hence the emphasis on linking a condition to the breakable treatable body in order to show it's a disease (earlier today I heard someone on the radio insisting there was no difference between "physical" and "mental" illness -- bringing this line of thought to its natural conclusion).

I, of course, believe all we are is the breakable, "treatable" body, which is maybe part of why I worry so much about how we know what to "treat" and what not to. As scientific knowledge advances, we will presumably be able to follow the template above for essentially all personality traits and mental states, which is why that template is no use in helping decide when to treat and when not to.

Of course, no scientist advances the logic above. The statement from scientists on ADHD the article cited uses a two-part definition of mental illness that makes much more sense:

1. There is a "deficiency or failure" in a psychological mechanism or ability that would normally be expected of all humans.

2. This deficiency leads to harm to the individual.

Given this definition, you would expect an article defending ADHD's scientific status not to be full of brain imaging and gene studies but instead to include a careful definition of normal and sub-normal attention (the first linked article actually starts to do this) and evidence about the harm done to the individual (the consensus statement focuses more on this). I would also expect cross-cultural studies would be much more important than gene studies or brain imaging studies ("all humans" is a key phrase -- if a disorder seems to disproportionately affect Americans or a given subgroup, then it starts to call into question its nature as a disorder).

In other words, what I'd expect ADHD believers and skeptics to be arguing over would be things like cross-cultural studies and widespread surveys on the one hand and the definition of attention on the other. As someone who's filled out many surveys to help diagnose kids, I worry about the bluntness of this tool, and my mind would be substantially put at ease if I knew there were something much more precise at work in treating kids than checklists about fidgeting in class and missing instructions. It would also be useful to know if people suffering ADHD exist on the tail of a bell curve or if they exist as a more discrete "blip" in the spectrum of human attention -- something more akin to a genetic or behavioral "switch" being flipped. If the condition does exist on the tail of a bell-curve of "attention", I would expect there to be lively debate over when to treat (I assume a debate because the normal treatments have substantial side-effects -- if this were something like giving people eyeglasses, obviously it wouldn't matter as much).

I suspect that instead we get the lists of gene marker and brain region studies not only because of buried "soul" argument but also because of a kind of technophilia that assumes modern forms of research and knowledge are more valid than older forms. After all, most of what I'm saying would be germane to the debate -- cross-cultural studies, tests for and definitions of attention -- could have been done just as well with 19th century technology.

Stupid commas (if lisp ran the world...)

2010-11-30T17:25:00.000-08:00

Does it give me away as a programmer that I think commas would be much easier to teach if we used parentheses instead?

And am I peculiar in my absolute conviction that commas basically are parentheses, where any nested parentheses (commas inside commas or commas at a sentence edge) get collapsed and disappear?

Here's a student sentence I'm giving feedback on:

Although Desdemona has no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestows on everyone, as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

In my mind, there are two acceptable revisions of the basic comma error in this sentence:

Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

Although Desdemona has no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes her kindness, which she naturally bestows on everyone, as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

But what I'm really seeing in my head is that this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone) as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

should become this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness (which she naturally bestowed on everyone) as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

or this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

Of course, as with lisp, this would be much clearer with a little indentation

(
 (Although  Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello)
he  mistakes the kindness
 (which she naturally bestowed on everyone)
as a  particular fondness for another man
 (Cassio)
)

Is it just experience with lisp that makes me think this way, or does this go on in everyone's head?

Word order and Spanish teaching

2010-11-21T08:11:00.000-08:00

Just to say I wish we (Spanish teachers of English speaking students the world over, as well as Taco Bell marketing wizards) would stop teaching kids to stay "yo quiero" "tú quieres" etc. etc.

Of course, "yo quiero" is a valid sentence in Spanish (as is "quiero yo"). So what's the problem?

The problem is as follows:
1. English speaking students will always understand and produce sentences like "yo quiero" based on their native language anyway so we don't need to drill this into them more.
2. English speaking students will *not* understand sentences like "Es un lugar donde conviven diversas culturas" (to pick a sentence a Spanish 4 student just misunderstood).
3. English speaking students are already primed to misunderstand sentences like "te quiero" or "me quieres." Explicitly teaching them valid but stilted and awkward sentences like "tú quieres" from day 1 does not help the matter.

The trouble is that in a relative clause, Spanish speakers are much more likely to put the subject after the verb, so just as the difficulty of reading ramps up (with more complex sentences), students are much more likely to see sentences with seeming "backwards" word order. If we teach students from the start that word order is flexible, and that the verb ending is the real "home" of subject-meaning rather than the word before the verb, we do much better.

I don't have any actual evidence that teaching e.g. "tú quieres" makes the problem worse, but I am suspicious that it does and I'm certain that it doesn't help the matter.

Grace the (prescriptive!) sociolinguist

2010-10-25T02:55:00.000-07:00

Last night, I had the following excahnge with Grace:

Grace: One two three four five six seven, eight nine tell and then eleven. Twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty.
Me: (singing along)... eighteen nineteen twenty...
Grace: No, daddy. You say twen-ty.
Me: Yes, twenty (twenny)
Grace: No. Boys say twen-ty. Girls say twenny.
Me: Grace, everyone says "twenny" most of the time, and "twenty" when they're speaking slowly, or something when you're singing.
Grace: No. Mommy and I say "twenny." You say "twenty." Boys say "twenty"
Me: But Grace, I say "twenny."
Grace: No, daddy. You say "twen-ty". Mommy and I say "twenny."
K (to me): Do we say these words differently?
Grace (insistent): Boys say twen-ty. Girl say twenny.

Where the raw material for this observation came from, I'm not sure. I have sung in many-a-chorus, which training does make me tend to overpronounce my "T"s when singing (I had to unlearn this behavior when singing folky/poppy music where it sounds rather silly to be so hyper-articulated). It's possible that's the root of Grace's observation, though I'm not at all confident that if I could play back recordings of us singing this would be the case.

One of the interesting moments for me in this conversation was when I realized Grace was not being descriptive but prescriptive here. Her initial comment, I'm pretty sure, was motivated by the fact that I had said it like she does (i.e. wrong for a boy), not by the fact that I said it differently from her.

This seems like an interesting window into language change for me. There are a great many variations in language and the human mind is a pattern-hungry and meaning-hungry thing. Obviously the great majority of patterns new speakers pick up (be they sociolinguistic or purely linguistic) are "real" (i.e. observed or obeyed by the vast majority of speakers). But a pattern like this new gender distinction from Grace is the equivalent of a ghost-sighting: she sees cultural significance where there is none. Language change happens the same way mass-ghost-sightings do -- we all have similar minds, see similar patterns, etc. Except that in language there is no "real" outside the minds of the beholders, so if we get enough Graces together, we could produce a generation of women who refuse to pronounce "t"s after "n" for fear they'll sound too masculine (or of women who will start enunciating "t"s to project male power in given scenarios etc etc etc).

Runner times influenced by language?

2010-10-21T03:51:00.000-07:00

Ever since I went to cheer K on running the Tufts 10K, I've wanted to graph the results. Something about knowing they post the times of some 6000 runners made me curious. I was initially curious to see if the results simply formed a straight bell curve or if there were a couple of different "humps" corresponding to different sorts of runners (I could imagine a "competitive runner" hump and a "I want to prove I can make it" hump, for example).

Those results didn't turn out to be that interesting, but one thing did strike me as interesting. The top of the curve, quite incredibly and by a rather dramatic margin, is precisely at one hour. This begs some questions:

1. If there were 55 minutes in an hour, would all of these women have trained just that much harder?

2. Are there other athletic events where even numbers affect performance? Numbers of homeruns? Minutes in a mile?

3. (this one I could check if I felt like it -- maybe I will soon): is this result reproduced in other 10ks? Is there a similar peak at even numbers for other distances?

me gusta a...

2010-10-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Today I was working with a native speaking student (not literate in Spanish, but basically fluent) who had always thought that you said:

"me gusta + a + NP"

It seemed very strange to me that she would have internalized this grammar, but there's no reason it should seem that strange. The "a" is un-hear-able, so it's just as logical for her to think that we say "*me gusta a hablar" (incorrect) as it is for her to think we say "va a hablar" (correct).

I asked her if she would say "me gustan a los perros" or "me gustan los perros" and this was a no-brainer for her -- obviously just "me gustan los perros", so she really does speak the language correctly.

I'm sure this is no more strange than the fact that native-speaking English speakers mix up "they're" and "their", but I don't usually get to see these kinds of errors in Spanish so it struck me as interesting.

Adjective complements and hypercorrection

2010-10-07T05:19:00.000-07:00

Just read the following in a student essay (embedded in a longer sentence):

She feels badly

To my ear, this is a clear error, most likely brought on by poor grammar instruction. "Feel" should take an adjective complement, not an adverbial complement. This is perhaps exacerbated by the prescriptive advice to use "well" (adj) rather than "good" (adj) to describe your health, as in the following imaginary exchange:

Mom, I don't feel good.
Ehhem, you mean you don't feel well?
I don't feel well, mom.

It is easy to see how the child would come to think they were being told that "feel" is supposed to take an adverbial complement (well, adv) rather than an adjectival one, though this breaks down quickly with other adjectives (no one would look in the mirror and say "I feel beautifully"). This is made worse by the fact that there are some other non-standard sentences where a speaker would be corrected for using good (adj) in place of well (adv):

Kid: Wow, that guy throws good.
Dad: You mean throws well.
Kid: Yeah, he throws well.

If I inspect my own internal grammar, this gets a little complicated quickly. Here are some of my own quick judgments:

Correct Incorrect
He throws great He throws greatly
He throws beautifully He throws beautiful
He throws phenomenally He throws phenomenal
He throws awfully He throws awful

I don't really know how to analyze this, or if other adult speakers would agree with all of my judgments. Perhaps "great" is already an adverb in my brain? Perhaps "good" is too for many people but not in official Standard English? All quite messy, leaving me rather unsure what to write on this student's paper, if anything.

Correct	Incorrect
He throws great	He throws greatly
He throws beautifully	He throws beautiful
He throws phenomenally	He throws phenomenal
He throws awfully	He throws awful

It seems that nearly any topic, investigated with a bit of thoroughness, quickly exposes the limits of my own grammatical knowledge and, even moreso, of traditional prescriptivist grammar as I learned it in middle school.

-- update --

Joon points out that dictionaries list "great" as an informal adverb, so that makes sense of the "throw" case relatively well. I have to say that to my ear, "great" is not particularly informal and is in fact more correct than "greatly" anywhere but before an adjective. This is surely an area where the famously vague "adverb" category of traditional grammar is failing us -- there are different rules for modifying verbs and adjectives and so on.

I also note that "badly" is listed as an adjective in the dictionary with meanings including "in poor health" and "sorrowful, regretful." So the dictionary rules my student correct, and it's just my intuition/ideolect that has her making an error.

It does seem a bit too tidy, though, to list "badly" and "well" as having special adjectival meanings that just so happen to work with feel. I wonder, was there at some point a misconception about feel and adjective complements that brought this into the language? Or some other structure?

"I feel well" seems to belong on a list that includes "I feel poorly", "I feel terribly" and "I feel badly," all of which sound pretentious and wrong to me. Only "badly" and "well" are listed as adjectives on that list. "Sickly" is a word that seems to have a an obvious place on this list, though in this case, "sickly" really is a full-blooded adjective.

Part-of-speech algorithms...

2010-10-07T03:29:00.001-07:00

Just finished grading a student's essay that repeatedly confused "este" (that, demonstrative) with "que" (that, complementizer). Whenever I see a repeated part-of-speech error like this, I try to put together a simple algorithm to help the student. In this case, it goes like this:

If replacing "that" with "this" yields a valid English sentence, then you mean "este/esto/esta." Otherwise, you mean "que"

Example: "That man is stupid." --> "this man is stupid" --> use "este"
"He said that I should." --> "*He said this I should" --> use "que"

This one is actually quite straightforward. Other times, it's trickier, like when I try to teach the difference between the past tense and the past participle by making use of the fact that English makes this distinction for irregular verbs only:

Replace the verb in question with a form of "write." If you say "wrote", you need to conjugate a past tense verb. If you say "written", you need the past participle.
Example:
"I played baseball" --> "I wrote baseball" --> past tense
"Baseball is played all over Cuba" --> "Baseball is written all over Cuba" --> past participle
Here, the trouble is that semantically, "write" (or whatever irregular you choose to use) may or may not make any sense in the sentence in question, thus confusing the student.

Nonetheless, it is my belief and experience that transformations of these kinds of easy for students, whereas recognizing and labeling parts of speech is difficult (probably because the parts of speech are usually taught using incorrect and confusing generalizations). That said, the question remains: how useful is it to have labels for the categories? Is it better to teach "if you can replace that with this, it's a demonstrative" or to teach "if you can replace that with this, use 'este'"?

More provokingly, is there a way to teach such that students will never make the este/que error in the first place. The parts of speech are so far apart that it seems very difficult to imagine they should ever be linked in a student's mind, except through English... it is intriguing to imagine an immersion approach that might eliminate the step through English on the way to learning these structures and thus eliminate the error altogether. Nonetheless, it seems quite possible to me that even if the teacher never said to students that "que" means "that", they would still figure this out and thus be vulnerable to this sort of error...

Thoughts on carrying and teaching

2010-09-14T03:35:00.000-07:00

Today I helped a number of students out with percent problems in study hall. After helping one student set up a problem correctly, I proceeded to watch him multiply "25 x 5" using the traditional pen-and-paper carrying algorithm and come up with 110. At first I tried to help him figure out where he'd gone in the algorithm, but it wasn't immediately clear to me, and it finally occurred to me why this particular error was so frustrating. "If you have 5 quarters," I asked him, "how much money do you have?" Not surprisingly, he knew the answer at once and was a bit surprised at himself for not seeing it. He then spent a puzzled minute trying to figure out where he'd gone wrong carrying.

The pen-and-paper algorithms for doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division are incredibly frustrating for the untidy. When I was in school, I remember turning lined paper on its side to help me keep my columns straight (that was the same year I had to make cut-outs out of note cards to help make sure I read one problem at a time). Yet somehow a great number of untidy students remain slavishly attached to these algorithms, using them as their only method for multiplying, even with very easy numbers.

It occurs to me that the basic algorithms we all learned for simple math are a form of early, somewhat clumsy technology: we use pencil, paper, and columns to help work around our memory limitations. Obviously, we have better technology now: the calculator built into every computer, cell phone and so on. Having students rely on one form of technology (pen and paper) is not fundamentally better than having them rely on another (calculator).

There is of course a very real drawback to both of these methods: you need to have the technology in hand to do the math. Stand a student in a department store evaluating 35% off of $40 and neither technology is very convenient. I would hope, though, that within a second or so even a student daunted by the 2-digit multiplication would know that the discount is between $12 (3*4) and $16 (4*4). It wouldn't take much to then say it must be half way between ($14).

For teachers, though, the pen-and-paper algorithms have a key advantage: they make all problems look the same and all students' work look the same. Errors in computation are relatively easy to spot and correct with these methods. They also are likely to point out (rightly) that mental math is prone to errors and impossible to revise. All of this makes algorithms better to teach.

