I was talking about minimal pairs in class last week (among other subjects), because the ability to form contrastive syllables is central to the ability to productively form a wide enough range of distinct words to be useful. And inevitably, this course is turning into an ethnographic examination of Arthur's speech patterns, so I mentioned his beer store / bear store confusion from a couple of weeks ago. But I have a couple of great examples from the past 24 hours that I will have to share with the class:

1) Yesterday, he was very active, and at one point was taking a running start at me and then crashing into my groin, saying "ka-BLAM!" as he did so. After about the third or fourth brutal groining (I think I was just groaning ...), curtana said to him, "Arthur! Stop that! It's not nice to kablam people!" So, of course, like any good toddler, he obeyed, and the next time he came running at me he said, "ka-BLOOM!"

2) Just now, he was playing with an empty box on the floor, and was heard to remark repeatedly "...20th-century Fox ... 20th-century box ...". I said, "Is that a 20th century box?" and he said, "Nahhhhhh ... that's Bach" and indeed it was, since the first segment of Fantasia, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, was playing on the DVD player.

Tags: arthur, language, teaching

I had been meaning to watch Randy Pausch's 'Last Lecture' since his death hit all the major news outlets last month. Never got around to it until today, since the lack of human contact is getting to me and I find that I need to see human faces, even if only on a screen. Ahhh ... yeah, I probably should not have picked today to watch it; probably I subconsciously knew what I was doing when I put it on, even though I was only reminded of it through randomly browsing.

The most powerful part is not that this guy was dying (now sadly deceased); I honestly don't think that it would have been significantly less powerful (for me at least) if he had been in perfect health. But the ability to see all the ties he had formed with his mentors and students, and how those ties of friendship and reciprocal trust lasted decades beyond those initial interactions, well, that is the sort of thing that I can only aspire to.

If you haven't watched it, but have ever been influenced by an educator (or hope to be an influence on others), please watch it in its entirety.

Tags: teaching
Current Mood: numb

At long last I have uploaded the research reports onto the Stop: Toutes Directions site. I initiated this project in the winter term in my Methods course, during which I and 27 senior students spread out throughout a large portion of Montreal collecting data on stop signs, focusing particularly but not exclusively on the language of the sign text. For me, one of the fascinating things about Montreal, visually, is the diversity you see in signs in different regions; Montreal's stop signs are in many ways a microcosm of language politics in the city and more generally in the province of Quebec. This is particularly significant given the changes in Quebec's language laws and attitudes towards signs in different languages over the past thirty years. The sixteen reports on the site (plus three or four more that await further revisions from students) are really superlative work, and reflect countless hours of effort in class and beyond. I think we all came to despise the project just a little bit while it was ongoing, but I hope the finished product is worth it.

In addition to the reports, the site has a Google Map on the home page, with placemarks to points of interest on the Montreal 'signscape'. We have also published the entirety of our dataset, although I have little expectation that these will be of immediate use to anyone. If you have any interest in language ideology, material culture studies, contemporary archaeology, urban geography, Montreal, bilingualism, or related topics, I'm sure you'll find exploring the site to be rewarding. Still to come is my editorial introduction to the website, but that's not really necessary to appreciate the site. Eventually my hope is to turn some of these reports, along with some additional material written by me, into an edited academic volume; stay tuned for more on that front!

Tags: anthropology, language, teaching
Current Mood: accomplished

Pretty crappy day start to today ... We're both feeling pretty cruddy about the move and the dislocation of all our friendships, our social ties, etc., as we go to Detroit-Windsor. Marking ... meh, so-so at best, they just aren't flowing as fast as I would like. Dealing with administrative teaching-related claptrap this afternoon didn't help. Still raining.

Then I get an email about fifteen minutes ago informing me that I have been awarded the McGill Arts Undergraduate Society's annual Excellence in Teaching Award. And apparently there will be some sort of reception ... I guess ... I guess my students must have nominated me, and ... ah shit now I am happy, and melancholy, and overjoyed, and so grateful.

Tags: teaching
Current Mood: indescribable

So I have just spent the past 6 hours in the wonderful town of Hampstead, Quebec, as well as northwestern parts of the neighbouring borough of Cote-de-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de Grace, and a couple of weird little slivers of Cote-Saint-Luc. Why, you may ask? I and three brave students from my Arch Methods class, together comprising Team Valiant, spent the day wandering about documenting and photographing stop signs as part of our ongoing project, Stop: Toutes Directions, in which we are documenting stop signs across a huge swath of Montreal. Needless to say, while the urban planners who modelled Hampstead after the eponymous area of London may have meant well, by the end we were cursing them and their insanely curved streets and bizarre street naming practices and tendency to put stop signs in the middle of streets for no particular reason. On the other hand, 179 stop signs in 6 hours at 71 intersections is not half bad! Fortunately it was a beautiful day (I went around most of the afternoon in just a sweater) and Team Valiant did their work with few complaints.

Tags: teaching
Current Location: not in Hampstead
Current Mood: hot

Over the past several weeks, my senior class and I have been working on, and have now completed, The Dollarware Project. What on earth is that, you may ask? Nothing less than the world's first scholarly archaeological analysis of discount store ceramic drinking vessels, that's what.

I'm just astonished at how much time and energy the class was able and willing to put into a project that was worth only 40% of their term mark. Honestly I hadn't expected anything like this kind of response, and as far as I can tell few people burned out even towards the end of the project. The projects range in length up to 9000 words of text (!!) and their quality matches their quantity. I'm also very pleased at the wide range of approaches and methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, used to examine an incredible diversity of research questions in fascinating ways.

Anyway, I'm sure that *something* there is of interest to many of you; to get a better sense of the projects you could read my editorial introduction which briefly describes each of the individual reports. Let me know what you think!

Tags: teaching
Current Mood: proud