Mark Myslín

Professor quotes

Saturday, 09/27/2008, 1:13 PM — Mark Myslín

BK: You can verb any noun you want.

BK: I can't hold office hours this Friday because I have to go to Las Vegas.

BK: So to fuck someone in the literal sense is not slang, but to say we're fucked is slang. See?

BK: So the question is, are the prescriptivists wrong about everything? Well...yes.

BK, on historic examples of they used singularly: And—look here—it's even in a passage from Corinthians. (then, dramatically) Uttered by the Lord!

ST: When you're speaking your favorite languages, you have no problem with this.

ST: Its predicate expresses the existence of a—of a what?
Student: Something.
ST: Yes, the existence of a something.

ST: And typically, the existentials exist in some place.

ST: You don't even want to think this. No one dares. They are—(dramatic pause)—adpositions. Ah, I knew you wouldn't like it.

ER, on religious speech acts: Think about when you're Catholic.

CN: It's called prescriptivism. Don't bring that in here.

CN: So they are...they're um...shit, I can't remember the term. They're special.

Student: If a woman used language that's too assertive, people would think, I dunno, she's a jerk or something.
VS, correcting: A bitch.

VS: I'm not going to know this side of the room's names for sh—ooh, I almost said shit. (then, defiantly) Well, for shit! Ha!

Student, on stringing more than two adjectives together in Mandarin Chinese: So how would you say a nasty, smelly, greasy cheeseburger?
PLS: We do not have this.

XLS: Today I'm going to be teaching you a grammar.
(Seems ambitious for one day.)

XLS, on Mandarin's syntactic distinction between taking a bus somewhere and going somewhere to take a bus: No one goes somewhere to take a bus.
(Wanna bet?)

XLS: First we need to learn a review: two new words.

Student, trying to ask if CLS had ever been skiing before: Ni qu guo hua zue ma?
CLS, confused: Hua xue? Have I ever been to the flower market before?

PLS, trying to teach us a hopelessly convoluted mnemonic for a Chinese character: In a park you can find mud, you can find mouths, and maybe people dressing clothes.
Student: I don't believe you.

PLS: Only in response to somebody phrase you.

CLS, apparently not noticing that her review sheet was organized by lesson: This is just like Lesson 22!

XLS: But then you ask me how would I know? (shakes head sadly) You don't know.

XLS: So what do you say when someone knock at you?

XLS: When you finish the test, please go home.

XLS: How many presidents do you have? 32? No, 47.

GSL: So I was watching the news with Jon Stewart and...
(Hey, that's where I get my news, too.)

SB, insisting on printed copies of our term papers: Y nada de 'I'll send it to you through my iPod while my blog is flowing.'

LO: I think what Nemo is indicating here is that the future is coming.

RH: I'm literally going to take you back to the election of 1992.
(He didn't succeed, though.)

SF, in concluding her own (highly subjective) analysis of something: Yeah, exactly.

DR: He was the first African-American to make a film noir, which is...a fact.

DR: This was a film that was largely regarded as the best western (giggles)—ha, best western.

JLC, on Martí's vision of urban squalor in which "se ama de pie": Eso no se hace. (thoughtful pause) A menos que tenga—bueno, no me voy a meter en eso.

LL: It's your responsibility to look at it if you want.

LL: But this is just something, so let's talk about the t-distribution.

LL: Some of you are having the problem of not being able to make sense in regular English.
(She recommended office hours.)

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The audacity of multilingualism*

Tuesday, 09/09/2008, 12:46 PM — Mark Myslín

(*My apologies to Patrick Appel.)

At a campaign event a few months back, Barack Obama downplayed English-only education, saying immigrants should and will learn English anyway, and that—here's the kicker—"you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish."

Of course, the general reaction on blogs and on YouTube was that this was a final straw of left-wing extremism, or at very least an effort to pander to Spanish-speaking voters. But with Ling 70 (Language in Society) still fresh in my mind, I was excited to see issues of bilingualism articulated in the political arena from a refreshingly informed linguistic perspective.

First, the issue of English-only. Obama seems to have recognized that—perhaps contrary to popular belief—immigrants want to and in fact are learning English and that English-only education (also called mainstreaming or sink or swim) is not some miraculous pedagogical force behind this. Mainstreaming, which was mandated in California by Prop 227 in 1998, has never been satisfiably proven more effective than methods such as sheltered bilingual education. Sheltered bilingual education is a multi-year phased process in which all academic subjects are initially taught in the heritage language (alongside ESL classes), then math and science are taught in the target language, and finally, all subjects are taught in the target language. From my own experience tutoring a second-grade Spanish speaker who was thrust into 'sink or swim' English education with zero prior knowledge of the language, I can say the system robs students of their educational opportunity as they sit through classes they don't understand and slip through the cracks of their schools. Certainly children who begin English-only education at a young enough age are able to 'swim,' but there is a point at which students begin English too late for sporadic ESL sessions to have much usefulness.

On the other side of the coin, Obama also mentioned the importance of United States students learning foreign languages such as Spanish. (Dramatic and clearly outraged headline from an apparently conservative political blog: "Barack Obama thinks Americans need to learn other languages.") Without really going into the myriad benefits of second language acquisition—utility, cultural appreciation, sharpened analytical and linguistic skills—I just want to comment on the way some people in this country (especially YouTubers, it seems) view learning foreign languages with caution, declaring it unpatriotic or even "leftist elite snobbery." But in contexts of perceived threat to our national image, in contrast, people applaud foreign language education as a great patriotic necessity, from the National Defense Education Act following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, to today's federal SMART grants that fund study of 'critical' foreign languages such as Arabic and Chinese.

Here's hoping issues of bilingualism in the United States may be informed by educational and linguistic reality, not political fears and ethnocentrism.

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