That said, I wonder how much is sacrificed in terms of flexible thinking, real understanding of what's going on when you carry, etc., by teaching simple rote methods. Might it not be better if most teaching focused on either flexible mental math models for small numbers and estimates for all numbers (that took into account human memory limitations) or calculator-based math for precise numbers (that eliminated problems of human sloppiness). In such a world, students might learn the pen-and-paper algorithms in much the same way they learn to compute square roots using tables -- as an artifact from pre-calculator times. Most of their effort, though, would go into quickly evaluating problems like "30 * 49" (30 less than 1500, thus 1470), 491*35 (slightly less than halfway between 15k and 20k, thus a bit less than 17,500), and 48 * 48 (between 1600 and 2500, closer to 2500). Students should be able to do at least these quick estimates quickly, I'd think, as a means of having general number sense when reading an article or out and about, and as a means of checking for typos or column-os when calculating them precisely by hand or by calculator. But, I doubt that they can and I doubt that they've been asked to with anything like the frequency with which they've been asked to calculate sums on paper.

It strikes me that throughout education, decisions may be driven by these same factors, favoring work that is reproduceable with little variation across students, easily represented on paper, and possible to complete by following simple steps against work that tends to support multiple solutions and happens mostly in your head. I can think here of other "tidy" processes often enforced en masse, such as notecard systems for research, 5 paragraph structures for essays, and so on. It may be that such systems produce the most reliable results as far as work from students, but isn't our goal for results in their minds. And, if that is where our goals lie, how can we possibly measure success there?

Real Counting!

2010-08-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

Grace has been doing something like counting for months now, with numbers going up into the twenties, but tonight Grace did her first confirmable real counting. Here's the interaction:

We're looking at a drawing of a funny man I drew (this is a game we play -- draw something funny then name what's wrong with the picture). This particular man had 6 arms.

Grace: What's funny about the man?

Me: What do you think?

Grace: I not know.

Me: How many arms does he have.

Grace: 4!

Me: Count them.

Grace: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6! He have 6 arms!

Counting is of course a poem and an algorithm (point to one item at a time while reciting the poem without repeating), and I've often wondered if to Grace it was merely a poem and a gesture (point to items while repeating the poem until bored). Tonight, Grace very clearly was using the algorithm correctly. As an extra bonus, I got to see that she hadn't actually memorized the appearance of 6 items as a unit -- her immediate fuzzy-math brain answered "4!" and only after counting did she arrive at the actual number (with dice games and things I've often been convinced that she was memorizing the number-of-dots as shapes rather than as a group of objects she counted).

First Words

2010-08-17T15:57:00.000-07:00

I'm always amazed that other parents can report the first words their children spoke. How on earth can you be sure?

At any rate, I can report that Clara's first words that I'm positive were words -- used and understood, with clear meaning, etc. -- were an emphatic "AAAH DAAAAA" (all done) at the end of dinner the other night. Clara also did the appropriate gestures for "All Done" (a sort of clapping that K must have picked up from daycare babysign and then a wild waving that Clara has added to make it sure we know she's done). The "Ahh Daa" was spoken first, clearly -- the gestures were only really added when I paused to marvel at the clarity of the words rather than getting her out of her high chair -- ah, the frustration!

This is assuming that the first word must be spoken. If not, then I have a clear first word from this past weekend (earlier still): "clap." I asked Clara to clap, for once not clapping myself or gesturing but merely saying the word, and she immediately began clapping. I tried out some other words and quickly found that she seemed to also know "wave" and "dance."

I realize that it can be hard to know for sure whether she knows these words since, understandably, her patience with being told what to do and doing it does wear thin rather quickly.

Other contenders for first-word (i.e. other things we think we've heard her say) include: "Clara" and "Hello."

How I know what counts as first, I know not, but I can definitely say that Clara is using language now -- let the fun begin!

More Gracese: overtransivitizing

2010-08-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more sentences I wanted to blog about before I forgot them, mostly for their charm, but also for their grammatical interest:

Grace, asking me to toss her in the air: Daddy, will you jump me

and

Grace, hearing me drop something: What did you just fall down

In both of these cases, Grace has transivitized a verb according to the standard English pattern, except that Standard English doesn't transivitize either of these verbs in just this way.

Here's the standard pattern Grace is working from:

Verb	Intransitive Form	Transitive Form
X	To X	To cause (Y) to X
Open	The box opens	She opens the box
Stop	He stops at the sign.	She stops traffic.
Sit	She sits down	She sits the doll down
Trip	He trips over the rug.	She trips him.
Move over	I'll move over for you	I'll move this over for you

For any students of Spanish following, the same pattern applies in Spanish, with a "se" marking the intransitive forms.

Verb	Intransitpattern.pattern.ive Form	Transitive Form
X	To X	To cause (Y) to X
Abrir	La caja se abre	Ella abre la caja.
Parar	Se para al señal	Ella para el tráfico.
Sentar	Se sienta.	Sienta la muñeca.

Not too long ago I read a nice description of which verbs accept the transitivizing pattern and which do not in a popular linguistics book. Alas, I can't recall which book at the moment, nor can I really recall just how strongly predictive the explanation given is.

Grace extended this pattern to two cases where it doesn't belong. In the case of "fall down", there simply is no transitive form of "fall." I suspect that this is part of a relatively clear pattern.

In the case of "jump", there are a couple of transitive uses, but neither of them mean "to cause to jump." Instead, they mean "to jump (at)" or (in checkers) "to jump (over)", with the transitive form basically eliding a preposition. If I think of other verbs similar to "jump" in meaning, I can see some similar transitive uses: skip (vt = to skip over), hop (vt = hop on, as in a train), or in other cases no transitive form available (prance, leap).

Thinking of verbs of motion, there are some neat patterns -- flip, turn, and spin all follow the transivitizing pattern, for example, whereas skip, hop and jump do not -- but it's still a bit hard for me to see what the proper pattern is.

Here's a rough chart of some verbs in the family...

Follow pattern	Has idiomatic transitive	Has no transitive form
flip, turn, spin, twist	hop, skip, jump	leap, prance,
Move (over)	run	go
land, fly		take off, soar
crash, trip		fall, stumble
break, hurt, heal		get better, get worse

Laying it out this way, it's hard to believe there is a pattern underlying it (though I imagine there is, at least of a sort). At any rate, I don't envy Grace the job of sorting it all out.

Adjectives and more unexpected ambiguity

2010-08-09T18:12:00.000-07:00

Tonight Grace and I had the following interaction while reading a story about a girl saving pennies in a penny jar:

Me (reading): "She put all the shiny coins in the jar."

Grace (responding): But not the dark ones.

It took me a second to figure out what she meant, but it did occur to me that given the structure "all the ADJ NOUN", her assumption that ADJ was restrictive was not a bad one. Only given the (false) assumption that all coins are shiny and the knowledge that shininess is not a good criterion for sorting coins when saving money is the correct reading, in which "shiny" serves as descriptive embellishment, obvious.

All of this reminds me a bit of teaching adjective order in Spanish. One common example given is "La blanca nieve." The explanation of this word-order is that adjectives providing an extra flourish of description can be preposed, whereas adjectives playing the more typical function of restricting the set of nouns being described are postposed.

When you try to explain this in terms of emphasis, it gets quite confusing, because whether "La blanca nieve" calls more or less attention to the word "blanca" depends on your frame of reference ("blanca" is extraneous information, but the fact it's being mentioned at all given its obviousness serves to emphasize it).

Of course, in both the case of the "shiny coin" and "la blanca nieve", it seems that contextual knowledge -- about the importance of shininess in coins and whiteness in snow -- plays a much more important role than grammatical patterns.

Conditionals, requests, language acquisition (i.e. more on Gracese)

2010-07-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

So last night I was reading Grace a board book about birds. The board book actually pretty much is dedicated to defining "birds", which would make it an interesting subject for a post on word meanings some other time... the pages said things like "most birds fly" and "all birds have feathers." After reading to Grace about feathers and looking at the picture, I asked Grace...

me: would you like to have feathers, Grace?
Grace: (after a pause) Daddy, why did you say I can have feathers?

A couple of cool things here. 1. Grace used the verb "say" to indicate the presuppositional content of what I said (i.e. to mean "imply"). 2. Grace heard "would" in the polite sense whereas I meant it in the hypothetical sense -- polysemy exists in way more places than just word meanings.
In case it's unclear, let me spell out the intended and understood meanings of my sentence:

intended: imagine having feathers -- what would that be like?
understood: Have some feathers, if you please.

Grace's misunderstanding seems unlikely because I tend to think of the hypothetical meaning of the conditional as primary. Thinking about the history of language, this seems true -- the tense serves for talking about possible but not-yet-true realities, and has then been ritualized in polite forms in which we ask indirect questions rather than make requests of each other. But of course in the world of a toddler, indirect questions are much more common than hypothetical situations. My first thought on hearing Grace's response was that Grace may not understand the hypothetical meaning of the conditional at all -- she may know it only as the form we use for polite requests.

This is something I often see when we ask Grace to rephrase a demand in more polite language. Like most parents, we are merely expecting Grace to say "please." But often Grace rephrases without the please, but using the more polite indirect form.

Grace: Bring me milk Daddy, right now!
Me: Grace, can you ask for that more nicely?
Grace: Would you bring me milk right now daddy?
Me: Can you be a little more polite?
Grace: Would you bring me milk right now daddy pleeeeeeease?

Of course, the "would you" transformation is probably a more important bit of learning than the "please" bit. Now to figure out how I'll know when she's actually learned to use hypotheticals...

iTunes sucks

2010-05-30T05:27:00.001-07:00

I feel like in the GNOME world, it's often an unspoken assumption that Apple sets the standard for good design, and that the free software folks just hobble along trying to meet it.

Having not used Macs extensively since the quite-well-designed OS 8.6, I've often assumed this is true (nevermind the poor design of the "Dock" etc).

With K's lovely new iPhone, I had occasion to download iTunes lately (and I kept Windows on a partition of my new laptop just for this purpose -- ugh). This is a sort of submission, ever since my unfortunate altercation with a Mac Genius last time we bought a Mac product, when said genius knew virtually nothing of what file formats the iPod supported and could only tell me, repeatedly, "you just use iTunes."

Well, now that we have an iPhone, it appears you in fact have to use iTunes (things don't just work in Ubuntu with it, and you can't buy cool stuff for it without iTunes anyway), and all I can say is iTunes deeply, deeply suck.

Here are just a few experiences so far:

1. I try to copy a movie to the iPhone. I drag and drop it -- this is the paradigm of virtually every mac app everywhere since multifinder was introduced. This starts playing the movie. Nowhere can I figure out how to exit the movie -- I finally quit the program and reopen, at which time I have to reenter my password information.

2. I can see my shared library from my Rhythmbox machine -- sweet! But I can't copy the songs or download them to iTunes, even though they're DRM-free easily-copiable songs in the linux world (I only buy music from Amazon so as to avoid DRM).

3. I copy my music library into iTunes from a networked folder since the "magic" way didn't work and the app hangs. I have to force quit the application, leaving me with about 1/5 of my music library.

4. I try to "sync" the iPhone to the program in order to let Katharine update her Audobon app and install her newly downloaded TV show. I get a series of confusing messages about syncing "erasing" everything on the machine. Finally, I click "OK", rather frightened of Katharine's losing all the apps she's already paid for. Fingers crossede.

Long story short: the "syncing" model is rather confusing, iTunes is buggy and doesn't seem to be threaded properly so that one operation (importing a library) hangs up the program with no easy way to pause that operation. Furthermore, long operations such as syncing don't include time estimates.

Of course, on the plus side, the iPhone itself is pretty sweet. According to K anyway -- I don't really get to play with it much, and I don't dare to since I might want to write apps for it, which dooes not exactly promise to be a free and open experience to say the least.

I'm pretty sure any neutral comparison of iTunes to Rhythmbox would have Rhythmbox dominating iTunes in usability and feature set. Except, of course, the ability to work with the Apple store -- but that's not exactly Rhythmbox's fault.

poop, the past tense, and phonological features

2010-05-05T02:31:00.000-07:00

So last night Grace said, "I pooped," a pretty typical sentence (we're mid potty training here). Here's how she said it:

ai pʰupʰɪt

This struck me as a pretty interesting utterance.

Background
Here's the relevant background information. First, the Standard English past tense here is formed by two simple rules.

1. Gramatical rule: Add "d" to create the past tense (unless the word already ends in "d/t" in which case you add "ɪd" in order to make the "d" audible).
2. Phonological rule: In a consonant cluster, the voicing spreads from the first consonant rightward in English (the opposite can happen at other times -- as it does in Spanish, for example, where voicing spreads leftward to affect the pronunciation of the "s" in "mismo" or "beisbol").

poop --> (grammar) poopd --> (phonology) poopt

One more piece of background information that is important is to understand Grace's rules for syllabification. Grace has for a long time not permitted consonant clusters. This is pretty typical of children's speech in English, and is typical of many languages throughout the world so it's also true of many accents. Her basic rule is that a syllable consists of C + V + C, where C is one consonant, V is one or more vowels and C is one consonant. When a word contains more than one consonant, Grace has two options: she can ignore a consonant or add a vowel. In practice, she does both, as in the following pronunciations:

Grace's syllabification at work
James: "dʒeimɪz" (standard pronunciation: dʒeimz)
Books: "bʊtʰɪz" (standard prononciation: bʊks)
Star: "tʰɑɹ" (standard pronunciation: stɑɹ)

These have been standard Gracese for a while. Obviously under the pressure of the Standard English she hears every day, all of these formations will eventually give way to the standard ones, and we have started to hear the occasional consonant cluster out of Grace already.

Analysis of Poop-it
Given Grace's rules for syllables, and Grace's frequent formation of past tense words in English with the "d" suffix, I would have expected her to form one of the following two forms:

1. Gracese: pʰupʰɪd (poop-id)
2. Standard: pʰupɾ (poopt)

What she did, however, is she formed a hybrid. This raises the possibility that she has learned neither the grammar nor the phonological rule described above, but has instead simply heard the word form "poopt" and interpreted it based on her own rules for syllabification.

This shouldn't seem that surprising, but to me it is. Listening to her talk, it seems so clear that she is using our grammatical endings "z" (plural, third person) and "d" (past tense) in a variety of contexts. But of course, it's entirely possible that instead of hearing Grace alternate between uninflected forms ("I poop") and inflected forms ("I poopit"), what I have in fact been hearing is simply her alternating between two pronunciations/interpretations of the to-her unpronouncable ("I poopt): "I poop" and "I poopit").

Of course the real proof that she is inflected verbs at all will only come when she begins to create novel (i.e. erroneous) forms like "goed" and "throwed." I can't say for sure whether I've heard these yet -- given how common they are in kid-speak and how interested I am, it's likely we haven't hit this phase yet.

Except that my second example of Grace's syllabification above is in fact a novel form: bʊkɪz. If Grace were in fact simply hearing and mimicking the word form, we would predict "bʊk" or "bʊkɪs". So are these novel forms? Has Grace learned to inflect for number but learned tense simply as "vocabulary"?

Hard to know for sure, but for the next few days I'll be paying close attention to those verbs and nouns that end in unvoiced consonants.

Lanugage Explosion, Subordination, Intonation

2010-04-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

Looking back over this blog, it's hard to believe that just two months ago I was still making lists of new words in Gracese. Now creating any such list would be an enormous and absurd undertaking -- new words show up daily, ranging from "preying mantis" and "mulberry bush" to "namaste" and "forsythia" and Grace is starting to know things I don't know (she taught me the words to "pop goes the weasel" last night, and she can list of the last names of all of her classmates -- most of which I can't interpret or reproduce accurately).

