English as a Second Language Teacher

Here is an article which I didn't publish, which I wrote in 2006 when was teaching advanced ESL to "newcomers" to Canada.

Usually at my local supermarket, I read the price off the cashier and repeat it out loud to make sure I’ve got it right. Almost every time, when an "English as a Second Language (ESL)" employee is at the booth, the price is almost always pronounced (or even read) wrong.

Me: Two dollars twenty eight?
Cashier: Two dollars twenty two.
Me: Twenty three?
Cashier:Twenty two.

And I have to strain my neck to verify for myself what if what I heard and what I see correspond. Usually, I have to strain my ears too, since as well as the indecipherable accent, I get such a low pitched response, with face partially turned away, that even hearing the correct figure is difficult.

Now, I’ve been an ESL teacher for a number of years. I’ve also worked alongside immigrants, as what was termed an “education counselor” mostly trying to familiarize them with the Canadian education system, both high school and post-secondary. And I think I understand where this lackadaisical approach to the English language comes from.

While I was teaching advanced ESL to “professional” Chinese, who were supposed to have at least a high level of writing and reading abilities in the English language, I quickly realized that one of the obsessions, if it may be called such, by the Chinese students was to learn as much as possible about the “Canadian culture” from the English classes. Therefore, our classrooms became mini cultural centers, where we enacted Canadian holidays on a regular basis. We had movie and popcorn days. We visited nearby farms to pick apples in the fall and strawberries in the summer, and to cull maple syrup in the spring. There was one teacher who would bring her whole family as examples for some her classes. That, to me, was approaching libel.

What surprised me, and I don't doubt part of the problem was time and perhaps money, was that few of these students took the time out for themselves to frequent and experience this Canadian culture.

These many years later, I doubt this approach to teaching ESL has changed much, and that Chinese and other "new comers" have changed their approach to learning about Canada.

Grammar and Civilization

“The decline and fall of a civilization is barely noticed by most of its citizens." Captain James Cook

After I posted my article early this morning: Moving Forward in Multi-Culti Mississauga where I write: "Fascinating, the language of the modern liberal era" I found the article How Can Studying Grammar Save Our Culture? at The Imaginative Conservative.

I've posted the full article How Can Studying Grammar Save Our Culture? below:

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How Can Studying Grammar Save Our Culture?
By Thaddeus Kozinski

There is tremendous need for conscious and vigorous action to shape and reshape our behavior in accordance with virtue, the common good, and God’s Law. What could studying grammar have to do with saving our culture..?

In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell sounds an almost despairing note:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it…. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

In his 2016 essay, “Exercises in Unreality,” Anthony Esolen echoes Orwell:

The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is…. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.

Certainly between 1946 and 2016, the English language has suffered, and most college students do not know even basic grammar. But is it true that “we cannot by conscious action do anything about it?” Or is language truly “an instrument which we shape for our own purposes?”

Wyoming Catholic College has been consciously acting to shape our rapidly degenerating discourse for almost a decade now by a sequence of courses called the Trivium, Latin for the “three ways” of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In the words of the great trivium Master, Sister Miriam Joseph: “Grammar prescribes how to combine words so as to form sentences correctly. Logic prescribes how to combine concepts into judgments and judgments into syllogisms and chains of reasoning so as to achieve truth. Rhetoric prescribes how to combine sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into a whole composition having unity, coherence, and the desired emphasis, as well as clarity, force, and beauty.”

We have heard much about the moral, political, and spiritual corruption of American culture, and certainly there is tremendous need for conscious and vigorous action to shape and reshape our behavior in accordance with virtue, the common good, and God’s Law. What could studying grammar have to do with saving our culture? Well, we are told in John’s Gospel that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Does this passage indicate an intimate connection between language and God, and thus between our words and our spiritual health? As Orwell argued at the end of World War II, the ubiquitous corruption of language in the West was not simply an effect of moral and political corruption, but was, in a profound sense, a cause of it.

In the twelfth century, John of Salisbury wrote that “Those to whom the Trivium has disclosed the significance of all words…do not need the help of a teacher in order to understand the meaning of books and to find the solutions to questions.” What is this “significance”? Literally, words are signs of reality. But perhaps what Salisbury means to convey is that things themselves, though quite real, are also, and ultimately, multiple signs of Reality. For, is not the created universe an imitation of the uncreated Divine Simplicity of the Father in and through the Son, the eternal Word, the Logos?

