[T]he IUPAC ‘Blue Book’ rules are something of a patchwork quilt. It is intended to cover the entire bed of Organic Chemistry although some parts are covered more than once.
Even if a beautifully simple and appealing new system were devised and promulgated now, it would not result in
immediate abandonment of existing procedures nor even a gradual supplanting of them. An attempt was made to re-think the whole approach
to systematic nomenclature following the discernment by the author of a lack of logicality in the patchwork of revision and extension to organic nomenclature over the past 200 years. This is the so-called HIRN system, the principles for which were published in 1984. Its author claims it to be simple, logically consistent and to use far fewer rules than those of IUPAC. So far, it has not won many converts and this characterizes the general attitude to chemical nomenclature, even among chemists, i.e. almost total lack of interest.
The mid-century devising of line notations was seen as a liberation from all the complexity of systematic naming. Unfortunately, the Wiswesser Line Notation — the one which most widely caught on — requires mastery of a set of encoding and decoding rules filling well over 200 pages of an instruction manual. The system is easy to apply in the sense that playing the violin is easy; in other words the required facility is achieved only by constant practice.
It probably comes as a shock to discover that the rules do not constitute a beginner’s instruction manual but are couched in terse language and require months if not years of study and practice before a fairly complicated molecule can be tackled with confidence. A commonplace reaction is to riffle through the Blue Book looking for an example that looks fairly close to the molecule in question and try to name it by analogy.
I tried to meet certain aspects of this demand by writing a stand-alone instruction manual on naming new organic compounds. <...> Initial trials on user panels gave promising results, the only failures being due to certain subjects inserting bits of their own knowledge instead of blindly following the instructions.
Se oggi la situazione è complessa, non c’è ragione di credere che invece fosse semplice nel passato.
So why Italian? Sure it’s a beautiful language but isn’t Mandarin (Arabic, French, or even German) more widely spoken and, therefore, more useful?
In my book, the beauty of Italian trumps the perceived usefulness of German. But, if it’s not enough, there are many more reasons to learn this language and its history. Look no further than this fantastic MOOC (or its little sister) to discover, indeed, why Italian. By a telling coincidence, I finished this course yesterday, just as Italy defeated England in the Euro 2020 finals.
L’italiano nel mondo is a complete opposite of Italian Language and Culture. No unconvincing skits with pretend students. No silly examples that nobody ever uses. And no English spoken whatsoever. This ten-week course is offered by Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (FedericaX) and presented by Nicola De Blasi, professor of Italian linguistics at the said university. Here’s the syllabus:
Lezione 1 — Italiano lingua internazionale
Lezione 2 — Italiano nel cinema e nel teatro
Lezione 3 — Italiano nel mondo contemporaneo
Lezione 4 — Geografia dell’italiano
Lezione 5 — Le origini dell’italiano
Midterm Exam
Lezione 6 — L’italiano ai tempi di Dante e di San Francesco
Lezione 7 — L’italiano nuova lingua di cultura
Lezione 8 — Italiano e dialetti
Lezione 9 — Le innovazioni dell’italiano
Lezione 10 — La continuità dell’italiano
Final exam
Each lesson contains two short-ish (7—8 minutes) videolectures, each followed by a reading, and, starting from Lesson 3, very simple self-evaluation. For those who do this course “for real”, there are also midterm exam and final exam; not for freeloaders like me though.
The videolectures feature little more than a “talking head” of Prof. De Blasi. Most of the time, he is sitting in the nice surroundings, usually with bookshelves behind him, and uses no other props than (physical) books when he is talking. Kind of old school; I like it. (I also would like, one day, sit at the table like that, on my own, and lecture to the world; or maybe just sit at the table like that. Never mind.)
Curiously, up to the Week 6 all the videos have both Italian and English subtitles. Starting the Week 6, English subtitles have disappeared. Not that I needed them too much: I found that I understand about 70% of what De Blasi says without them, and then there is Italian transcript that I can use. Still, I duly informed the course staff about that and got a prompt response:
Hello,
thank you for your feedback. We try to make every course available in other languages as well, but this one is completely in Italian and we are working on the English translation that we hope we'll put up as soon as possible. Meanwhile you can find a shorter version in English at this link: https://www.edx.org/course/italian-language-around-the-world
Happy learning,
FedericaX Team
I followed the link and discovered that Italian Language around the world is a five-week course which, most likely, just uses the videos of the first five weeks of L’italiano nel mondo. Oh well.