Grammar is still something I can try to track, though. I posted a while ago on subordinate phrases in Grace's language. Grace is beginning to use complementizers on occasion (where/how/for), but for the most part she still prefers the null complementizer (e.g. "I tell mommy Clara has a poopy diaper") and uses null complementizers even in cases where standard English does not allow it ("*I not know this goes").

Of course, with null complementizers, a skeptic might tell me that Grace is not in fact saying "I tell mommy Clara has a poopy diaper." but "I tell mommy. Clara has a poopy diaper."

To disprove the skeptic, I'd need to get out my recording equipment -- I'm quite sure that you can hear the punctuation difference quite clearly, not just in the lack of a pause but in the intonation ("Clara has a poopy diaper" sounds different in a subordinate phrase than it does as a standalone sentence -- said more quickly, with less stress, perhaps lower tone -- I don't really have the technical vocabulary to describe this correctly, but I'm quite sure you know it when you hear it).

All of this has me thinking about how I teach high school students to recognize subordinate phrases, a skill that comes in handy in at least three places: 1. Correctly punctuating the increasingly sophisticated sentences students try to write in high school. 2. Correctly reading complex sentences in writing by folks like Hawthorne, Dickens or Shakespeare 3. Understanding where the subjunctive is used in Spanish (as hinted by the "sub", the subjunctive can only occur in subordinate phrases).

I usually follow the "dependent/independent" clause method for describing subordination -- asking if a clause can stand on its own or not (if not, it's a dependent clause, a subordinate clause, and might have a subjunctive verb in it). Of course, there are cases where this fails, as in Grace's "I tell mommy Clara have a poopy diaper" where either clause could stand on its own. How then to explain to the student that "I tell momy" (Le digo a mamá) is the main clause and "Clara have a poopy diaper" (Clara tiene/tenga un pañal sucio) is the subordinate clause?

It strikes me that teaching them to recognize the intonation difference in the two clauses might be quicker than trying to teach a heuristic for determining which clause is dependent. It also would teach a valuable reading skill -- incorrectly reading a subordinate clause as a main clause is a major error in reading that leads to errors in comprehension. Yet I fear because we lack a clear language for describing it, this is an error that gets corrected much less reliably in teaching reading than less grave errors such as mispronouncing an unfamiliar word (the mispronounced word reveals a single gap in the puzzle; the misread subordinate clause shows the student has missed the very structure of the puzzle they're working on).

On the Spanish side, that leaves me only the exciting task of teaching them the difference between the very normal "Le digo a mamá que Clara tiene un pañal sucio" and the extremely odd "Le digo a mamá que Claro tenga un pañal sucio." which not only asks for a dirty diaper but implies that mom has the power to control Clara's bowl movements...

Thoughts on Lesson Planning

2010-04-12T06:40:00.000-07:00

Like many teachers I know, I don't really write lesson plans.

Let me rephrase that, I have historically written plans for one of three reasons:

1. When someone was going to review a lesson with me (i.e. a supervisor would observe or a team would look at one as a model or to critique).
2. When co-planning (i.e. when another teacher was going to be using my plans the next day.
3. When required to (i.e. during my student teaching when I had to hand in all lesson plans).

When teaching on my own, writing individual lesson plans has never risen on my priority list above, say, working on something that students would be given, tweaking a project description, assessing student work, or working on longer-term planning.

That said I've certainly taught classes that would have been better if I'd taken even another 10-15 minutes to plan better. And of course I reinvent the wheel all the time, whereas if I had better plans I could theoretically be revising and revisiting rather than redoing and reinventing.

So the question this raises for me is how can I force myself to do those extra 10-15 minutes of labor to plan better and document what I'm doing for posterity without recreating the lesson plan templates of my student teaching that I find so overwhelming and droll.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that most of teaching I hold in my head. If I walk into class with a poem and three questions in my hand, I'm bringing much more: an idea about which vocabulary words will cause trouble and how I will pre-teach them in a drill, a sense of which lines are most difficult and how I will guide the whole class through an understanding of the difficult lines before setting them up with the (easier) rest of the poem for independent work. I also likely have a template to how my day goes -- we start with a drill, then have a Q/A with the whole class, then do small guided group or individual work followed by prolonged work and a wrap-up. If I take the time to explain it, there's a whole plan in there, but all I actually need are the questions and the poem, maybe with some underlining to indicate words to pre-teach.

Currently, many such templates mostly exist in my head, but I could probably benefit from writing them down. Templates would describe certain kinds of flow that could, over time, be refined, revised, and perfected. I could also come to notice those tasks for which I don't have a clear template and then start to chip away at the question of how best to teach them. For a given level and subject area, there may only be 5 or 6 templates over all: all classes fit those moulds. An individual lesson plan would then consist of basically a set of parameters that would slot into the template.

The list of parameters would likely take up no more than half a page, which is about the length of plans when I make them now (actually, now my usual length is a sticky). The beauty of something so short is that it is more readable and more adaptable for future years. Even when I have full lesson plans now, the very thought of reading a multi-page document is overwhelming. Having an ever-evolving description of a few templates in addition to sticky-length plans that reference those templates seems like something a more-effective version of me could actually do.

What's more, I have a feeling that both of these kinds of documents (templates and parameters) would be more useful to other teachers than full lesson plans. One frustration with trying to use other people's plans off the internet is that inevitably there are too many accidental factors that may or may not fit your class (class length, logistical rituals, etc.). Giving someone just the parameters -- here's the objective, the problem set, etc. -- would let them plug it into their own template for good teaching.

On the other hand, if what you're looking for is good instructional practices, then you want just the reverse -- a template that you can slot your own content into.

So this is my new idea. In programming, this is very common -- essentially I'm talking about separating data from display, or separating the model from the view. So the question that now occurs to me is: who else has had this idea? What names have they given it? Do there already exist books full of templates and parameters?

The other question of course is about the risk of abstraction. I am often guilty of the sin of over-abstraction in programming, and is it possible that templates, in the end, would be too leaky? I'm not sure, but I'm going to try to find out -- my goal for the end of this year is to start writing up templates and parameter sets. We'll see where it gets me.

Champion Teachers misteaching grammar

2010-03-22T02:39:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the New York Times article a few weeks ago, I started reading Doug Lemov's Teach like a Champion in spite of a title so bad I can hardly bear to repeat it here. I very much like the idea of a teaching book that focuses on the mechanics of teaching, rather than on higher-order ideas that so often can become muddled or meaningless in practice.

Completely incidental to the points the text is making (which are content-neutral), I've already found two examples of "good" grammar teaching that are rather distressing to me.

In the first, the answer is right but the definition wrong, in the second, only the definition, which is wrong, is given.

1. Definition of a Subject

The task is to identify the subject and the sentence is: "My mother was not happy." The student (A) in the example guesses "happy." The teacher asks for clarification from another student (B) and gets the definition that "The subject is what the sentence is about." The teacher says this is correct and then asks student A what the subject is again. Student A replies "mother." End example.

This is an example of the rule "No opt out," where students always are forced to give the right answer, even if they at first get the answer wrong. You might think that the teacher above was just going easy on student B to move the lesson along, but the next section of the book, "Right is right," is about how important it is not to pretend students are right when they're not, so I think we can safely assume that Lemov thinks this answer is right.

If you're wondering why the definition is wrong, it's easiest to just give some counterxamples:

1. It is raining. Grammatical subject: "it." Subject according to above definition: rain.
2. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Grammatical subject: "it." Subject according to the above definition: marriage.

2. Definition of a Noun.

The task is simply to define a noun. Lemov gives the example of a student who says "A person, place or thing." The champion teacher does not accept this answer but prompts a more thorough response, until given "A person, place, thing or idea."

The importance of the idea clause here is telling, because it is the vagueness of the concept "idea" that has let so many educated people believe this definition for so long. It is, after all, entirely obvious that not all nouns are people, places or things. However,if you consider that things like "liberty," "truth," and "proof" are ideas, conceptual entities if you will, then it seems like this definition might just do.

The trouble is many nouns are clearly actions. In fact, we have suffixes that let you turn verbs into nouns, thus creating newly minted nouns out of any action we please. Here are a few very simple cases of nouns that are not people, places, things or ideas:

"Destruction" as in "The hurricane resulted in devastating, wide-spread destruction."
"Liberty" as in "I am not at liberty to say."

How would I define "noun," you may ask. I teach students the following simple procedure for identifying a noun. It is not perfect, but it is close, and it doesn't include any out and out lies: "If for a given word X you can say "the X" but not "very X", then X is a noun." Every native speaker can apply my rule perfectly every time.

Grace's first linguistic question...

2010-03-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

Following up on the topic of taboos, Katharine reports that today Grace asked her her first question:

G: Mama, what's doo doo?
K: poop.

Pesky taboos

2010-03-17T16:13:00.000-07:00

Quote of the day: "Está jodido", said by an earnest Spanish 2 student describing a character in a movie about to be carted off by fascists...

Meaning and usage learned correctly from an Orishas song he studied earlier in the semester. The description of the character was also correct. He just missed the pesky detail of register... It's always interesting to see the kind of Spanish students speak (and the kind of errors they make) when you give them authentic sources.

This is one of many words that students would typically never encounter in a textbook but which they would likely hear within a few days of arrival in a Spanish-speaking country (presuming they make contact with other youth, that is). Not all these kinds of words are swear words, they also include simple phrases like "mande", "vale", "venga" or "anda."

Grace's first subordinate sentences

2010-03-08T02:27:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of days I've started noticing sentences like this one in Grace's speech:

"Mine not know this goes"

The sentence above translates into standard English as

"I don't know [where/how] this goes."

The context is putting a puzzle together, so it's pretty clear that this is what she means.

Null complementizers are of course allowed in English in sentences in alternation with "that" (I saw the man you mentioned / I saw that man that you mentioned, etc.). However, Grace is using a null complentizer where we would use an unstressed question word as a complementizer -- where, when, how, etc. She knows these question words in other contexts, but question words as complementizers play a different grammatical function and are harder to pick out, I'm sure, since they're unstressed, so it makes sense that she hasn't picked them up here yet.

I wonder how comprehensible someone would be if they left out all of the question word complementizers... evidence so far is that it wouldn't be too bad -- when I first mentioned the sentence above to Katharine, she could swear she'd heard a "how", though when we got Grace to repeat it it was clear there was no "how" there. It's amazing how much filling-in we do when we listen, and how much of it is unconscious. Even though I'm aware of lots of the irregularities of Grace's speech (using a "t" for a "k", for example), in every day interactions it feels like she says words like "kitchen", "cook", etc. completely normally (until, that is, I misunderstand her, at which point I realize that for a "t" sound I have to guess a wide range of possible letters -- t, k, qu, etc.).

How not to use war photography in a lesson...

2010-03-02T06:05:00.000-08:00

I'm about to start teaching the Spanish Civil War in my Spanish II class. I was looking around for some resources on the web -- I'd gotten it into my head that if I could find some resources aimed at lower-level native speakers I could make use of them for my students. In the course of my search, I found the following puzzling activity:

The instructions say: "El fotógrafo estadounidense Robert Capa realizó una de las fotos de guerra más célebres de la historia an la contienda civil española. Ordénala." [The American photographer Ropert Capa took one of the most celebrated war photographs in history in the Spanish civil conflict. Put the pieces in order.] In case it's not clear from the screenshot, this is a web applet that allows you to play one of those sliding-piece puzzles where you have to put the picture in order. I have a feeling this was one of many generic "plugins" that were part of the suite of "educational" software... I can't imagine the author ever expected to see this sort of image show up in the shuffle.

I have a pretty heavy level of disdain for this sort of activity... it makes me fear for the time when Grace enters elementary school and a good bit of her time is taken up with activities designed to kill time (pointless word searches, easy "puzzle" games vaguely related to the curricular content, etc.). Not to mention what Susan Sontag might say about this particularly unexpected use of photography... (what do you say to the child when, after putting the pieces in order, they realize they seem to be looking at a man's death?)

More vocabulary observations

2010-02-23T03:50:00.000-08:00

In the interest of not losing track of cute words, here's the latest collection. As Grace's vocabulary expands, this becomes more and more ridiculous, but it still bothers me every time I forget one of these peculiarities, so I thought I'd write them down and share them with the world.

Oddball words on the way out

eat [eet] - until recently used for all consumption (eating/drinking/etc)
drink [nink] - a recent innovation, which made me sad because "mine eat apple juice" was so cute.

noodle [doodle] - alas, she is now beginning to pronounce this [noodle] and yesterday even did a rare self-correction (I blame daycare!) -- "no doodle, noodle!"

barefoot [bay-uh-foot]

Groupings & Family

nuclear family - mine, baby, daddy, mommy [often repeated, as with counting, with repetition, as in "mine, mommy, daddy, baby, mine, mommy, daddy"]

funny names for family and friends - people with cute babies don't get named in their own right. So, her cousin "Liam" dominates that whole family's naming ("baby liam / baby liam mommy / baby liam daddy"). The same is true with our friend's with a baby named Jack ("baby jack" / "baby jack mommy" / "baby jack daddy"). Even better, our friend Sam is tall, slender and wears glasses, like her uncle Dave, so he is called "Sam-Dave" to differentiate him from the real "Dave-Dave" (she refused to call him "Sam", perhaps because her best friend is named "Sam" already).

Caroline (her aunt) - this used to pronounced something like [ladalada] but is now a much more standard [ka-line].

Grampy (maternal grandfather) - this used to be prononuced like [ladaladala], in imitation of a funny noise Grampy made. Now, alas, just [gam-py]

rooms & spaces: living room [liwing room], my room, my bathroom, mommydaddy room, mommydaddy bathroom, laundry room; baby jack school, baby room, mine new classroom, mine old classroom; mimi grampa house, moose,

Speech acts

please

sorry

thank you - recently used in public for the first time

no thank you - recently used to scold herself for pushing daddy [no thank you mine!]

Olympic vocabulary
ice skating, skates, ice princess, pink tutu

skiing, hockey - usually used just to say something like "No skiing, ice skating!"
mine skates off! - Grace has internalized the important fact that when sitting down after "iceskating" around the living room, one must first take skates off.

The rules of skiing according to Grace: stay blue lines no fall [tay boo liniz no fall] (the rules of skiing, according to Grace)

Cute Phrases
nice try - used when Mommy tries to pull a fast one.

rack them up - used in pool (more commonly she says the less interesting: "mine put balls in triangle").
nice break - used in pool; overgeneralized for any good shot, not just a break.
talking cat - as in "Mine talking cat"
mine eyes still open! - used at bedtime, to mock us.

mine side/your side - as in, "This mine side, daddy. Get your own side!"

make room - As in "Mommy sit next me, mine make room!"

naked baby - used for all nudity, regardless of age (Clara naked baby / mine naked baby / daddy naked baby).

Grammatical endings
Nouns

plural marker - [iz] as in "mine more fishiz please"

Verbs
participle- [ing] (as in "talking cat")
progressive marker - [ing] (used without copula, as in "mine playing")

third person singular ending - [iz] (as in "mommy poopiz, daddy poopiz, clara poopiz, mine poop too!")

Poems/Ritual sequences

counting - 1-5 consistently, plus numbers up into the twenties, often in incorrect sequences or with favorite sequences repeated (8, 9, 12, 13, 8, 9, 8, 9, 14, 18, 5, 6, 8, 9, etc.).

abc's -- she now has the vast majority of the song down (entertainingly, the first part she mastered was "Now I know my ABCs, next time won't you sing with me" -- it's taken her longer to actually know her ABCs).