Why does Salisbury claim that graduates of the trivium no longer need a human teacher? Of course, humility dictates always sitting at the feet of the wise, but perhaps the profound grasp of and adept use of words that a trivium education provides will enable one to complete anything essential to one’s learning on his own, remaining, of course, until death and after, at the feet of the Incarnate Word.

In our day, when Great Books lie unopened and clicking through ephemera on screens is all but compulsory, when heartfelt questions about existence, God, and the meaning of life are supplanted by the banal curiosities of celebrity romance, money-making schemes, and therapeutic elixirs, we desperately need leaders with a command of logos, who think clearly, rigorously, and creatively, and who write and speak forcefully and elegantly. A Wyoming Catholic College trivium education results in apprentices of the teacher, the Logos, who alone has the words of everlasting life, full of spirit and truth.

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Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College’s Weekly Bulletin (September 2016).

Moving Forward in Multi-Culti Mississauga

I received an email recently with the phrase "moving forward" in the concluding paragraph.

It is a variation on "going forward" which I have never really understood. Moving forward/going forward toward what? With what? An agreement? A dissolution (of a partnership or a relationship)? Is it good this going forward? Is it a bad thing? Who is doing the forward moving, the one who declares it or the one who receives the invitation? It sounds less of an invitation and more like a threat. What if the invitee doesn't want to move forward in the same direction, or at all?

Fascinating, the language of the modern liberal era.

In any case, it is some kind of jargon which now crops up in all kinds of places and with a faint aura of a threat behind it: "Moving forward, or else." (I typed "ora" in my online dictionary as in oratory, spoken word etc. but no results. I then simply googled "ora" and found this!)

Besides the initial humor (incredulity is a better word) at least that I found with the whole thing - the cops were involved as the email sent to me was cc'd to the Mississauga Square One Security Office, which is linked to the Peel Regional Police - I realized that this is all dead serious. There is a war that has been waged, and the sooner we on the "other side" acknowledge this, the better.)

Here is someone who feels the say way I do about this "inane" phrase:

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Going forward, let's consign this inane phrase to history
By: Mark Seacombe

Superfluous, meaningless but ubiquitous, it arrived from corporate America and now permeates every area of our lives


Barack Obama does it, David Cameron does it; film stars and advertising people do it; even national newspaper editors do it. But let's not do it. Going forward, let's not utter or write the superfluous, meaningless, ubiquitous "going forward".

It is impossible to get through a meeting today without being verbally assaulted by this inanity. And it nearly always is verbal; you have to be truly unthinking to commit it to paper. When I hear those two words it is my signal to switch off and think about something more interesting, such as Preston North End's prospects going forward. See how easy it is to lapse into this vacuousness.

It is sometimes deployed as an add-on – a kind of burp – at the end of a sentence; sometimes, as with "like" or "you know", it seems to serve as punctuation. But it is especially infuriating when used with the word plan. I heard somebody say a few days ago: "Going forward, the plan is … " How can a plan be about anything but the future? Planning the past would be a remarkable facility.

Why do people speak like this? The online Urban Dictionary offers two possible explanations: the first defines "going forward" as "a phrase that business people use to mean someone completely [messed up] big time but we don't want to dwell on whose fault it was; instead can we all just adopt an optimistic outlook and please can we all start thinking about the future, not the shithole of a present that we're in?"

The other, less scatalogical definition is: "Going forward is purported to mean 'in the future' or 'somewhere down the road' when in fact it is an attempt to dodge the use of these words, which generally indicate 'I don't know'. A newer development in corporate doublespeak, in most companies it is grounds for dismissal to release a press release without mentioning something 'going forward'. Going forward, you will likely see this turning up everywhere: 'Our company expects to make a profit going forward'; 'We don't expect any layoffs going forward'."

I blame the businessmen and women of America – still the undisputed world leader in abusing the English language. It is difficult to pinpoint the birth of "going forward". But my former colleague at the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway, has accused the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Given the mess that American capitalism is in, we should not be surprised to learn that the body that regulates the nation's stock exchanges, among other things, specialises in obfuscation. Kellaway has fought a valiant but ultimately doomed campaign against "going forward".

