Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005 - 4:56 p.m.

My first class is very blah. I think the room has bad Fung Shui (however the hell you spell it) for the learning of linguistics. Or perhaps of anything. (It is a long thin room with one long thin table and one long chalkboard on one wall. Half of the students have to sit with their back to me if I'm using the board, and I always end up standing at one end of it like I'm teh chairman or something, because there isn't any other way to have all of them more or less facing me.) They sit there all morose and don't make eye contact with me, and don't ask questions much. They just look depressed that they're being asked to learn something.

I mentioned to the prof (not the annoying one) that I thought the distinctive features are too much for them to learn in such a short period of time, and lo and behold he changed the plan for the semester to try it out my way. This is the result one likes.

Thus I have in effect reduced the amount of stuff they have to know by a significant amount (it will feel like half to them, although there is so much redundancy between the two systems it is really more like 1/4-1/3. But they never notice that or catch on to how if you know the one system well it's only a few adjustments to get you to the new system, so call it by half). So yes, I have reduced the amount of memorizing and fretting over terminology they have to do by HALF, and that bitchy class is still like, "How are we supposed to learn all this?".

I should have pointed out how much work I saved them. Maybe I will next time. And then tell tham I don't want to hear any fuss about it any more.

Like, if they can't just absorb it all during lecture and get an A by briefly skimming their notes in the five minutes before class begins, then it's too much work. Lazy! Bastards!

Okay, I'm done. For now.

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