Grace learns "play with"

2010-02-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

One reason to blog the oddities of Gracese is that I know they are all destined to die as her little language engine gradually falls into step with all the other little language engines of her generation and produces something more or less identical to my own standard English (with whatever generational quirks her generation comes up with to irk mine, of course).

Over the last two days or so, it's become clear that one of my favorite features of Gracese is moribund or already dead. My favorite feature was Grace's unusual use of "Play" as a transitive verb meaning to have fun with e.g. a toy. Note that normally "play" in this sense is intransitive, whereas play's transitivity is reserved for the meanings of playing an instrument or a game.

Grace, alas, now says "play with." Luckily, this too is not without some charm... I'm not 100% positive, but I'm pretty sure I heard her say "Mine play-with-ing it" the other day :)

How do you say "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in linguisticsese?

2010-02-06T18:56:00.000-08:00

Today, Grace wanted to go to sleep "camped out" on her bedroom floor. She then decided the whole family should come, and she moved over for me. This was a remarkable event -- usually when Grace comes to our bed she takes over my side and insists that I sleep on the bottom of the bed (I don't actually give in to this demand, for what it's worth). Thus, Grace thought that her moving over tonight was worth repeated comment, which made it pretty easy to tell what she was saying:

"Mine moved over daddy" (standardized spelling).

Which means: "I moved over for daddy"

Which she pronounced, roughly: "mine mov-uhduh ovuh daddy"

This would be the first regular past tense I've definitely observed in Gracese!

What's particularly cool is that her pronunciation of "-ed" looks a heck of a lot like her pronunciation of "did", which is one of the (albeit disputed) theories of the origin of the suffix in English (see Paraphrastic Theory of Origin here). Regardless of the similarity to "did", her pronunciation does look more like Old English weak verb endings (-ede and -ode) than like modern English.

You might think "uhduh" was a word for something like "for", which we would expect in her sentence ("I moved over ____ Daddy"), but as far as I can tell, Grace only has a subset of the prepositions (up, on, down, over etc.) which she tends to use on their own as verbs or as so-called "prepositional verbs". She omits the prepositions "for", "to" and "with" everywhere we would expect them. So, you can analyze this sentence (and countless others like it) either with "Daddy" being in something like a dative case or with "move/move over" having a slightly different semantics in her language (with similar usage to a phrase like "give into"). Other verbs with interesting semantics in Gracese are "play", which is used transitively in the play-with-toys sense, whereas in standard English the transitive play is only used for the play-an-instrument sense. This is a particularly charming one since it comes up hundreds of times a day ("Mine play it", "Mine play those", "Mine play it more right now", "Daddy play it too right now", etc.).

The other reason I'm thinking this new "uhduh" is a past tense suffix is that I've been watching her engage more with the past tense (as a concept) over the past month or so. On other nights, for example, I've noticed her self-correcting to get irregular past tense verbs right. For example, the other night when Katharine worked late and then made a much-celebrated return home at bedtime, we kept retelling the story of "mommy come home." On the thirtieth retelling or so, Grace switched over to "mommy came home" (pronounced something like "Mommy tame home", since she still doesn't really have a "k" sound). The point being she definitely understands the concept of past tense verbs.

Of course, the proof will be when she first produces the sentence "Mommy come-uhduh home" (with the newly mastered ending overriding the correct irregular form) which I am eagerly looking forward to!

Why is word order so hard...

2010-01-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Depressing moment looking at some students doing review problem sets for me.... 100% of my students can tell me that "te quiero" means "I love you." I'm pretty sure, also, that they could tell you that "te" means "you" in that sentence, and that the "o" ending there means "I."

However, applying this same pattern to any other sentence (any sentence not already memorized as a stock phrase) is shockingly hard for even bright kids to do consistently.

For example, if I give a test with "la quiero" or "me dan una coca cola", a good percentage of students will answer "she wants" or "I give them a soda."

I've hammered on this fundamental bit of Spanish just about every way I can think of, yet I still can't say I've made half as much progress with this as I'd like to. It seems to take well over a year for this pattern to really sink in... if I weren't speaking from experience, I'd think it could be done with one day's lesson.

Spanish Plurals in Gracese

2009-12-23T03:08:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite features of Grace's language right now is a simple rule that she has that, it seems to me, is the same as the rule for forming plurals in Spanish. My guess is that this is a rule of syllables rather than a rule of grammar per se, which is interesting because of what it seems to imply about Grace's perception of English (or does it? Truthfully, I have no idea).

Grace's rule is as follows:
- If a word ends with a consonant and you need to add an "s", you add "[iz]" (normal spelling=eeze).
- If a word ends with a vowel and you need to add an "s", you add "z" alone (this is the standard English rule).

The result is some pretty adorable sentences, such as the following, which I heard (it seems) several thousand times last night:

[no, mo bʊkiz] (Nooo, mo' bookies) - No, more books!

The explanation that comes to mind right away is that Grace has a similar template for syllables as, e.g., Spanish and Italian, where a syllable can consist of [CONSONANT + VOWEL + CONSONANT], with both consonants being optional. Of course, in standard English, as many as 4 consanants can stack up, as in "sixths" ([sIksθs]).

I have no idea if this is the "right" explanation. If it is, it's consistent with other consonant reductions in her speech, which I think are pretty universal to toddler speech, such as:

stuck -> tut (reduction + duplication)
spinning -> tinning
etc.

It's hard to know whether she *hears* "stuck" as "stuck" but then says "tuck", or whether she hears "stuck" as "tuck" in the first place (or as "tut"). It's hard to believe that she could hear books" as "bookies", though.

Another complication: I'm pretty sure she says the following:
[næns] for "dance" (standard: [dæns]).

That would imply that maybe her syllable template prohibits a stop to be part of a consonant cluster, but allows clusters with nasals (and probably liquids etc).

Why it's hard to say you're "fluent"

2009-12-07T03:01:00.001-08:00

Here are some things Grace can say, at 2, that I don't know how to say in Spanish, in spite of years speaking and teaching the language:

* Jellyfish
* Reindeer
* Futon

Okay, that's my whole list for now, but the point is, vocabulary comes in strange ways. There are probably hundreds of words your average Spanish-speaking four or five year old knows that I don't know, even though I am basically fully conversant and of course have all of the educated vocabulary five year olds don't have. Words for plants and animals (which, oddly, seem so much important in toddlerdom than adulthood), words for parts of cultural rituals, and on.

Adventures in Toddler Diets: Raw Fish, Cafeteria Food & Fried Rice

2009-11-10T03:01:00.000-08:00

It's a motto of mine that no morality should enter into food, pretty much ever. That includes "Whole Foods" style morality, it includes diet industry morality, and it includes locavore dogma as well. Food is sustenance and pleasure, plain and simple. Preparing and eating food is a big part of what family is: I want to leave that unsullied as long as possible. We eat vegetables because they're good, not good for us.

That said, I am by no means capable of living up to my motto. So, when I learn that Grace eats two and three bowls of food at daycare -- food prepared by the school as part of their now-mandatory lunch program, well, I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a twinge of "you should know better" rooted in the notion that mass food is bad food. And when Grace sits down to sashimi with me and happily devours every last bite of fish, I would be lying if I didn't say I felt a twinge of pride. The beauty of sashimi is that it makes you realize that everything we do to cook fish detracts from the flavor of a fresh, quality product. A small part of me thinks Grace understands this (the same part of me that thinks she has perfect pitch when she sits down to her piano).

Neither of these feelings is really rooted in the healthfulness of the options. On the whole, I think nearly every American could eat more fish and be better for it--but I do have thoughts about mercury and toddlers that mean that even if it were financially feasible, I probably wouldn't have sushi for dinner every night. And though I'm sure there is more of all kinds of "bad" things in the cafeteria food Grace eats, the root of my snobbishness toward it is really cultural more than dietary. Frozen food heated up and served on trays is gross. Period.

But publicly, in my explicit words and actions, I plug on with my philosophy. If Grace enjoys the food at daycare, wonderful, I say! She's learning to enjoy things I would likely never serve her. At home, I continue to cook the food I cook, be it what it may, and serve it up. If Grace eats half a plate, I'm happy. If she pushes her food around the plate and then goes and plays, fine -- play is also fine. K occasionally prods, worried she'll go hungry, but I'm confident no Hinkle has ever gone hungry in the presence of food.

That said, I would be lying if I said I didn't have my private doubts every time Grace leaves her food untouched. Maybe I should whip up some mac and cheese for her, nevermind that she's not asking for it and is now happily engaged in hopping in circles.

Yesterday, though, I had an interesting experience. It was a night when I was home late from work and had to whip something up in a hurry. I had at my disposal a lot of fresh vegetables from a Sunday trip to the store and a bit of leftover rice I had to use: the obvious solution, fried rice. In this case, we were short on rice, so I compensated by chopping about twice as many vegetables as I normally would. The key to my fried rice recipe (which comes from one of my several beloved Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid cookbooks) is that you finish it off with a healthy wallop of fish sauce. I once had my nutritional program do the calculations, and it turns out you get something like 100% of your daily sodium from the recipe. Oh, and you top it off with a fried egg: that adds a fun, toddler-friendly, interactive element to the meal that's very important to both Grace and my pleasure in food.

About half way through dinner I looked up and saw Grace happily picking up one vegetable after another and popping it into her mouth like candy. Zucchini. Pepper. Bamboo shoot. Broccoli. Asparagus. Mushroom (well, that's no surprise, she loves mushrooms above pretty much everything but butter and cheese).

I didn't say anything of course--I'm convinced Grace will cry foul at any attempt to encourage her to eat a given food (I know I would). But I did wonder about it. What was the difference between these vegetables and the countless ones she'd rejected? These were not in soup format (a usual favorite). They were not overcooked and textureless (also a frequent toddler favorite). What they were was abundantly salted (at the last minute, with fish sauce, which is why they didn't lose their texture to the salt).

Which has me thinking: I'm aware salt is an oft-avoided food, but on the pantheon of food evils, I think salt is pretty low. When I first started introducing food to Grace, we avoided salt -- I'd learned somewhere that babies don't show a preference for salt and that baby food was only salted for the sake of parents tasting it. Given the supposed neutrality of the baby, it seemed silly to add salt. I still have no idea whether this is true, but it is certainly true that toddlers show a preference for salt, and an immense one (as do adults, as pretty much every bite of restaurant food I've ever tasted demonstrates). In the case of last night's dinner, it was salt + umami, which fish sauce packs an abundance of.

Now given how much joy Grace takes from sprinkling kosher salt onto food when we cook together, I'm thinking it might not be the worst thing in the world to let her salt her own food. Maybe with a little MSG for the umami.

A quick check of parenting and nutrition websites shows that in having these thoughts, I'm pretty much the devil. But of course, these recommendations never seem to take into account actual tastes. I wonder how many people try to cook the "right" way, find it doesn't work at all, and end up supplementing with packaged foods with far more salt than they'd add in cooking in the first place. In Grace's case, for example, she may well make up all of those calories she doesn't eat at dinner in crackers and cheese. Given that, wouldn't it make more sense to let her eat the salt with her dinner?

And now just having read those websites I looked up is making me start to shrink back into moralizing and guilt and all of those feelings that make you skip real food altogether in frustration and grab a candy bar or a cracker for the calories... which kind of brings me back to the beginning. Good food, right? Focus on the good part, not the good for you. Sashimi with soy sauce, vegetables with rice and fish sauce, these things are good. I would much rather Grace grow up knowing a variety of delicious foods that might not quite pass the nutritional test than trying to down bland and virtuous "good" food while fantasizing about the delicious "bad".

Wish me luck.

Two OSV sentences at 20 months

2009-07-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

This week I had the pleasure of hearing the first of Grace's clear three word sentences with verbs. Better yet, the first two clear three word sentences I can remember Grace producing were in Object-Subject-Verb word order, a word order that rarely occurs in the English Grace hears all the time. This makes me confident she's generating the sentence rather than hearing it as one word (she also says "I love you", but it's likely she's learned this whole phrase as one unit).

Alas, I already forgot the first sentence I heard, though I did note the OSV word order. The second one was cute enough I'll probably always remember it.

After I gave Katharine a kiss, Grace said:

[mama dada ma] (1)
mom dad kiss
Dad kissed mom

Though the word order is strange, my guess is that she is following a topic-comment pattern. I feel like this is true of a lot of her two-word utterances as well, though I can't think of a list of good examples at the moment. I wonder if patterns of topic (or of theme/rheme) are more fundamental than subject/verb/object patterns in some way.

Clearly whatever is going on in her mind is not at all a form of imitation or statistical analysis of English. She's got her own little grammar engine starting up. I can't wait for more complex sentences to start.

(K, on the other hand, may already be tiring of my attempts to analyze her language)

Notes:
1. "ma" is an example of Grace's preference for imitative words. Though she understands the standard "kiss", she prefers to use the sign for kiss accompanied by the "ma" sound, which is from her goodbye ritual at daycare. This is one of many instances of her preference for onomatopoeia, even when she has sounds she could use to say the harder word. For example, she prefers "ba" to "sheep" ([ba] and not [ʒi]), "roar" to "bear" ([ro] and not [be]), and "arf" to "dog" ([af] and not [da]) and "quack" to "duck" ([ʀ] and not [dʌ]). This is true even when the name of the animal is much easier to say than the sound (such as "bear" and "duck" which use the early sounds "b" and "d").

Support & Open Source

2009-06-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

My love/hate relationship with my Dell Mini 12 continues.

On the love side, every time I see folks with other laptops, I think to myself, my God that thing is huge and smugly congratulate myself on my tiny machine.

On the hate side, Dell's proprietary crap makes this thing a PITA on Ubuntu (wireless driver + graphics card). This was mostly fixed by Jaunty, which basically just works on the mini-12 (to get the graphics card fully supported you just have to enable the ubuntu-mobile ppa). However, the problem with relying on a PPA etc is that everything is a bit more fragile. So, for example, when Ubuntu recently pushed a kernel upgrade (-> 2.26.28-13), the graphics broke. Of course, Ubuntu keeps your old kernel around after an upgrade just in case your system gets hosed, so I was able to boot from the old kernel with working graphics, but suddenly the wireless network card wasn't being recognized by the old kernel.

All of this was very sad: I was left with either a working network card or a working graphics driver. On the assumption that it would be a while before the graphics driver was fixed, I wasted a good hour trying to get wireless working again with my old kernel (networking requires a non-free driver, but it had just worked with ubuntu on the initial install).

Tonight I decided I'd rather have ugly graphics than no wireless and went back to the new kernel. While at it, I decided to drop into the ubuntu IRC channels to see what I could find. I went to #ubuntu-mobile, explained my situation, and left the window there while working. Within a half hour or so, the packager of the ubuntu-mobile PPA was talking to me. I was able to give him a useful error message that instantly told him what the bug was. He released a new version of the graphics module that fixed the bug, I installed, rebooted, and confirmed it worked.

This was quite cool. Within 1/2 hour of looking for help through online chat, I found the developer of the software that had broken. Within an hour the problem was fixed, not just for me, but for all users.

Here's what I'm thinking: this is why open-source development works. This is what's so cool about linux. I remember stories of my mother making similar breakthroughs with Microsoft support when she'd found easily reproducible bugs in Excel graphs -- only in her case she got a 8-step workaround to the bug and no fix. With open-source package management tools, it's easy to push updates out to all users fast, so a problem like this can be fixed right away.

