ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Academic category.

Side Effects of Syntax

There is a long and heavy sigh that now usually accompanies the end of another painful attempt in class to win her heart. Every other fallout from that – including sleeplessness, irritability and crankiness, and an inability to update blog as necessary shall be called the sytax syndrome. Who would have thought that I would find a formidable opponent in her after more than seven years of a painless mutual separation. A mutant demon just slightly different from the X-bar and Transformational Generative Grammar models of that undergraduate life has now returned in my American class, and the result is not pretty. Add that to the annoying schedule of activities that lap up all the waking moments of my week, and you have a little glimpse into the direction of my life at the moment. Underneath all sentences and utterances of English (and every other language of the world, in fact) lies this very benign-looking but really mischievous virus. It looks like network of trees and sticks from a microorganism when looked at under a lens. Unfortunately, everything else in the appraisal and understanding of language derives from its bosom, and there is no escape.

What I’ve been doing then in an attempt to strike back is a diligent and thorough approach to its challenge. It involves sleeplessness and excessive eating, denial, and plenty tree diagram exercises among others. It is not proving to be an easy one, especially because of the pressure from two other equally demanding classes on pedagogy and teaching assessment. Whoever said the life of a graduate student is easy hasn’t been studying linguistics. And whomever said there’s no “i” in team hasn’t been studying phonetics either. In this curious battle between the tormented mind of a young linguist and the gigantic demon that is syntax and its ramifications, the “i” in team, just like its phonetic equivalent, is a long and lonely one, sandwiched between two formidable consonants. Meanwhile, here is (more than) a week long break for eating, travelling, fun and merrying in my hands that is about to yet again be intruded upon by syntax and generative grammar. What to do? What to do? If I can just admit to myself that much of my present resentment comes from a reluctance to now engage this familiar adversary on its own terms, maybe I’d actually do better. Or maybe not.

At least if I lose my mind now, I’d know who is to blame. Right now, all I see are trees branching in different directions, upside down with thin black branches. Hello sytax. We meet again. How can we engage so that we part on good terms this time, and for good?

(Image from http://www.elloandfriends.uni-osnabrueck.de/wikis/1/show?n=syntax.syntax)

Side Effects of Syntax was published on November 20th, 2010, with the tags , , , , under the Academic, Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Protected: Saving the Words

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Protected: Saving the Words was published on November 14th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, adventures, Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently Enter your password to view comments. on this article so far.

Pondering Education

On returning from my weekly work in St. Louis, I’m pondering the importance of education and the state it is today worldwide (and especially in the US since I can only speak from the sneak peek perspectives that I have from being a teacher as well as a student at different times so far.) No doubt – as Clarissa comments in one of her recent posts – higher education in the US is (one of) the best in the world today. The reason why this is so is not just because of facilities, but because of some safeguards put in place to ensure independence of thought, and the freedom to pursue new challenges. It is terrifying to think of how easily it can collapse if allowed to become subject to the whims and prejudice of politics. Just last week, I followed the very many of people in the academics who had their hearts in their mouths while waiting for the result of the gubernatorial election because of the prospects of what would happen if a certain candidate wins. He had promised to cut funding to Universities in order to fulfil his party’s agitation for “small governments.”

The No Child Left Behind Act passed under the Bush administration is notorious today because of how it subjects the prospect of learning to a set of blanket rules that doesn’t take into consideration a lot of testing biases, and variations in language aptitude and proficiency in child learners. It also subjects funding of schools to fulfilling a set of rules arbitrarily set by Government without regard for procedures or tested and trusted research results on child education. I’ve been reading a lot about the act and its effect on early childhood and high school education in the US, and it brings tears to eyes to see that had the changes in the Senate had been as drastic as it had been in the House of Representatives last week, by now, we would have returned to the same old process of returning schools to that retrogressive path. For now, higher education has been (only largely) immune from the influence of federal politics, but for how long will that remain? Till the next election?

The US federal budget for defense is more than twice the total annual budget of some other countries in the world – and for good reason, some might say. It’s not my place to knock the country’s defense or military agenda. Yet, thinking about it, one wonders if it is not always infinitely better to educate the mind of citizens than spend an even larger cost putting them and the country in harm’s way sometimes for totally non-justifiable reasons. The program on NPR today on my way to St. Louis focuses on the increasing number of US soldiers that have committed suicide since the occupations in the Middle East began. The number increases everyday, and the country spends more and more seeking psychologists and psychiatrists to take care of the resulting effects of the combat fatigues that fuel those horrible, preventable deaths.

I do hope that education grows someday to become a bigger priority for government spending, but I won’t cross my fingers yet. I live in a country of sometimes contrasting values, possibilities and characteristics.

Pondering Education was published on November 8th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

Launching Festschrift Honoring Rudolph G. Wilson

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Acquaintances of Rudy Wilson (Papa Rudy):

Kindly consider this note your official invitation to the launching of a book in Honor of Rudy Wilson on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 12 Noon at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE).

Since his retirement from SIUE as Assistant Provost for Cultural and Social Diversity and a professor in School of Education, a group comprising of friends and mentees of Rudy Wilson has put together a short festschrift titled, Multiculturalism in the Age of the Mosaic: Essays in Honor of Rudolph G. Wilson. The book, edited by Dr. Michael O. Afolayan, Assistant Director for Academic Affairs, Illinois Board of Higher Education, with a foreword by Dr. Venessa Brown, Assistant Provost for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Social Work at SIUE, came out in September.

This important one-hour event will take place at the Morris University Center (Hickory/Hackberry Room). There will be short readings from the chapter on “Reflections” written by friends and colleagues of Rudy, brief statements from invited guests, and a response from Rudy Wilson.

Please mark your calendar, and be there to honor this “Man of the People!”

Launching Festschrift Honoring Rudolph G. Wilson was published on November 3rd, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Academic category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

It is Written

Maybe I should have started the report on my crazy religious weekend from the mosque visit. After all, we went there first. Now, that particular post coming at the end of a long and beautiful description of the other places I went to on the same day, I feel like an angry blogger – something I’ve tried to consciously avoid. Life is too short to spend being angry all the time. Not when there is so much beauty around to satisfy even the most ordinary life. So there, I’m done with complaining for the next couple of weeks. Again, religion is a testy topic, and I’ve been warned to steer clear of its contentious parts. I’ve not taken well to that piece of advice. Sorry mum.

And so a new week begins, hopefully on a positive note. I thank you for voting in the poll on the right side. I’ve been too lazy to blog about it. I have a few academic papers to put in during this week so I don’t hope to blog much as it goes by (but we all know how well I stick to that promise). There may be other things I forgot to put in the poll, but if you have any ideas, feel free to include them under “others.”

In any case, here’s just a quick note to say that I’m still breathing. I bought two lovely postcards from the Cathedral Basilica and I’m willing to send it by post to whomever expresses interest. One shows the building from the inside, the other from the outside. Cost: $1. No tax.

This reminds me. I still owe some people postcards I promised to send. Sigh. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ll try to send them all off this week. What can I say, I’ve been a combination of busy and lazy. Welcome to the crazy life of a student, worker and blogger in America.

(In the photo: A group of students listening to the Kenyan Ambassador to the United States Mr. Elkanah Odembo on his visit to campus last week. I was there to impress him with my smattering of Swahili, his native language.)

It is Written was published on October 18th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Academic, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.