The readings, also in Italian of course, build on the lectures and provide the visual support that, one may feel, is missing from the videos. For example:
The language, academic it may seem, is easy enough to understand. And if not, Google Translate is doing a decent job, apart from the moments where some examples of mediaeval Italian are given. On more than one occasion, Google Translate helpfully suggested to switch to Corsican.
This course is said to be “a new iteration of our course Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2019—2020)”. In reality, a lot of material dates from much earlier time.
The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture first appeared around 5200—5000 BCE and survived a thousand years longer than any other part of the Old European world. Tripolye people were still creating large houses and villages, advanced pottery and metals, and female figurines as late as 3000 BCE. They were the sophisticated western neighbors of the steppe people who probably spoke Proto-Indo-European.
Cucuteni-Tripolye is named after two archaeological sites: Cucuteni, discovered in eastern Romania in 1909, and Tripolye, discovered in central Ukraine in 1899. Romanian archaeologists use the name Cucuteni and Ukrainians use Tripolye, each with its own system of internal chronological divisions, so we must use cumbersome labels like Pre-Cucuteni III/Tripolye A to refer to a single prehistoric culture. There is a Borges-like dreaminess to the Cucuteni pottery sequence: one phase (Cucuteni C) is not a phase at all but rather a type of pottery probably made outside the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture; another phase (Cucuteni Al) was defined before it was found, and never was found; still another (Cucuteni A5) was created in 1963 as a challenge for future scholars, and is now largely forgotten; and the whole sequence was first defined on the assumption, later proved wrong, that the Cucuteni A phase was the oldest, so later archaeologists had to invent the Pre-Cucuteni phases I, II, and III, one of which (Pre-Cucuteni I) might not exist. The positive side of this obsession with pottery types and phases is that the pottery is known and studied in minute detail.
Here’s a story: in 2015, I did my first MandarinX course and quite liked it. Last year, I did the second one. And then, when the third instalment was announced, I thought it could be a good idea to refresh a bit of Mandarin in my memory. So I decided to try another basic course,
TsinghuaX (TM01x Tsinghua Chinese), and see how it compares with MandarinX.
Now that edX scrapped their free honor code certificates, and I don’t have any spare money to pay for a “verified certificate”, I am doing these courses purely for myself.
Tsinghua Chinese: Start Talking with 1.3 Billion People
Just like MandarinX, TsinghuaX is a six-week course with estimated effort of 4 hours/week. Each of the six lessons contains the following sections:
Dialogue (several short videos and quiz)
Characters (several short videos and quiz)
Listening comprehension (quiz)
Tea time with Peter (study tips and cultural notes)
Like in MandarinX, most of the material is also presented by “talking heads” but here we have more diversity. In the Dialogue section, Ms Lǔ (or Lǔ lǎoshī) talks about grammar and vocabulary. Another teacher, Ms Wáng (Wáng lǎoshī), introduces a few Chinese characters. Although the focus of TsinghuaX course is on speaking (Ms Lǔ only uses Pinyin in her presentations), I have to say that I remember more of hanzi from Ms Wáng than from all MandarinX courses. I love the way she explains the origin of the characters. (On the other hand, I like that in MandarinX we are always given hanzi together with Pinyin. Even if it slows down my note-taking, I prefer to have both things.)
Here are the topics of TsinghuaX:
Lesson 1: Greetings
Lesson 2: Self-introduction
Lesson 3: Transportation
Lesson 4: Food
Lesson 5: Accommodation
Lesson 6: Shopping
There is no final exam, but you have to take quizzes (18 in total). To pass, you only have to get 60% right, which is really easy. The quizzes are good fun. For example, you are given the Beijing subway map. The task is to find a certain hanzi in the station names!
I was so inspired by this course that I decided to start yet another blog, just some symbols, where I present one symbol (usually a Chinese character) a day and write a short story about it.
