Thursday, July 17, 2008

ESL (English as a Second Language) Tutors Needed

Somewhere, not far from where you are right now, is someone who needs you to be an ESL tutor.

Any speaker of native American English can do it.

Actually, most speakers of English can do this sort of work, whether they are a native speaker or not.

some of the English speakers with very heavy accents might want to disqualify themselves. If you speak American with an American accent it is good, since many people want to learn from an American.

I started doing this sort of thing just for friendship. The beginnings were rather serendipitous--I kept meeting more and more foreigners with mediocre spoken colloquial english. I could understand them, more or less, and agreed to meet them sometime so they could practice their English.

The exact techniques vary--sometimes i do diagnostic work, sometimes just talk. Sometimes I tape record the conversation and give it to the other person at the end of the hour.

Some people have a very good idea what they want help with, others have vague feelings of dis-satisfaction. They know they have trouble communicating what they want to say. Often they hear and understand others better than others seem to hear and understand them.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Libraries and anti-Libraries

Uberto Eco discusses the insitution of the anti-library. This is a personal library. It contains (for the most part) books that one might read sometime, but probably hasn't read just yet.

The more one knows, the more subjects or topical foci are likely to be included in the anti-library. Someone who doesn't know how to read, or doesn't like to read, or doesn't have any interest in books, is unlikely to develop a large anti-library.

In addition, the anti-library presumes a certain standard of living. A subsistence farmer with a hoe, a matchet, a sleeping mat, an iron cooking pot, and two sets of clothes (one for worship and holidays) is unlikely to develop much of a library, let alone an anti-library.

In some sense personal knowledge might grow linearly, while potential topics for the anti-library grow exponentially.

Most of my knowledge of the concept is second hand, as developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb toward the very beginning of his book _the black swan_. But he credits Eco with the idea. Eco discusses the phenomenon very briefly (the read, unread, maybe-partly-read books littering the dwelling) in "how to justify a personal library," in his book _how to travel with a salmon_.

This is a great and grand topic for me because I have lots of books and am purging many of them in the next couple weeks.

Craig Scrivner (DS84) described the desire to hang onto one's old textbooks, other assigned books, favorite novels, etc. as "book cling."

This month I am waging a successful battle against book cling. Check this blog for further developments.