Here's the problem, though: my solution wouldn't have been remotely possible if I was still using the version of ubuntu Dell installed. Dell has no one in their phone support team who could be nearly this helpful, and most likely has no one in its support system who could access someone this helpful. It strikes me that when companies think about using linux, they should think about harnessing the power of the linux user and developer communities as well. In short, maybe they should simply try to hire this guy to maintain a package archive for them that will make their hardware work with vanilla ubuntu. It seems it might work better than their home-rolled distro anyway, and it would certainly be better supported.

Simple scripting tasks

2009-06-16T16:31:00.001-07:00

This afternoon Katharine asked me to do a very simple task. She needed to create a certain number of random groups from a population of students. The groups weren't purely random -- rather, they had to ensure an even distribution by grade level and gender.

Our student database is all in an online database, which, allows you to export data from it in a reasonably sane way. My approach to solving her task, which took 10-15 minutes to do, was as follows (I'll give the physical equivalent of each step):

1. Make an index card with each kid's name, class, and gender on it (export a CSV file)
2. Divide those cards into piles by grade level
3. Divide those piles into a male pile and female pile
4. Shuffle the decks of cards
5. "Deal" from each deck of cards into one "hand" per group needed.

I'm quite confident most people could come up with the algorithm above -- no programming skills needed. But, in our world, it's still not possible for most people to do the above programmatically. The physical solution is available, of course, but it's not repeatable, and it doesn't scale up well (the beauty of the program is it is equally easy to run for virtually any number of kids, groups, and factors you need to divide by).

My solution was roughly 50 lines of code, though it could have been much shorter. It strikes me that essentially this kind of data management is a large part of what computers are useful for -- whether it be converting one kind of table into another kind of table, or iterating over data to create things. Programs like Excel and tools like mail merge offer some of this power, but they usually fall short at some point[1].

So my question is, is a tool that would put this kind of programming into the reach of non-programmers conceivable? Available? In the works somewhere? I've often thought that a desktop-wide macro recorder would be enormously useful[2] but I'm not sure that's really what I'd want. Perhaps AppleScript gets at this, but I'm not sure that does what I want.

Here's an initial list of features that such a language or tool would need to allow:

Easy access to data in rows, regardless or source, and easy export of data in rows, regardless of needed format.
Easy actions on data in rows
Easy filtering of data.
Simple string operations, search operations, etc., to turn one form of data into another.
Calculations and comparisons.
Shuffling, randomizing, etc.
Graphical interface or other tool that makes syntax errors an impossibility and make semantic errors difficult to make. Recording macros, for example, it is impossible to make a syntax error.

I realize this may be a completely insane idea. Perhaps people who think like me (and therefore want this tool) are already programmers (and therefore don't need it). Still, I have to think there's a population of computer users who can see what makes for an automatable task but simply lacks the tools to do it.

I also have to think that given the variety of ways that data presents itself, and the ways in which people regularly need to move data between one application and another, there are many tasks that can't be anticipated by programmers of any given application, but could be automated given the right environment.

[1]In this example, they fall short in a number of places. I've had them fail at much simpler tasks though -- I wanted Excel, for example, to look at a numeric grade and give me a letter grade. Because of the limited syntax of Excel functions, the obvious solution was to use nested if statements, but it limits the number of nested function calls at 7 -- alas, I had more than 7 grades (A,A-,B+,B,B-,C+,C,C-,D,F)

[2] Growing up, I had such a tool in a very early Mac OS and found it incredibly useful). But macros can't introduce elements like randomness or even simple calculations (unless you get very clever). Trying to imagine a macro language becoming powerful for basic scripting, I'd have to suddenly imagine GUI equivalents to powerful programming and commandline tools like the random library, grep, sed, and awk, and on and on. One enticing possibility is building on something like the firefox macro extension (imacros) -- given the diversity of webpages and webapps out there, nearly everything becomes possible via macros on the web.

2009-06-12T03:13:00.000-07:00

Here's another update on Grace's consonants. I recently confirmed that she really is using a uvular trill for a "k" (actually, realized that she seems to have two separate sounds for the "k" sounds in English, neither of them standard, but one of them is definitely a trill).
It's so much fun!

Grace's sound, roughly			Phonemes she uses the sound for (in rough "English-y" notation)
stops
d			/t/ and /d/
b			/b/ and /p/
d (back a bit)			/k/ (in "car"). We sometimes think we hear a proper "k" here but we're pretty sure it's a "d" variant, a bit like the "d" in an Indian accent.
p			/p/ in a whispered tractor sound and sometimes in "papa" (grampa). We debate whether this is a "p" or a "b", it may be an unaspirated "p" (and sometimes she whispers the whole word in an attempt at aspirating her "p"?)
nasals
n			/n/
m			/m/
fricatives & approximants
ʒ (zh)			/s/, /z/ /ʃ/ (sh),/tʃ/ (ch) /dʒ/ (j)
w (some version of it)			/ɹ/ (r) and /w/ - as in "wawa ("flower" or "water")
θ (th)			/s/ (word-terminal only) - as in "bus"
x? ʃ?			/tʃ/ (ch) (word-terminal only) - as in "beach"
Trills & funny sounds
[R] (uvular trill)			Used for the "back" K, as in "quack" and "chloe")
[ʙ] (bilabial trill)			Used joyfully and frequently for silliness
r̼ (linguolabial trill)			Used joyfully and spitfully for silliness

User creation script

2009-06-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

A consultant recently asked me for a copy of a script I created for our school to automate user creation. I thought it would be more useful for myself and the world if I just archived it here where I can always find it, and where other folks can use it (I find it much harder generally to find usable sample window code &c. than I do with linux).

These are my first (and hopefully last) scripts in virtual basic scripting. I'm putting them here to make it easier to share them, but these haven't really been prepared properly for sharing (I was simply working from examples until these worked). Obviously it would be worth setting these up with tweakable parameters up top at some future point.

Script for creating students

Create Users

This script creates student user accounts based on a CSV file with the following structure:

username, first, last, group, password


' Script to create student accounts
' Created by Tom Hinkle 
' (or, if he's moved on, 
' 
' Requires file named students.csv in same directory with requisite information.
' 
' File format is plain csv (no escaping) as follows:
' 
' username, first, last, year-of-grad, password
'
' Note that year-of-grad is used for group names. We expect there to be an OU 
' with the name of e.g. YOG2012 for each year-of-grad. Also, student folders
' are named by YOG, so we expect the students folder to contain a folder titled
' e.g. YOG2012

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
upnSuffix = "cpcs.com"
Set objRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://rootDSE") 

dim fs,objTextFile
set fs=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
dim arrStr
set objTextFile = fs.OpenTextFile("students.csv")

Do while NOT objTextFile.AtEndOfStream
  arrStr = split(objTextFile.ReadLine,",")
  givenName = arrStr(1)
  lastName = arrStr(2)
  sn = lastName
  cn = givenName & " " & lastName
  OU = "YOG" & arrStr(3)
samAccountName = arrStr(0)
' Specify the NetBIOS name of the domain.
strNetBIOSDomain = "cpcs"
userPrincipalName = samAccountName & "@" & upnSuffix
homedir = "\\mms1.cpcs.com\students\" & OU & "\" & samAccountName
groupname = "LDAP://ou=" & OU & ",ou=Student,DC=CPCS,DC=com"

Set objContainer = GetObject(groupname)
Set objUser = objContainer.Create("User", "cn=" & cn)
objUser.Put "sAMAccountName", samAccountName
objUser.Put "userPrincipalName", userPrincipalName
objUser.Put "sn", sn
objUser.Put "givenName", givenName
objUser.Put "displayName", givenName & " " & sn
objUser.Put "userAccountControl", 512
objUser.Put "homeDirectory", homedir
objUser.Put "homeDrive", "H"
objUser.Put "scriptPath", "SLogon.bat"

On Error Resume Next
objUser.SetInfo
If (Err.Number <> 0) Then
 Wscript.Echo "Unable to create " & samAccountName
End If
'On Error GoTo 0


objUser.SetInfo
objUser.SetPassword arrStr(4)
objUser.SetInfo



' Create folder, based on: 
' http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/30289055/modifying-user-home-direc.aspx


If (objFSO.FolderExists(homedir) = False) Then
 ' Create folder.
 On Error Resume Next
 objFSO.CreateFolder homedir
 If (Err.Number <> 0) Then
  Wscript.Echo "Unable to create home directory for " & strSAM
 End If
 On Error GoTo 0
End If
If (objFSO.FolderExists(homedir) = True) Then
 ' Assign permissions to home directory.
 intRunError = objShell.Run("%COMSPEC% /c echo Y| cacls " _
 & homedir & " /T /E /C /G " & strNetBIOSDomain _
 & "\" & samAccountName& ":F", 2, True)
 If (intRunError <> 0) Then
  Wscript.Echo "Unable to assign permissions for " & samAccountName
 End If
End If
Loop
objTextFile.Close
set objTextFile = Nothing
set fs = Nothing
wscript.Echo("When you are done, you will want to go into active directory, highlight the new users manually, and add them to the group Students. You'll also need to disallow changing the password. Sorry I didn't get this done programmatically, but it's relatively simple to do manually")

Does it count as unvoiced if the whole word is whispered?

2009-05-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

Needless to say I've been excitedly tracking Grace's acquisition of various sounds as she learns to speak and I've been waiting anxiously to hear her first unvoiced consonant.

The other day, we came to a fine page in a book with the following text:

"The PIG is driving the tractor... putt-putt-putt..."

The putt-putt-putt is supposed to be a tractor sound (there are round poofs of smoke which illustrate the rhythm going out of the tractor tailpipe).

Grace finds this page highly entertaining, enough so that she echoed back:

"PUH PUH PUH PUH PUH!"

It was the first time I ever heard a clear "P" from her, so I was very excited. But then I realized she had whispered the rest of the word (a shouted whisper).

Oh well.

If you're curious, Grace's consonants so far are roughly as follows...

Grace's sound, roughly	Phonemes she uses the sound for (in rough "English-y" notation)
stops
d	/t/ and /d/
b	/b/ and /p/
nasals
n	/n/
m	/m/
fricatives
ʒ (zh)	/s/, /z/ /ʃ/ (sh),/tʃ/ (ch) /dʒ/ (j)
approximants
ɹ (some version of it)	/ɹ/ (r) and /w/
funny sounds
p	/p/ in a whispered tractor sound
r* (coronal trill)	Used consistently for what a duck says -- I have no idea why
[ʙ] (bilabial trill)	Used joyfully and frequently for silliness
r̼ (linguolabial trill)	Used joyfully and spitfully for silliness

*Katharine things this might be [ʀ] (uvular trill), which would make some more sense of it since this at least has her tongue somewhere close to the position needed for a "quack" sound (velar plosive)

Now that's style...

2009-05-13T03:06:00.000-07:00

From google docs...

The bad news is that Google Docs has just encountered an error.
The good news is that you've helped us find a bug, which we are now looking into.

This is actually a bit annoying as I'm using google docs for a time sensitive assignment... but nonetheless, I appreciate their astonishing dedication to the half-full glass. I should work on some error messages like that for Gourmet.

Two experiences with customer service, a world apart

2009-04-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

Since we've gotten two new gizmos here over the past month (dell mini + kindle2), I've had a few chances to enjoy giant-corporate phone support. At times past I've felt like all companies end up being equally frustrating, but my recent experiences leave me feeling otherwise. Here's a look at two very different experiences -- Amazon and Dell.

Dell:

I had various issues with my dell laptop's ubuntu installation out of the box. First, the weekend I got it, the Dell software repositories were down for a few hours, so no kind of update or installation would work at all (I had no way of knowing at the time that this was a temporary problem). Next, a number of things weren't working too well -- the machine had crashed several times (more than any linux machine I've ever used before), ssh was not working (so I couldn't copy all my working files from my other machine over our network), and I had found a reproducible bug that crashed the dell launcher every time I changed the background. Finally, I had questions about whether and how to update the machine from 8.04 (what it came with) to 8.10 (what is current); the standard ubuntu procedures didn't seem to be supported, but it seemed like it would be worth trying an update to see if it fixed some of the issues I was experiencing.

I went to Dell's website to see what I could see. I found a phone number and a chat support link. I called the phone line and opened up the chat support, figuring I'd learn which was faster. The chat took about 10 minutes to connect me with a service representative. I had to type in the service code from the back of the computer, etc., before I could describe my problem to them. When they learned the issue I had was with their ubuntu set up, they informed me I had to call a phone number (a different number than the one listed in my docs on the machine and on the website). At this point, I hung up the phone (I was on hold all this time) and called the new phone number. I was on hold on the order of 45 minutes before being connected to a service representative, to whom I had to read various serial numbers off of my laptop etc. When she learned that I needed support with their ubuntu installation, she told me I needed to talk to their ubuntu experts who were only available from 10-5 (it was 9:50 at this time -- I'd been trying to get support for over an hour at this point).

At 10, I did try calling the number I'd been given again, but when I heard tones and a computerized voice saying "you're being forwarded", I got suspicious I'd been moved out of the ubuntu support area anyway, and gave up entirely.

Amazon:

Katharine's new kindle developed a dead pixel (or rather, a dead line -- a whole one-pixel-wide vertical line of white) some time a few weeks ago. When you're reading, you barely notice it, but it's the kind of thing that's worth getting repaired while it's under warranty.

Today I decided to get around to calling support. I googled "amazon kindle support" and the first web page I found informed me that I could call, or I could sign in with my amazon account and have them call me, in which case they'd have all of my information ready. That sounded better to me, so I signed in under Katharine's account (to which the kindle is registered). I chose "hardware defect" from a dropdown menu of potential problems, chose "now" from a menu of times at which I'd liked to be called, entered my phone number, and clicked "Call me".

A window popped up telling me the phone was ringing and sure enough my phone rang. A computer voice told me I'd be waiting for 1 minute. In a few seconds I got a human. He confirmed that I really was Katharine by asking for my name and address (okay, I'm not Katharine, but I know enough to fake it). He talked me through how to hard reboot the kindle. I was pretty sure this wouldn't do anything, and sure enough it didn't. He confirmed that this sounded like a hardware issue and said a replacement kindle would be in the mail today and would most likely arrive by Monday. He said an email would go out to Katharine with tracking information, information on sending the defective kindle back, and directions on registering the new kindle to her account.

The whole process was done in just under 9 minutes (my phone has a timer, so I know).

Conclusions:

In both cases, I was calling tech support for a new product (Dell has just released the Mini-12 with ubuntu, within the past few months; the Kindle2 is under a month old), so in both cases the support training etc. must be relatively fresh. But the design, polish, and programming behind these two systems was worlds apart.

In Dell's case, they seemed determined to disappoint at every step. Their advertised 24/7 support does not apply for software issues. Add to that a slew of technical problems in their ubuntu setup and you have a lot of frustrated ubuntu users. But when you try to access them through their phone and chat support, you get bounced around on the phone with no indication of where you are, how long you'll be there, or how close you are to getting help.

Amazon doesn't offer 24/7 support either, but when you go to their website, it's very clear what they do offer (the hours are right there). They also make it easy for you to save them time and money by having them call you after you've logged in, which gives them all of your account information and so on and prevents you from having to read awkward serial numbers in on the phone. The minute I got on the phone, Amazon gave me an estimate of how long I'd be waiting, so I knew whether I should settle into some other task while on hold or not. When I got a hold of a representative, the representative already knew everything about me, so all I had to do was confirm my address (I didn't need to spell anything out since he surely had the info in front of him on a computer screen).