Now back to MandarinX.
Basic Mandarin Chinese – Level 3
Here are the topics of MX103x:
Lesson 1: Movies
Lesson 2: Talking about studying Chinese
Lesson 3: Health / going to hospital
Lesson 4: Sports / getting fit
Lesson 5: Staying in touch / 21st century telecom
Lesson 6: Talking about studying (again!) and dating
Now MX102x had a “Question of the week” section. To do it, one had to set up an account with Prollster. The participation marks for this section were worth 10% of the grade. Like many other students, I found this requirement incredibly annoying (why do we need to register with one more platform?) and have chosen to ignore this section altogether. I’m glad that in MX103x they scrapped this nonsense. Just like in MX101x, each weekly quiz is worth 10% of the final score and the final exam is worth 40%. You need to get at least 80% to pass.
Estella, as always, was super-charming. However, listening to the dialogues, even with my level of understanding Mandarin, I had a distinct feeling that nobody talks like that in real life.
外表不是一切，但是我喜欢比我矮的女生
“Physical appearance isn’t everything, but I do like women who are shorter than me.”
你的身材很好，应该也对运动有兴趣
“Your figure is very good, so you’re probably interested in exercise, too.”
如果我能找到像你这样完美的女生，就太好了
“If I could find a girl like you that’s this perfect, it’d be too good to be true.”
I spent all Thursday evening marking their work. Friday morning, in school, I discover, to my horror, that I can’t find this pile of papers. Next thing I know, a girl (one of my best students) is coming to my class and asks, “Mister, did you correct our work?”
Damn.
“Yes I did, but it seems that I forgot to bring them in.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry, you did well.”
“How much did I get?”
It’s my turn now to say “Oh” (silently). Think, teacher, think.
“You did everything correct apart from one question.”
“Which one?”
“The one nobody answered correctly, by some reason.”
“Which one was that?”
“I’m trying to remember. I’ll let you know when we have a class.” (I have a class with them today. The last period.)
“OK.”
Later, a boy is coming to my class when I am about to go. Another of my best pupils. After his grade, no doubt.
“Mister, mister, did you have time to check my work?”
I’ve been teaching here for two months and they still don’t know my name. We have a conversation very much like above.
“Sorry, I have to go now. See you in the afternoon.”
In the afternoon, I finally remember the one question nobody had right. I tell kids what was the correct answer. Also, that I bring their papers on Monday.
“Mister... are you organised?” the clever boy asks.
I want to tell him that no, not really. But my inner teacher doesn’t want to give him such a simple answer.
“Of course I am organised. Look at me. All depends on the adverb that you place before ‘organised’. A person can be well organised or poorly organised. Still ‘organised’. You guys are well organised.”
“I am not very well organised”, says another student.
“Yes you are. You always bring your homework in.”
“You have to see my room. It’s a mess.”
I recall our university lecturer in physical chemistry, some 30 years ago. Once he told us that instead of saying “mess” it is more polite to say “high entropy”. For example, “you have high entropy in your department”. I tell the kids that the bedroom mess is a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You simply can’t organise your homework without increasing entropy around you. They don’t understand the entropy bit but seem to like the idea.
“Bye, mister.”
“Good bye. See you Monday.”
At home, no sign of the papers. I check my bag again. Of course, they were there all along. I am so organised, I don’t need any adverbs.
You can substitute several adjectives here for variations on the same myth. Among the most common: some ways of using your language are more beautiful, more complex, more pleasant, more efficient, more logical, more civilized... Many such beliefs arise naturally because of mistrust of ‘the Other’, but in large part language judgements follow from the notion of a ‘standard’ form of the language against which all other varieties can be measured — and found wanting. But in what sense do standard languages exist? They certainly seem to exist in forms of discourse such as newspaper editorials, national language policies and school textbooks. Standard forms of language are appealed to, often when people feel that their national or regional identities or interests are being threatened. Despite the social power of the belief, standard languages don’t exist in the minds of individual speakers; rather, groups of speakers share different degrees of awareness of a set of conventions about what is acceptable, prestigious and desirable. Written language has played perhaps the most important role in ‘fixing’ these conventions as the basis for how others should write and speak.
