The one-sentence lesson

[robinturner]

I did what I was thinking about in my last post, and taught a whole lesson based on one sentence from Rousseau ("Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"). To my surprise and relief, it went rather well. We did the gender thing, the absolute adjective/adverbial thing, metaphor and how active/passive verbs affect our worldview. In Turkish "to be born" is an active verb (doğmak) and we had fun speculating beyond the data about whether the fact that in English (and, I assume, other Indo-European languages) being born reflects the idea that we are hurled unwillingly into this world, with references to Augustine and Aquinas, whom we covered last semester, and Rumi, who was Turkish (sort of) but wrote in Persian: "Whoever brought me here must take me home".

The on word I didn't cover was "is". I said, "I'd like to talk about "is", but if I get going on the verb "to be", you'll be here for another two hours."

Comments

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

It was once my first day teaching adult literacy and I was handed a list of very simple words and told to "go over" them with my students. Frankly, I didn't know what the hell he meant by that. When I think "go over" I think "comprehend". So I ended up lecturing for three hours on transitive/intransitive, abstract, etc, etc, etc....

And today a girlfriend and I were walking and joking about fighting w/our mothers and then buying them gifts even though we're still angry. I proposed that we were trying to buy our way back into their wombs.