Dell obviously understands that phone support is frustrating -- they've added chat support which is surely cheaper for them to implement and less annoying for many customers. But they haven't linked any of this to your account information (which would bypass all of the serial code reading), and they haven't linked their website directly to their phone system.

I realize Amazon had a lot of advantages in this comparison -- a hardware problem is easier to diagnose and support than a software problem; they also obviously had more call center people on hand when I called. That said, a lot of this is simply a question of design. Even with the same resources, I'd imagine if Amazon had designed Dell's system, my experience would have gone something like this:

1. I go the Dell website, log in under my account, and then say I need support.
2. I answer a few quick questions (drop-down menus) that determine that I have a software problem and I have the Dell-supplied Ubuntu 8.04 operating system.
3. I come to a screen that tells me that Ubuntu support is available from 10-5. I can either call a phone number listed there, or enter my phone number to have Dell call me at a specified time between 10 and 5. I click "call me at 10"
4. At 10:00 I get a call with an estimated wait time. Presumably even with the same staff, my wait time will be substantially less now that my call has been directed correctly, since their phone support people aren't being tied up redirecting misdirected customers, having people read out serial numbers, and so on.

Surprisingly, the redesign would actually improve my experience by replacing two human-to-human interactions that I had with computer interactions: first, instead of chatting with a person, I could have used a dropdown menu to tell them the nature of my problem; second, instead of waiting on hold to find out when software phone support was open, the web page could have told me. I know humans are normally nicer to talk to than computers, but when all you want is to give some basic information, a well designed form is much better than a human you have to wait to talk to.

A final note: I have no idea how good the Dell techs are at troubleshooting and supporting you over the phone, because I never got to one. Now that I know it takes upwards of an hour to contact them, I'm highly unlikely to call their support again.

Luckily, google has a plethora of information about all things linux, so I was able to learn a few key things that Dell support likely wouldn't have known anyway, such as how to fix ssh on their install (which is broken by a broken wireless setup by default), how to activate ubuntu repositories properly for the low power intel architecture dell shipped with, and why upgrading to 8.10 won't work yet (even though a Dell salesperson told me she was pretty sure it would).

I'm famous...

2009-04-03T18:15:00.001-07:00

So my new Dell laptop arrived today with ubuntu out of the box... it's cool to see my sudoku game there among the games that come by default.

To think, a few summers ago Katharine gave me a sudoku on the beach... and now Dell is using my work for free...

Weekend in food

2009-01-19T16:44:00.000-08:00

So this weekend in food I...

Made injera (or rather I made an injera hack -- made with regular wheat flour and only a half-day's fermentation). Injera + a nice flavorful stew + lentils + a couple of pastes/sauces to add more heat for the grown-ups made for a highly entertaining meal. For Grace, I just spread the bread on her placemat and spooned lentils, meat, etc. onto her plate. For once we were all eating with our hands, so she was right in place. Though the flavor was off, the texture of the injera was just right, and the whole point is that it does such a good job soaking up the other flavors anyway. Once the meat and sauces hit the bread, it was pretty awesome.
Made two loaves of raisin bread with Grace. Making bread is becoming a tradition -- she loves helping me knead. We ate one loaf almost instantly, but still haven't cut into the other. It will make nice toast whenever we break into it.
Made brownies with the Obama logo on them for tomorrow. I actually made two pans -- one round with the Obama logo and one square, on which I attempted to do an Obama silhouette. I had to abandon the silhouette, which resulted in a vague blue and red tie-dye look... oops. I'll be cutting those into squares so they look less like a screw up.

That's just a start. Also in the fridge for lazy nights this week are left-over roast chicken and vegetables and some multi-grain pancakes to cook up tomorrow morning (we have a tradition of making real breakfast on Monday mornings to take the edge off -- since it's a three-day weekend we'll push that to Tuesday.

All of this is pretty firm evidence that I had a boatload of work to do this weekend... nothing like procrastination to make me ambitious in the kitchen.

Lullabies

2009-01-17T06:53:00.000-08:00

It turns out that if I limit myself to the first five frets of the guitar, I can put Grace in the sling, sit in my desk chair, and play. Luckily the arrangement of the Brahms lullaby I've worked out is easily played in the first five frets.

Sweetest thing in the world: watching your baby fall asleep on your shoulder while you play.

Do real people actually use Windows Server?

2008-12-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

Tonight I got one of many tech e-mails I get at school. In this case, the issue was related to a printer being down -- actually, a number of printers. If enough printers fail, it's a high priority issue, because it means teachers and students walking long distances to get print outs, and that's a lot of lost time at school (students may be thankful for the exercise and chance to socialize, but that's not really what we're aiming for).

Anyway, I decided it would be worthwhile to go into the server remotely and see what I could about the condition of the printers, so I could prioritize how important it was to get to fixing these printers soon. But the server is a Windows 2003 server. Our standard way of accessing it is over VNC or RDP, both of which can be really slow in the wrong conditions.

I've been waiting a good 30 seconds to get a response to each click remotely, which makes my "quick check" not so quick. This raises the question: why on God's green earth am I "clicking" anything?

There are lots of reasons why it doesn't make sense for a server to run a GUI. Among them is this: it's incredibly inefficient to transmit a picture of a whole desktop, and mouse events, etc., just to find out some basic information. If this thing were simply a *nix commandline, a 1200 baud modem would have sufficed to complete my inquiry in a few minutes. As it is, I'm giving up after a half hour (for what it's worth, I've been doing other things while I wait for responses from RDP). Do real people use this crap?

More and more I've been missing the commandline as I have to do admin work. I know that clicking is (theoretically) faster than typing commands, but between the ease of doing things remotely (I've spent hours programming on a remote system in emacs without noticing any difference from working locally) and the scriptability inherent in the commandline, I'm finding it hard to believe that people who administer machines for a living could ever do without a decent shell as their base of operations.

(Note: I know windows has a command prompt, but it's a pale shadow of bash, and as far as I know out of the box Windows Server does not have an ssh server enabled)

Pronouns, by the numbers...

2008-11-30T15:33:00.000-08:00

I start teaching students in the 9th grade, after they've had, ideally, a full 4 years of Spanish. One of the things I have to actively unteach is the overuse of subject pronouns. One of the things I have to teach and teach and reteach is the correct use of enclitic object and indirect object pronouns. For the 5+ years I've been teaching Spanish, this fact has driven me somewhat mad.

Below is a chart the explains why:

This chart lists a few common Spanish pronouns, followed by their rank in a word frequency list in Spanish, followed by the chapter in which they're taught in an online Spanish curriculum whose design mirrors most textbooks:
le - ranks 19th (3rd most common pronoun)... taught in chapter 44 (Unit 4)
me - ranks 33rd (5th most common pronoun)... taught in chapter 41 (Unit 4)
tú - ranks 554th (28th most common pronoun) taught in chapter 7 (Unit 1)

Needless to say, if we map the word frequencies of the English translations of the above, the chart seems much more logical...

This chart lists a few common Spanish pronouns, followed by their English translation's rank in a word frequency list, followed by the chapter in which they're taught in an online Spanish curriculum whose design mirrors most textbooks:
le - him - ranks 64th (10th most common pronoun)... taught in chapter 44 (Unit 4)
me - "me" ranks 76th (14th most common pronoun)... taught in chapter 41 (Unit 4)
tú - "you" ranks 15th (2nd most common pronoun) taught in chapter 7 (Unit 1)

There are a number of technicalities I could comment on here. Obviously, for example, translating "le" as "him" is not a simple equivalence. But nonetheless, the basic point stands. Also, it's worth noting that "you" (the #2 pronoun in English), is ranked 554th overall in the Spanish word frequency list. I'm quite sure that no living English pronoun ranks so low (we'll ignore "thou" and "thine" for obvious reasons). The reason, of course, has something to do with the fundamental structures of the languages (specifically, the fact that Spanish is a null-subject language), which is exactly why I have to work so hard to un-teach what is, traditionally, put front-and-center for students in Spanish 1 (chapter 7 of Unit 1 above, to be precise).

All of which begs the question, exactly which language do the textbook authors think we're teaching?

Struggling with the Rule of Least Restriction...

2008-11-28T19:01:00.000-08:00

Two posts have me thinking about the construction of assignments.

First, Tom Hoffman wrote a nice post excoriating an assignment shockingly chosen as a "model" of good standards-based work:

Given that, for good reasons, we're normally much more polite when we talk about other teacher's work, it was nice to hear Tom let loose. How often do we really get a chance to take apart the tasks we assign to kids? How often to English teachers really define what rigor or analysis means and what it can reasonably mean to a student?

The assignment has me thinking about this post on "the rule of least power". What Dan calls the "rule of least power" I would rather call "The rule of least restriction" (oddly, for once, I'm turning town a computer science metaphor for a special education metaphor). The idea is that when you create an assignment, you should always impose the lease powerful (restrictive) frame on a problem possible. This allows as much re-use/re-interpretation as possible, including students taking things in directions you never dreamed of (just as web developers can take easily-scraped data in directions you'd never dream of).

Thinking back to the assignment Tom was attacking (which makes the standard five paragraph essay assignment look open-ended), I admit that it is more likely to get the kind of predictable essays on Anne Frank that some teachers (or some tests) seem to like getting. But, crucially, it doesn't invite the students to ask any questions themselves or to discover why they might be interested in doing so.

On the other hand, the kinds of open-ended tasks I would rather give students are much more open to failure. And that catch -- the fact that assignments that ask students to do real-world tasks or that ask students to think in an open-ended way are far more likely to end in messy, hard-to-grade work or in outright hands-in-the-air I-don't-know-what-to-do failure... well, that's the problem I've been unsuccessfully struggling with my whole teaching career.

Dan finishes his post by formulating his rule of least power in this way:

1. Tell no student to care.
2. Tell no student how to care.
3. Apply increasingly powerful frameworks to mathematical objects only as the class cares about them.

Please don't confuse this with hardcore, Waldorfian constructivism. I have an agenda, a standard to meet, a lesson objective. But I don't fence my students onto a narrow path to my objective. I instead pave the ground beneath them so that the path to my objective is the easiest and the most satisfying to walk.

It's a high bar he sets. It's hard to figure out how to "pave the ground" so that the path you want students to walk is "the most satisfying to walk". It also strikes me that the more authentic your task, the less control you have about how students approach it, ergo, the harder it is to make sure students reach a standard or meet an objective while carrying it out.

Nonetheless, I'll definitely be challenging myself to think about presenting grammar at least (the most mathy thing I do) in the terms he describes (i.e. set up a problem + least restrictive framework and let it lead the class to the learning I want). Meanwhile, I'll try to think about how this problem-solving framework can map onto the stickier world of open-ended humanities-type assignments.

Using data to remediate, teach, improve

2008-11-11T19:21:00.000-08:00

I just found this inspiring math teaching blog, which has me somewhat down about my own teaching and classes. Dan's posts on keeping data in particular have me thinking quite a bit.

I've long maintained that traditional language programs simply ignore the fact that most students are learning virtually no conversational skills. You march the kids through a set of tests and drills designed to teach the language and assume it's worked (or it hasn't), but you don't measure whether they can converse. So what do I do -- I measure whether kids can converse. But that's costly in terms of classroom time and teacher resources, and so I can't actually do it nearly as frequently as I'd need to for it to be really effective.

Looking at the math blog has me thinking about the discrete skills that go into language -- whether that be recalling a piece of vocabulary of conjugating a verb or understanding how enclitic pronouns work. And I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be worth charting student's abilities with respect to these skills much as Dan does for his math students.

Of course, working toward that chart could start to look like that textbook march I was lambasting a paragraph ago... after all, having all the grammatical puzzle pieces that go into language is not the same thing as using language. However, if used with a linguistically informed approach to teaching the skills, and used alongside authentic assessments of actual linguistic skill (could answer comprehension questions on article / could converse for 2 minutes / etc), maybe just maybe something like what Dan's describing would be transformative in a language classroom (maybe, just maybe, in mine).

Does anyone know of any language teachers doing anything like this -- graphing student achievement, remediating quickly, making sure students have actually learned the concepts we think we're teaching... I'd like to think it would be commonplace.

"Yo estoy" or "Estoy yo": word order, subject pronouns, and the sticky question of whether all text books take the wrong approach?

2008-10-19T18:10:00.001-07:00

In my lovely grammar-book-in-progress, I make a point to put the subject pronouns after the verbs in all verb charts: hablo (yo) / hablas (tú) / habla (él), etc.

I do this for several reasons:

To break the speaker's habit (from English) of looking for subject pronouns before the verb

Because it is perfectly common in Spanish, as evidenced by the y-terminal "yo" forms (doy/estoy/voy/soy) which originated from "do yo / esto yo / vo yo / so yo/ etc.

To help avoid confusion when enclitic object pronouns are introduced, since "me quieres tú" is easier to parse if you're used to "quieres (tú)" than if you're used to "(tú) quieres"

Presenting "estoy yo" suggests, unconsciously, that the verb form ("estoy") determines the pronoun ("yo"), rather than that the pronoun comes first and the verb form second. I think this subtly helps prepare students for the fact that Spanish usually omits the subject pronouns, meaning that the verb form is the only source of subject information.

I consider these reasons sound. The only reason I can see for doing it the other way ("yo hablo / tú hablas / etc.") is that it will allow transfer from English. However, I see this as an anti-reason, and I wonder if teaching that focuses on drilling "yo amo / tú amas / etc" encourages other, incorrect transfer, such as "*ella hablas español" (there, the student has transfered both word order and the conjugation from English).

Given this, I'm sad to say I've never seen a Spanish text book that presented the subject pronouns as I do. Has anyone else? If not, are there reasons I'm not thinking of why teaching beginners to say "tú quieres" is a good idea?

Spanish spelling errors in English, and viceversa!

2008-10-18T07:37:00.001-07:00

One of the things I focus on in my Spanish teaching is phonetics -- I focus there partly because understanding the phonetics of Spanish will allow my students to have a better accent, but largely because I believe a better grasp of the Spanish phonetic system enables students to understand authentic Spanish much better.

I'm often excited when I see students make the very errors I try to warn them off of in their interpretation assessments, because it lets me reinforce that the phonetic patterns I'm teaching are real (they often seem to only half-believe me). For example, when a student transcribes a Spanish "r" as a "t", "d" or "l", and when they transcribe an intervocalic Spanish "d" as a "v", it's a great opportunity for me to talk about what the Spanish "r" and "d" actually sound like (the "d" being transcribed as "v" is particularly interesting -- the English phoneme that matches the sound is spelled "th", of course, but students know "th" is unavailable as a Spanish phoneme so they hear another voiced fricative -- "v" -- in its place, until, that is, they've internalized the pattern that intervocalic "d"s are like our voiced thorns).

Anyway, today in my geek blog reading, I read the following in a Spanish-speaking hacker's blog:

Benchmarking software is not an easy thing to do. It may look trivial, but it requires a bast amount of time and effort when you want to do it right.

Notice the "b" for a "v" there. What that tells me is that Alvaro almost certainly learned the word "vast" orally, rather than through writing, since his spelling is otherwise impeccable, and that, in spite of being literate in English, he is still hearing English with Spanish phonemes. Which is to say, he hears the voiced labiodental fricative ("v") as a voiced bilabial fricative (β), which he understands as the intervocalic allophone of the phoneme /b/.

Of course, one possible reading of this is to say that Alvaro appears to be a fully functional English speaker who has not internalized the English phonetic system... which suggests that the typical Spanish student who does not understand that, for example, the Spanish phoneme /d/ encompasses something very like our "d" as well as an allophone that is exactly like our phoneme /ð/, which we spell "th", may not be in such a bad situation.