Another attempt was made by a British website, the Institution of Silly and Meaningless Sayings (isms), which kept a "going-forward-ometer" until the people running it gave up, exasperated, nine months later, after recording hundreds of instances.

It cites nonsenses such as: "He's coming back to help going forward"; "We cannot back down, going forward"; "Problems for England's backs, going forward"; "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, going forward." The last one was a joke, of course: Abraham Lincoln would never have perpetrated such a solecism.

While it may have started in corporate America, "going forward" has now penetrated every area of British life. It even came from the mouth of the multilingual Emily Maitlis on Newsnight the other evening. Comically, her interviewee shot back with a "going forward".

You would think that Formula 1 was an organisation that, self-evidently, did not need to underline the direction in which it was moving. But when F1 in the US appointed Steve Sexton as president it announced: "He will be a tremendous asset to our operation going forward."

I want to know, guys, about your races going backwards.

Coffee With a Sprinkle of Jihad

Texting With the Syntax of a Jihadi

I was in Starbucks where I managed to find a seat in the corner. It was quite a nice seat considering seating is hard to come by in Starbucks. I started to read from my tablet, and found this article on the Jihadi John.

I then noticed that the guy next to me looked like he could be a Jihadi John.

I started to test him on his accent and comprehension level (if he even understood what I was saying).

Turns out guilty on both counts (accent and comprehension level).

Me: You've got yourself a nice place here.

Guy: (Looks up with a half smile, looking intimidated.)

Me: You have a pretty nice spot.

Guy: I donent no.

I just sat down and momentarily watched him push his fingers around frantically on his phone. I couldn't make out the language, but it looked like the Latin alphabet (not Arabic, although I wonder how one would text in Arabic on a Latin keyboard?)

Me: Is that the new iPhone?

Guy: i-ye-Phoneee?

Still no comprehension. His "i-ye-Phonee" sounded Hispanic.

Me: You don't speak English?

Guy: Englishi?

Me: Where are you from?

Guy: Colombia.

I returned to my tablet, and continued to drink my coffee.

He was glancing back and forth at me (I guess he thought he could chat me up or something, and wasn't astute enough to realize that I wasn't asking him pleasantries):
"Where do you work?"
"Near Walmart, like this..."
"Ah, McDonalds."
"Where is your family?"
"In Montreal and here."

All this with ample sign language and repeated words. I speak good enough Spanish, but I wasn't about to make things easy for him.

Such is the state of our Multi-Culti land.

And I still don't trust him.

What is to stop him from joining Arab Muslims, whom he greatly resembles, to find himself a welcoming community in this land of those evil, racist whites?
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Translations of the Pslam 42: Like As the Hart

The Wilton Diptych: Exterior [showing the white deer]
Painted in England or northern France
Around the time of Richard's second marriage in 1396

The Wilton Diptych in the National Gallery takes its name from Wilton House, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, where it was housed between 1705 and 1929. The name of the artist and the place where it was made are unknown. It has been suggested that the painter came from Italy or Bohemia, but it is probable that the diptych was made on behalf of Richard II himself and that it was painted in England or northern France around the time of Richard's second marriage in 1396. Surviving panel paintings from northern Europe dating from the late fourteenth century are very rare.

[...]

On the other panel is a white hart, Richard II's badge. Around its neck is a crown with a chain attached. The antlers stand out from the gold ground through the effect of light and shadow created in pointillé. The hart lies in a grassy meadow strewn with flowers and mingled with rosemary thought to be in remembrance of Richard's first wife, Anne of Bohemia. The green pigment has discoloured with age.
[Source: Richard II's Treasure]

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In my post: Like as the Hart and a Cacophony of Cicadas, I posted Psalm 42 where the phrase "Like as the hart" (or more precisely in the King James version "As the hart") occurs. Howell, who wrote the psalm to choral music, and whose version the Choir of St. Paul's Cathedral performs, uses Like as the Hart for his composition:

The blogger A Clerk at Oxford analyzes various translations of the psalm. It is worth spending the time reading his analyses, albeit a little difficult at times.

Here is his post: Psalm Translations: Like as the hart
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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