An extension of this dead end is the belief that some languages are better than others, for example that some are harder or easier to learn, some are closer to God(s), some are more beautiful, more complex, more pleasant, more efficient, more logical, more civilized, etc. Descriptive linguistics and sociolinguistics are useful here to expose the patent nonsense of such beliefs, by comparing the same linguistic unit in different languages or dialects. This allows us to see how the same or a similar element of phonology, for example, can have different linguistic value in different languages, without requiring or entailing any measurement of efficiency, complexity, logic or aesthetics. The /l/ and /r/ sounds of English and many other languages are not differentiated by Chinese speakers, for example, just as the tonal features of Chinese can seem indistinguishable to speakers of atonal languages, such as English. And the ‘illogical’ double negative of many English dialects (‘I ain’t got none’) is part of the ‘standard’ versions of French and Spanish.
After finishing the Spanish MOOCs, I thought I may try starting another language course at edX. I was in for a disappointment here. No languages apart from English and Spanish! Then — hey, what’s that? Starting, wait a minute, yesterday?
I have to say that learning basic Mandarin was not on my wish list, let alone to-do list. On the other hand, why not.
Now I’m sure you’ve came across many misguided opinions that rank Chinese among the hardest languages to learn. Take orthography. For instance, in Finnish, each phoneme (sound) corresponds to exactly one grapheme (letter), and each grapheme represents exactly one phoneme. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we find Chinese with no correspondence between graphemes and phonemes whatsoever. English and French fall somewhere in between. From this, one may conclude that Finnish must be easier language to master, compared to Chinese. Now let’s see, how many native speakers of Finnish versus Chinese are there? That’s right, 5.5 million vs 1.2 billion. Granted, one more Chinese speaker won’t make much difference, but why don’t give it a shot?
MX101x is a six-week course with estimated effort of 4 hours/week. Each of the six lessons contains the following sections:
Introduction
Vocabulary
Supplementary Vocabulary
Grammar and Sentence Patterns
Dialogue
Quiz (Homework)
Dictation & Cultural Notes
Each section, apart from the quiz, contains one or two videos. In addition, there is Workbook (four or five pages of exercises for each week; you are supposed to print it out) and Textbook (which is basically a transcript of the video lessons on Vocabulary, Supplementary Vocabulary, Grammar and Dialogues). Both Workbook and Textbook is available in both traditional and simplified Chinese. Well I don’t have a printer and to print out all of this elsewhere is too much a bother. Instead, for the first time in any edX course I did so far, I was taking notes. Which, I think, was useful because I’ve got to practice writing down the Han characters. On top of that (or shall I say on bottom of that?) there is Before You Start... section which explains tones, Pinyin, numbers, and traditional and simplified characters.
MX101x Chinese Language: Learn Basic Mandarin
Overview / syllabus
Before you start: tones, Hanyu Pinyin, Chinese numbers, traditional and simplified Han characters
Lesson 1: greetings; introducing yourself; countries and continents
Lesson 2: arrival to Taiwan
Lesson 3: checking in a hotel; things that can go wrong in a hotel and how to deal with them
Lesson 4: talking about food
Lesson 5: getting around; transportation
Lesson 6: intonation and tone; small talk; making friends; joking
Final exam
As you can see, the topics range from mundane/boring (how to say “the air conditioner in my room does not work”) to exciting and perhaps too subtle for this basic course (small talk). Vocab, grammar points and cultural notes are presented by a “talking head” of the course’s charming instructor, Estella Y. M. Chen. Most of the dialogues feature the very same Estella and an American tourist called Calwin. So if you expect some visuals of China, Taiwan and other places where they speak Mandarin, you’d better look elsewhere.
Some of the dialogues used the words which were not given in the vocab sections. This is all right, you don’t have to know all of them. But, while I was trying to figure out the meaning of those extra words, I made an important discovery. Google Translate works much better translating Chinese to English than, say, Russian or Spanish. Also, there is a number of ways of entering Chinese, including Pinyin and handwriting. Could it be that there are more Chinese-speaking programmers employed by Google?
