Wednesday, December 16, 2015

I find myself in yet another rut (part 1)

In my 5+ year effort to solve the problem of sustainable, independent learning I find myself in yet another rut.  My path, starting as an English teacher in South Korea, took me through a masters of education degree in instructional design, a designer of a curriculum to sell cars in the Bay area, a private elementary school in the same area, and back as an English teacher, but this time in Japan.  During every one of these milestones I began with a desire to solve a particular problem and ended with losing hope - temporarily.  I have realized that this has been a repeating pattern throughout my life and by recounting it all here, I may be able to understand it better.   Here is my story thus far (there is a deeply moving message about education somewhere here, but I will leave it up to you, the reader, to figure it out).

Thursday, December 3, 2015

We Can't Say "Cat" Backwards.

Record yourself saying the word "Cat".

Even with the most state of the art sound engineering equipment manned by the most expert sound engineer, if you cut the word into its individual sounds "K" "A" "T" (its phonemes for the linguistically anal), place those sounds in reverse like so, "T" "A" "K", and play the sound clip, you will not hear the word "tack" (1Pinker, 1994).

So what?  How does this piece of information amount to anything more than a novel, Is that so? 

To understand we must first leave our adult, highly categorized brains.