Nonetheless, I think it does make a difference... a student who hears the phrase "de dónde eres" as "devonderes" is surely at a disadvantage (and that error is not that atypical in my experience, provided you provide students with actual examples of Spanish speech, and not with typical American-Non-Native-Speaker-Spanish-Teacher pronunciations.

Dialect and the VP Debate, taken up by a real expert

2008-10-04T14:00:00.001-07:00

Who better than linguistics-populizer Steven Pinker to take up my rambling thoughts after the VP debate in an articulate Op-Ed on the style and content of Palin's speech. He agrees that the "en" vs. "eng" is a conscious dial of informality, but clarifies that the accent is authentic (however much it annoys me).

VP Debate

2008-10-02T19:34:00.000-07:00

So I hadn't really seen much of Palin until tonight. My God, it felt surreal seeing her on stage with Biden. I also hadn't seen too much of Biden before, who was remarkably sharp. She seemed completely out of place.

I'm struck that I have no idea how affected Palin's speech was. The high frequency of "-in" (in place of "iŋ") for the "-ing" ending and the phrases like "you betcha" and "gosh darnit" are the obvious things about her speech, but she also has quite a strong noticeable accent.

Thinking about the "-in" vs. "-iŋ" distribution, I realize that there's an interesting intersection of accent and formality here -- in this case, (nearly) all speakers use both endings in informal speech and avoid "-in'" in formal speech. What this meant was that Palin's constant use of "-in'" seemed not just like her accent, but like a deliberate attempt to seem folksy, or, alternatively, like a failure to take the debate seriously.

This leaves me wondering about the rest of her accent — it also struck me as out of place in the debate. The question that leaves is, is that just prejudice against her accent, or am I right that her accent was not just non-standard but obnoxiously informal.

Regarding the content of the debate... I'm a bit shocked now to be watching the PBS talking heads suggesting that the debate was a wash... granted, expectations for Palin were low, but she looked rather incredibly outclassed, outsmarted, and outspoken to me.

How I relax...

2008-09-07T16:28:00.001-07:00

So if you know me, you know I've been working far too hard the last few weeks. On Friday, I got home and though I had a pile of work to do, I knew I couldn't do anything unless I let myself relax a bit first.

A bit of backstory — one thing I started doing this summer to relax was taking up guitar lessons again, which has been a good thing. One thing I've been working on is learning series of inversions. The thing I like about this exercise is that it allows me to generate a limitless number of new chords, which means I can now help myself get un-bored when I find myself in a guitar rut. Lately, for example, I've been taking some songs I wrote that have very simple progressions (just C and G basically) and playing with different inversions and voicings.

Anyway, I realized what I really wanted to do on Friday was to write a program to generate those series of inversions for me. Here's an example of how it works...

./inverter.py 3x043x
Printing inversions of  3x043x
--x--x--x-
--3--8-12-
--4--7-12-
--0--5--9-
--x--x--x-
--3--7-10-

In that case, there are three inversions generated because it's a three note chord. If I give it a chord with four notes, it will of course generate four inversions:

tom@hydrophax:~/Projects/chord_inverter$ ./inverter.py 3x443x
Printing inversions of  3x443x
--x--x--x--x-
--3--7--8-12-
--4--7-11-12-
--4--5--9-12-
--x--x--x--x-
--3--7-10-14-

I can also make it print out the notes so I can keep track of where the root is:

$ ./inverter.py --include-notes x3201x
Printing inversions of  x3201x
--x------x------x-----
--1-(C)--5-(E)--8-(G)-
--0-(G)--5-(C)--9-(E)-
--2-(E)--5-(G)-10-(C)-
--3-(C)--7-(E)-10-(G)-
--x------x------x-----

And of course it can move down as well as up:

$ ./inverter.py --down xxx988
Printing inversions of  xxx988
--8--3--0-
--8--5--1-
--9--5--0-
--x--x--x-
--x--x--x-
--x--x--x-

Finally, it handles alternate tunings -- here's the inversions of D in drop-D tuning for example (which, by the way, illustrate that not all inversions are pleasant to finger -- check out the second chord):

$ ./inverter.py --tuning DADGBE 0xx323
Printing inversions of  0xx323
--3--6--9-10-
--2--3--8-11-
--3--6--7-12-
--x--x--x--x-
--x--x--x--x-
--0--5--8-11-

This means it will work for any fretted instrument.

The next step would be to have it name the chords, but of course that's kind of complicated. One of the things that pops out of this sort of exercise are "oh duh" moments like when I generated this series based on Am7 and found that the 2nd chord was already fixed in my muscle memory:

--x--x--x--x-
--5--8-10-13-
--5--9-12-14-
--5--7-10-14-
--x--x--x--x-
--5--8-12-15-

It took me a second until I realized something I already knew: an Am7 has all the same notes as a C6, which is what I'm used to calling 8x798x...

The next step would be to cook up a web interface and make this into a handy tool for everyone. In the mean time, the full source code follows... (by the way, if anyone knows how to attach a generic file to a post or do the equivalent of an lj-clip on blogger, please let me know!)

#!/usr/bin/env python

import types
UP = 1
DOWN = -1
notes = ['C','Db','D','Eb','E','F','Gb','G','Ab','A','Bb','B']
synonyms = {'C#':'Db','D#':'Eb','F#':'Gb','G#':'Ab','A#':'Bb'}
x = None

def get_degree (note):
    '''Return the numeric degree of the note named note.
    '''
    return notes.index(synonyms.get(note,note))

def get_name (degree):
    '''Return the name of the note from the degree'''
    abs_degree = degree % 12
    return notes[abs_degree]

def add_to_note (note, steps):
    return get_name(get_degree(note)+steps)

def get_interval (a,b):
    """Return the interval in chromatic steps between two notes
    """
    a = get_degree(a)
    b = get_degree(b)
    if a > b:
        b += 12
    return b - a

def pad (txt, length, pad_char = '-'):
    if len(txt) > length:
        raise ValueError
    elif len(txt) == length:
        return txt
    else:
        pad_with = length - len(txt)
        left = pad_with / 2
        right = pad_with / 2 + pad_with % 2
        return pad_char*left + txt + pad_char*right
    
class String:

    def __init__ (self, root='A'):
        self.root = root
        self.nroot = get_degree(self.root)

    def get_note_for_fret (self, n):
        return get_name(self.get_degree_for_fret(n))

    def get_degree_for_fret (self, n):
        return self.nroot + n

    def get_next_fret_in_chord (self, start, chord, direction=UP):
        for n in chord:
            try:
                assert(n in notes or n in synonyms)
            except:
                raise ValueError('Chord contains invalid note %s'%n)
        if start is None: return start
        n = start + direction
        chord = [synonyms.get(note,note) for note in chord]
        while self.get_note_for_fret(n) not in chord:
            n += direction
        return n

def get_fingering (fingering):
    if type(fingering) in types.StringTypes:
        fingering_ltrs = fingering[:]; fingering = []
        for char in fingering_ltrs:
            if char in ('x','X'):
                fingering.append(x)
            else:
                fingering.append(int(char))
    return fingering

def fingering_to_txt (fingering):
    s = ''
    for f in fingering:
        if f is None: s += 'x'
        else: s += str(f)
        s += ' '
    return s[:-1]

class FretBoard:

    def __init__ (self, strings='EADGBE'):
        self.strings = [String(n) for n in strings]


    def fingering_to_chord (self, fingering):
        fingering = get_fingering(fingering)
        chord = []
        for fret,string in zip(fingering,self.strings):
            if fret is not None:
                chord.append(
                    string.get_note_for_fret(fret)
                    )
        return chord

    def invert_chord (self, fingering, direction=UP, chord=None):
        fingering = get_fingering(fingering)
        if not chord:
            chord = self.fingering_to_chord(fingering)
        next_fingering = []
        for fret,s in zip(fingering,self.strings):
            if fret is None:
                next_fingering.append(x)
            else:
                next_fingering.append(
                    s.get_next_fret_in_chord(fret,
                                             chord,
                                             direction)
                    )
        return next_fingering

    def get_inversions (self, fingering, direction=UP):
        chord = self.fingering_to_chord(fingering)
        n_fingerings = len(set(chord))
        fingerings = [get_fingering(fingering)]
        for n in range(n_fingerings - 1):
            fingering = self.invert_chord(fingering,
                                          direction,
                                          chord)
            fingerings.append(get_fingering(fingering))
        return fingerings

    def print_inversion_series (self, fingering,direction=UP,include_notes=False):
        fingerings = self.get_inversions(fingering,direction)
        lines = []
        for n,s in enumerate(self.strings):
            line = '-'
            for fing in fingerings:
                fret = fing[n]
                if fret is not None:
                    note = '(' + s.get_note_for_fret(int(fret)) + ')'
                    fret = str(fret)
                else:
                    note = ''; fret='x'
                if include_notes:
                    line += pad(fret,3) + pad(note,4)
                else:
                    line += pad(fret,3)
            lines.append(line)
        lines.reverse()
        for l in lines: print l
        
                
if __name__ == '__main__':

    # If called from the commandline, treat our argument as a chord
    # and print the series of inversions...
    import optparse

    parser = optparse.OptionParser(option_list=[
        optparse.make_option('--tuning',
                             action='store',
                             type='string',
                             dest='tuning',
                             default=None,
                             help='A custom tuning'),

        optparse.make_option('--down',dest='direction',default=UP,action='store_const',const=DOWN,help='Print the series of inversions moving up the neck (down in pitch). Default is to move down the neck (up in pitch'),
        
        optparse.make_option('--include-notes',default=False,const=True,action='store_const',dest='include_notes')
        ]
        )
    (options,args) = parser.parse_args()
    
    if False:
        1
    if options.tuning:
        fb = FretBoard(strings=options.tuning)
    else:
        fb = FretBoard()
    include_notes = options.include_notes
    direction = options.direction
    for a in args:
        try:
            print 'Printing inversions of ',a
            fb.print_inversion_series(a,
                                      include_notes=include_notes,
                                      direction=direction)
        except:
            import traceback; traceback.print_exception()

Someone else agrees with me: learning styles don't exist!

2008-08-28T20:14:00.001-07:00

So I've often said in an off-the-cuff way that I don't really believe in learning styles. More concretely, I've often said in my Spanish classes that I don't believe in visual language learners, because, well, language is auditory. I particularly hate diagrams like this, which are supposed to cater to visual language learners:

The reason I so hate that diagram is that it tries to use a visual clue to organize supposedly arbitrary information, disguising what is in fact a very simple auditory pattern (a pattern called dipthongization, which in fact exists in English as well as Spanish).

Anyway, today I noticed in a post on Tom Hoffman's blog that he linked to a video called Learning Styles Don't Exist. It's a little simplistic, but entertaining and, I think, right.

So, has anyone heard of this guy before? Is he right? Does anyone outside of the world of education take learning styles seriously? Is there any research to support them?

Or is the reason that the "different learning styles" line is so common in educational circles really that many teachers are (or are imagined to be) simply uncreative, and it's easier to tell them "cater to different learning styles" than to say, "be less boring", or "try out something new"?

Sysadmins are not programmers

2008-08-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

In my new life as a technology liason/sometimes sysadmin, I've had occasion to watch a Windows Systems Administrator at work, and to marvel at the ways in which the mind of such a person is not the same as the mind of a programmer. This is, to me, rather shocking: after all, the great thing about computers is that they're programmable, right? So someone who spends their lives working with computers... well, you'd expect them to know how to automate things.

I've always assumed that being a computer type means that you follow a very simple axiom: never repeat manually what could be done by a program for you.

In other words, automate the automatable, whenever possible, and, when it's not possible, whine like hell.

It turns out that our SysAdmin consultant does not think this way. Or perhaps it's simply that his definition of "possible" is extremely limited. At any rate, as a result of his ignorance in this matter, I've been reading up on scripting, trying to get myself the requisite literacy in Windows programming that, staggeringly, the Windows expert lacks. In this case, I have a very simple, very tedious task to do:

1. Collect a list of student users from our online student information database.
2. Create Active Directory accounts for those students that don't already have accounts.
3. Delete Active Directory student accounts for students not on our list.

This is the kind of task that any lover of computers should refuse to believe must be done by hand. (Note that I also had to create google-based e-mail accounts for these people — that was a no-brainer because google is not designed by idiots (there's a defined csv file and all I have to do is massage the data into that format and upload it).)

Lo and behold, after much fruitless searching, I have at long last found instructions for creating Active Directory accounts from information in a spreadsheet (or, if they were more sane, a csv file) (hopefully that link will help future googlers).

As I began to read those instructions, though, I was struck by the following strange prose, which so confused me, and so revealed the weirdness of the category of "System Administrator", that I had to stop reading and write this blog post. Here goes:

System administrators, or so we are often told, are the last of the rugged individualists. System administrators don't use mice and dropdown lists; they type their commands at the command line. System administrators don't bother with graphical user interfaces; they like their data displayed in the command window. System administrators don't pull up to the drive-through window at a fast-food restaurant, they actually get out of the car and... well, okay, even rugged individualists have to draw the line somewhere. The point is, you can run a script by starting it from the command prompt and passing it a bunch of command-line arguments; in addition, you can output data to the command window or to a text file. What more could you possibly need?

The truth is, there are lots of times you don't need anything else. On the other hand, sometimes—just sometimes, mind you—system administrators look at applications like Microsoft® Excel and think about how nice it would be to harness some of the capabilities Excel for their own use. Consider, for example, the need to create a bunch of new user accounts in Microsoft® Active Directory®. Could you do that by passing command-line parameters to a script? Sure, if you don't mind typing in command strings similar to this:

cscript new_user.vbs /cn="Myer Ken" /sAMAccountName="kenmyer" /givenName="Ken" /SN="Myer"

Okay, maybe that's not such a good idea. But couldn't you read in all the information from a text file? You bet you could. Of course, the text file would have to look something like this:

"CN","sAMAccountName","givenName","SN"
"Myer Ken","kenmyer","Ken","Myer"
"Jones TiAnna","TiAnnajones","TiAnna","Jones"
"Smith Ben","Bensmith","Ben","Smith"

That works, too, but good luck getting your HR department to supply you with a text file that looks like that. Can you use these techniques? If you want to. But think about how easy it would be for your HR department (or whoever) to type all this information in Excel; in fact, there's a good chance that's what they already do. Yes, Excel is a graphical utility, and, yes, you're a rugged individualist, but just this once, wouldn't it be nice to be able to take an Excel spreadsheet, run a script against it, and then use the information gleaned from the spreadsheet to create a whole bunch of user accounts, all in one fell swoop?

