Do real people actually use Windows Server?

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...

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...

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

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?

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!

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

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).