Hidden highs

There are very few aspects of teaching that I don't enjoy. One of the ones I do enjoy immensely is just pronouncing words, preferrably multistress words, to model them for students: anXIety, eVENT, COMF'table. In my line of work, you can say them once, repeat them with exaggeration and drama. A single bugbear word can be several minutes of a lesson, first of all modelling the pronunciation with specific directions for tongue, tooth and lip locations; once mastering it, the student should next practice it in the context of a sentence, because producing a sentence takes some attention away from pronunciation - and pronunciation in real life has to be done with a lot of competing thoughts; and then they need to be monitoring themselves in speech to be aware if their accuracy has slipped. All of this entails a lot of repetition.

One of the recurring mysteries is how certain words can be so hard to say for some. ACcess, for one, is bothering one of my highly able students. He can say each syllable well, but together he either says: AXis or exCESS. When he stresses the first syllable, the vowel on the second automatically reduces; when he makes sure he says the correct vowel on the second, he instinctively stresses the second syllable, reducing the first. It does his mind in while I just get my kick from saying: ACcess, ACcess, ACcess.

There is also the mystery, constantly posed by another student, of how he is pronouncing what he is pronouncing. A common word like "that", he somehow mixes the "th" with "l" producing both sounds simultaneously. Usually mispronounced phonemes (sound units) are somewhere on a continuum of sound, like ten and -tain (from "maintain"). But there is virtually no continuum of sound between "th" and "l". I cannot replicate the sound (I may have once, but have no idea how I did it), yet he does it naturally when not monitoring the exact position of his tongue.

Of course, it's not always my students' pronunciation that can cause wonder; my own baffles me and others too. As stated in a blog sometime ago, my exuberant reading of difficult books in my youth caused me to create my own pronunciations for words I rarely heard. While teaching a few weeks back in the home of a friend, I defined a word my student, his wife, found: "AWry, that's when things don't go according to plan." The friend emerged from the kitchen cocking his head to one side to see this unfamilar word, before saying: aWRY. So much for the clouds of wonder that make an "infallible" teacher. "whilst" has also been mispronounced in a lesson by me.

Yesterday I borrowed a book I thought I must read: 100 words that everyone mispronounces. Here are the ones I have discovered that I fail at: niche, gnocchi, concupiscence, desultory, cadre, cache, lingerie, harass. (Of course, many of these have several "accepted" pronunciations which have to be considered correct.) While reading it though, I found one of my youthful pronunciations was in fact correct: BANal can have a first syllable stress!

(I discovered a lode of draft blogs which once saved were long forgotten. These I will finish and publish)

Education quote (from 2004) - The nature of humanity and state of society

The purpose of education is always an interesting philosophical debate.

This quote is taken from a book The Liberal Tide: From Tyranny to Liberty (edited by Jim Peron), the article itself coming from a person called Frank Chodorov

"In one way or another, this idea [social collectivism] has insinuated itself into almost every branch of thought and has become institutionalised. Perhaps the most glaring example is the modern orientation of the philosopy of education. Many of the professionals in this field frankly assert that the primary purpose of education is not to develop the indivdual's capacity for learning, as was held in the past but to prepare him for a fruitful and "happy" place in society; his inclinations must be turned away from himself, so that he can adjust himself to the mores of his age group and beyond that to the social milieu in which he will live out his life. He is not at end in himself."

(beginning of 2007 edit)

This was written by a libertarian author whose individualistic nature is quite easy to spot. A libertarian would object to all forms of collectivism in society and it is through that prism that he analyses phenomena. Is his observation valuable?

The human species tends towards gregarious behaviour and collectivism. This is not to say that every person is sociable but that people generally like having friends and being a part of groupings, and thus gain a sense of belonging and identity. Individualism itself is usually an extreme exception in human societies of the past. Naturally, these days apparent individualism is more common but I would say that it is individualism that has insinuated itself into education and politics. That is not to say that it is an aversive thing - but it does highlight an interesting trend.

On a TV show Exposed (hosted by John Marsden), a suggestion was made that human nature had evolved to cope well in groups no greater than 500 individuals. Over that, people start to not be able to recognise or know the members of their community and start closing off. The point was that urban life exposes us to numbers much greater than that 500. I'd say that this forces the individualisation. Adjusting education to enable individualism may be an important trait for 20th and 21st century education due to the environment we live, but this has to balanced by an acknowledgement of the collectivistic needs of people. Classes should have contact with the world beyond the world of their classes. How would someone learn social responsibility if one has to focus on their own goals? You can threaten people with punishment to cause them to be responsible in their pursuit of goals, but there is not a greater method than cherishing the society in which you exist and having no desire to harm it on the way to your own personal goals.

The fear of the libertarian is that the personal goals and needs will be completely subverted by the asserted needs of the society. There is are existing examples of this but it is one location on a spectrum. But a completely individualistic society is not necessarily a better society in which to exist either.It is hard to say where our (admittedly pluralistic) society is on this spectrum but I'd say that a more collectivistic education system would be beneficial to help glue together the diversity of the society.

(I wonder what I was going to say back in 2004)