Okay, sure, not for you. But maybe you have a friend who isn't as rugged an individualist as you are. If so, tell your friend that he or she is in luck. This month we're going to tell you—um, we're going to tell them how to use a script to read data directly from an Excel spreadsheet, and then use that data to create a bunch of new user accounts in Active Directory. And then next month we'll show them how to go the opposite route: How to grab data out of Active Directory (or some other location) and display it in a nicely-formatted spreadsheet. And listen: If you decide to try these scripts, we promise not to tell your fellow system administrators. Promise

Ok, let's look at the crazy assumptions in the above:

The point of the commandline is that you can do things with lots of parameters, which shows you're knowledgable.
Actually, the point is that you can chain various commands together, and save useful combinations thereof in scripts. No one prefers typing long chains of obscure switches to pressing a few buttons; it's just that there's no way to program button-presses, so programmers prefer the commandline. It appears that sysadmins (as imagined by the above prose) try to imitate programmers by typing everything into a commandline, but don't actually understand it).
A CSV text file is scary
WTF? Is there any decent programming language that doesn't have simple libraries for handling CSV files?
An Excel file is different from a csv file
Again, WTF? Is there any person sufficiently computer literate to be reading this document who couldn't turn a given excel file into a csv file easily (Save As...)? And is there any HR department that could be trusted to get column headers etc. exactly right so you could run a script using their Excel file? Or is it actually true that all the crap excel adds to data to make the HR department happy (like formatting, for example) just gets in the way of the programmer, which is why you'd convert to CSV in the first place. I assume in this example we'll massage it into a predetermined format of Excel file instead, but if that's the case, there's really no difference between the Excel solution and the CSV solution.
Rugged individualists wouldn't run scripts against spreadsheets
Huh? I frankly can't imagine how any thinking person (and I assume these straw-man rugged individualists would style themselves thinking people) could possibly consider creating users doing anything other than running a script against something like a spreadsheet (assuming, that is, that one is copying a list of users from elsewhere, such as HR).

Of course the ultimate WTF is that this functionality isn't built into AD at a more basic level.
Anyway, I'll be reading the rest of the article soon. The odd thing about the article is that it seems to posit a commandline-using sysadmin in opposition to someone with a modicum of programming knowledge. And that, I must say, is very strange.

Pronunciation snobbery and Beijing

2008-08-16T19:19:00.000-07:00

The other day the radio, I heard an NPR reporter doing explicitly something that has always implicitly bothered me about NPR reporters. She was talking with their China correspondent and asked him how to pronounce "Beijing". He explained that it's actually (in Chinese) pronounced [beʤɪŋ] (with a "j" as in "juice") and not [bejʒɪŋ] (with a "j" as the "s" in "vision" or "treasure"). An article I found here at cnn.com goes so far as to make this hyperbolic claim:

Television networks should be setting a higher standard of pronunciation and fulfilling their role of informing and educating the viewing public," he said. "Mispronunciations are misinformation. The casual attitude of the networks towards this matter is, at best, negligent and, at worst, bordering on disrespect for China and the Chinese."

This is absurd of course. No one is recommending we actually try to reproduce the Chinese pronunciation of "Beijing", in which nearly every sound would be foreign to us (I believe it begins with an unvoiced non-aspirated bilabial -- not a voiced bilabial like we use) and in which we'd have to make sure we got the tones right. In no way does not speaking Chinese border on disrespect for the Chinese.

This is a more widespread phenomenon. I see it when the NPR folks try to spanishify their pronunciations of Latin American countries, (saying "chee - lay" instead of "chilly" for "Chile", for example). Have they forgotten that they're speaking English? It also reminds me of a habit of a certain acquaintance-who-will-go-unnamed who always strikes me as terribly pretentious in pronouncing all foreign words with faux-correctness, taking care to avoid flapping the "t" in words like "risotto", for example.

It strikes me that the NPR version of this has something to do with not wanting to offend people, or with the belief that Americans generally are woefully, shamefully ignorant. But isn't it obvious that all over the world people speak a handful of languages at best, and frequently just one or two (as we do), and that when they refer to other people's words, they follow the sound patterns of their own languages? I of course can pronounce Spanish place names just fine when I speak Spanish, but I find it awkward to try to pronounce them in Spanish when I'm speaking English -- that's why we warp pronunciations to fit our own sound patterns in the first place.

All of this rant is premised on my assumption the Beijing is always pronounced [bejʒɪŋ]. That does the beg question of whether I'm wrong and [bejʒɪŋ] and [beʤɪŋ] have existed as variants for some time. Is that the case? Has anyone ever heard the [beʤɪŋ] pronunciation used commonly? Is it common in Britain or other English-speaking countries? (note: pronunciations by Chinese speakers and hyper-self-conscious broadcasters don't count as common use).

Grrr... I hate closed source software

2008-08-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

So in my new life as a tech administrator, I've gotten to play with OS X server and client machines. It turns out that OSX includes more or less the equivalent of Norton Ghost for free — that's a good thing. Our school hadn't configured or used this functionality in the past — that's a bad thing. Enter me to save the day!

Anyway, long story short, our previous tech guy had upgraded our server to 10.5 in order to fix some now-forgotten-about bug (grrr #1: paying to get upgrades that are really bugfixes). So, long story short, after a long time today setting up an image and setting up the server to use it, I had a problem: for some reason Mac's System Image program wasn't seeing my source disk as a valid image. I couldn't figure out what was going on for the longest time, until finally on Mac's website I discovered it: with the 10.5 version of the System Image program, you can only create images of System 10.5 and later. Our client machines all have 10.4.x on them.

Grrrr.

It's funny what you end up taking for granted in the open source world I'd been living in. Here are the things that would normally be unimaginable:
#1. That I can't update without making a big expenditure (and in this case, it would not just be one new client license but many)
#2. That I can't downgrade if an updated piece of software isn't any good (i.e. I can't get or run the 10.4 System Image program on my 10.5 server).

To solve this, I'll have to downgrade everything to the 10.4 server and hope that whatever bug bugged our last tech guy won't affect our new environment.

It's also quite puzzling to me that the System Image software cares about what kind of volume it's installing. I'd think with the base infrastructure in place, you'd be able to distribute images of any kind -- Window, Linux, Mac, what have you. I can understand that their might be some value-added stuff the System Image software can do that's specific to the OS, but it seems strange that they couldn't support at least a base functionality for any old system disk.

Lazy web programmers (or are they just stupid?)

2008-08-09T05:37:00.000-07:00

I'm setting up some online auto-billing to save the pain-in-the-ass of stamps and checks here... this always gives me a chance to see some fine web programming on display. Here's an error message I just got that, unfortunately, is not at all uncommon:

Please enter 10 digits, leaving out characters such as "-" or "/".

My first response is: you lazy piece-of-crap programmer, how hard is it to strip out the character.

But then I realized something — the programmer isn't exactly lazy, they're stupid, because they took the time to write the code that generates the error message, but didn't take the time to just do what the user wants.

Here's some pythonic pseudo-code to illustrate:

To do it the right way

inputstring = get_idno_from_webform()
inputstring = inputstring.replace('-','').replace('/','')

To do it the wrong way...

inputstring = get_idno_from_webform()
def confirm_idno ()
    inputstring = get_string_from_webform()
    try:
        assert(inputstring.isalphanum())
    except:
        show_obnoxious_error_message()
        confirm_idno()
    else:
        do_the_right_thing()

Grrr... makes you wonder -- who hires these people and how much do they make?

(Note: I realize that even in the ideal code you'd need an error message for cases where the user typed something totally invalid, so maybe they're just lazy after all. Still, the error code that handles things like a user typing "!)(*@!$#KJ" should pretty much never run, whereas the code that handles dashes (which are printed on the bill as part of the number) is really much more important and will be called for more often than not.)

D.A.R.E. Update

2008-08-08T15:50:00.001-07:00

Today K was accosted by the same D.A.R.E. identity-card selling people in Arlington center that I wrote about a few weeks ago. In her case, they told her that next year ID cards would be required for children and cost a mere $65, making their price ($40) much more reasonable. They also helpfully suggested that if she didn't have cash she could give them a credit card number! So, it looks like this is an out and out scam and I should take back anything I implied about D.A.R.E. itself.

Except that the scam is based on an actual D.A.R.E. fundraiser, which, on second look, I was able to find on their website here. The description of the actual fundraiser is quite perplexing. Here are some choice quotes...

As part of the Child Safety I.D. Program representatives will offer D.A.R.E. Medical Emergency ID all-FREE of charge. During these events products including D.A.R.E. t-shirts, ID cards, DNA kits, safety videos and other child-oriented products, will be displayed and available for purchase...
...
This campaign is a great way to introduce and remind children about safety information. If children are made familiar with these techniques through reminders and role-playing with parents, they are less likely to find themselves in dangerous situations. We hope that no child or family ever has to use the emergency/medical D.A.R.E. ID card.

The above really doesn't get any better if you read the full context -- it's incoherent, at least to me. What, for example, is the referent of "these techniques"? In what sense are DNA kits child-oriented products? I still have no idea why I would be motivated to get this card, whether for free or (in the case of our local scam-artists) for $40 (although if they got my credit card number, I'm guessing it would come to much more than that...)

Tomatoes worth eating have finally arrived

2008-08-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

I just finished a few weeks vacation in the Adirondacks. I returned to Arlington just in time for the farmer's market. The difference between what the market was when I left and what it was today was staggering: summer came out while I was gone. Tonight's dinner absolutely blew my mind — it's amazing how every year I forget just how good peak flavors are. In true farm market fashion, the foods that came out the best tonight were those I did the least to. The heirloom tomatoes sliced and sprinkled with basil and salt were the kicker. I had intended to do something else with them, but after making my first cut into one and tasting it, I knew anything else would be a waste.

These were the first tomatoes I bought this year — I've been letting my nose be my guide above all else, and it hasn't disappointed; you have to wait for tomatoes with that knock-your-socks-off fragrance, but it really is worth it. It makes me wonder whether it's worth buying fresh tomatoes the rest of the year at all (if you can't have the good stuff, it seems better just to go with canned, which pack more flavor than off-season fresh tomatoes anyway).

The corn was also fabulous — so much so I didn't adulterate it at all, just grilled it in its husk and ate it straight. I don't know why I ever bother trying to eat corn before August.

Python debugging

2008-07-21T06:17:00.000-07:00

So I just discovered the awesomeness that is ipython -- specifically, the awesomeness that is the ipython embedded shell.

Ever wished you could just stop at a given point in your program and start poking around using the handy dandy python shell? Here's how.


# We clear the args because arguments to your program will confuse IPython
import sys
sys.argv = []
# And now we embed a shell...
from IPython.Shell import IPShellEmbed
ipshell = IPShellEmbed()
ipshell()

This even works from in the midst of a GUI (I use it in the midst of my gtk program).

For a lazy programmer like me, this is a godsend. Now rather than reading back through my code to find out what I need to do, I can plop the below code wherever I'm in the midst of working, then find myself landed in a shell where I can inspect my objects, variables, etc., figure out just what I need to add to my code, and give it a test run.

D.A.R.E., fear-mongering, and a question about identity fear

2008-07-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

So when I was in high school, it was a cliche to make fun of D.A.R.E. as a fear-mongering, ineffective program. I don't actually remember if I ever went through the D.A.R.E. program, so I can't comment on whether it was or was not effective or fear-mongering as a high school program, but I had an experience today where I was accosted by a D.A.R.E. representative on the street in my role as parent (I was with Grace), and I learned that our local D.A.R.E. folks were involved in a whole new kind of fear-mongering: working off of the fear of medical emergencies (and, oddly, identity theft).

What the D.A.R.E. representative tried to sell me on was not (as I would have guessed) donating to D.A.R.E. Instead, she wanted to sell me, for a mere forty dollars, an identity card for Grace that would include medical information about her and give permission to treat her in case of emergency. She showed me a sample card and explained that it was an "official" something-or-other. She then reassured me that the card wouldn't have Grace's full name on it, so if it fell into the wrong hands, I wouldn't have to worry.

This raised a number of questions for me. Some of them rhetorical, some genuine (actually, maybe they're all both rhetorical and genuine):

If a child were to show up in an emergency with a treatable, life-threatening condition and no guardian present, would they deny treatment? I somehow feel like they wouldn't (it's also hard for me to imagine just how Grace could end up in such a scenario, but I understand that in order to get into the proper D.A.R.E. mind-set I am to imagine the worst of all scenarios in the worst of all worlds...)
Is there in fact a subset of plastic-like-identity cards that are "official"? What makes them so?
Why would I be afraid of someone finding out my daughter's name? Aren't names public information? Is there anything scary that can happen to her with her name known that couldn't happen to her with her name unknown? (I've heard the name worry come up in a web context. A number of students have told me they're allowed to have facebooks/myspaces/etc., so long as they don't use their full name, or their last name, or what have you. I presume that the fear behind this is that someone will see their picture, decide to stalk them, and then, knowing their name, be able to track down their home address, etc. Are there other things about names that I should be afraid of that I don't know?)
Why is D.A.R.E. selling medical-alert-ish identity cards? (Note: I couldn't find anything about this on their website, nor could I find the cards -- is it possible the D.A.R.E. table in Arlington center was actually entirely a scam? seems unlikely...)

If anyone knows the answer to these questions, I'd be interested to hear them.

Fall from Grace

2008-07-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

I am trying to write more, and it also occurs to me that I'd like to be blogging more. I thought about setting up a content-specific blog -- but it's hard to anticipate what I'll be writing about, so I'm hoping that the "labels" feature of blogger will enable me to categorize things usefully, so that someone interested in the teaching side of this blog can avoid my sentimental musings on parenting and so on.

Speaking of sentimental, let me start off this blog from a journal entry I wrote earlier today. This week I'm on solo-parenting duty while K takes a class at UMass Boston. I've gotten into the routine of taking Grace out for a walk for her first morning nap -- usually I end up at our local Starbucks or one of its competitors and it gives me time to read or write in my journal. Here's an excerpt from this morning's journal:

Back at the same table -- again, Grace asleep on my chest. Yesterday on the radio I heard a stroke survivor describing her stroke as an enlightenment-like experience. Her left brain was choked off in the stroke, leaving her mind thoroughly in the present and giving her a feeling of connectedness and unity (what James called a mystical experience). I dabbled in just enough Buddhism in college to intuit, along with the survivor, that this was a kind of ground of experience or being, though I realize there's no good reason to think that connectedness is any more fundamental to our sense of being than any other part of our psyche (say, the list-making or anxiety-generating functions of the brain). Still, she described her experience as a kind of return to infancy, and that struck me suddenly, the way nearly anything to do with childhood strikes me since I became a father.
I have been struck often by the sheer joy I see in Grace -- it's hard not to think that that boundless, unrestrained joy is in fact a default setting for humanness, a ground of being, what we feel when nothing stands in the way. And for now, for Grace, the obstacles to joy are small and generally easy to overcome -- she is hungry or tired or uncomfortable. It's hard not to imagine growing up as a kind of fall from grace, to think of consciousness as an accumulation of obstacles that stand between self and unadulterated joy.
Yet sometimes it is that very fall that makes my heart move as I see Grace the person emerging. More and more she cries not from hunger but from more unique wants -- there is something out of reach and she can't get it, or, try as she might to crawl, she just pushes herself further and further away from her destination -- her backwards crawling so cute to us until a pout quivers onto her face and slowly but surely breaks into tears of frustration.
There is an easy spiritual metaphor in that. Her desire, Desire itself, pushing her away from Joy, which is, ultimately, what she desires.
(And now I notice a teenager in line, glossy lipped, her hair teased out model-like, a pout planted firmly on her lips -- how many desires and anxieties tell the story of her crossed arms, her polished and painted nails, her mini-skirt, the words across her t-shirt, her dramatic stance -- how adult she looks, how thoroughly sad)
But surely this line of thought, the Golden Age, the Fall, leads ultimately to a kind of misanthropy. It is hard not to want to protect Grace from this (now she is waking up as I write this), but isn't the real thing to celebrate every little piece of being human as she discovers it--every tear, every grasp and frustration and laugh -- and now I'm starting to cry just watching her wake up in Starbucks -- isn't that the thing, even here, to wake up, to bring a tear.

I told you that would be sentimental. It's what's been happening to me lately. I cry at everything. I am so happy.