Grading is working like this: each weekly quiz is worth 10% of the final score and the final exam is worth 40%. You need to get at least 80% to pass and earn a certificate.
100 = 10 × 6 quizzes + 40 for final exam
I found the quizzes far too easy. You have 10 (ten!) attempts for each multiple-choice question. You can pass all of them just by brute force. In the final exam, you are only given two attempts: that’s more like it.
“But can you speak any Mandarin now?”, you may ask. Alas, the answer is “no”. My vocabulary is still restricted to a few polite expressions and those Chinese words that everybody knows. One has to practise daily, which I find impossible without looming deadlines. However I started to understand how the language works, and as such the mission of MX101x is accomplished. I am looking forward to further instalments of MandarinX series.
For a long while, there was no Spanish-language course of interest to me available at edX. Then, suddenly, there were two, both starting in February 2015: La España de El Quijote (Quijote501x) offered by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Advanced Spanish Language and Culture (ASLCx) by St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. My past experience taught me that it’s a bad idea to take two (or more) MOOCs at the same time. But which one to choose?
In the end, greediness won and I enrolled for both courses. However, given that I had to go to work, and even actually work, I had to make some sacrifices. Like (o horror!) skipping homeworks.
Advanced Spanish Language and Culture
Of course it’s cool to put something “advanced” on your CV but for me ASLCx, a ten-week course presented by Marta E. Moore-Austin, felt more like intermediate than advanced. To pass the course, one has to score at least 70% of the grade. Grades were assigned as follows:
12 quizzes (readings, videos, grammar) — 40% of the grade
17 homeworks (readings, recordings, discussion forums and two emails) — 20% of the grade
Final exam — 40% of the grade
From this it was blindingly obvious to me that I should concentrate on quizzes and don’t waste my time on homeworks (each worth only 1 point). Especially I couldn’t bother with recording myself.
The topics of this course included:
La identidad personal y pública
Las familias y las comunidades
La vida contemporánea
La belleza y la estética
La ciencia y la tecnología
Los desafíos mundiales
The grammar points such as future, conditional and subjunctive, were presented rather formally and without much connection to the rest of the material. There were pleasant discoveries too, such as Ella o yo, or Nosotros, no, a short sci-fi story by José Bernardo Adolph.
To pass the final exam, one has to read five articles and answer multiple-choice questions. Easy, I thought, I had more than a week until a deadline, I can do one article a day or something. I started with a paper about Salvador Dalí, answered the multiple-choice questions and was about to go to bed (it was past midnight already) when by some reason I scrolled the page back to the top and read the following passage:
Contesta las siguientes preguntas de comprensión de lectura. Hay cinco selecciones. Debes terminar el examen dentro el tiempo en límite, 55 minutos, como el examen AP de College Board. ¡Buena suerte!
What?! I have only 55 minutes for all? Did the timer start when I opened the document about Dalí, or when I submitted my first response? In any case, I decided to carry on and, believe it or not, finished the remaining four tasks on time.
La España de El Quijote
I have to say straight away that this course, created and taught by Pedro García Martín, is not about Don Quixote, but rather about Siglo de Oro, Spanish Golden Age. I found it fascinating and challenging. The estimated effort (5—7 hours per week) sounds about correct... if you are a quick reader. In Spanish. I am not, and I some of the texts (all by Pedro García Martín) turned out to be rather demanding reading. On the other hand, I had no problems understanding the video lectures. And I did enjoy the Telenoticias. However, watching the videos is not enough to answer all the questions in the weekly exams. So you’d better do the readings.
Here’s the full program of the course.
Semana 1. Introducción: tiempo y espacio
Tiempo.
Espacio.
El tiempo y el espacio en El Quijote.
Semana 2. La vida cotidiana
La vida privada.
La vida pública.
La vida cotidiana en El Quijote.
Semana 3. Economía y sociedad
Economía.
Sociedad.
Sociedad en El Quijote.
Semana 4. Política, religión e Inquisición
Política.
Religión.
Inquisición.
Política en El Quijote.
Semana 5. Literatura
Escritores.
Teatro.
Literatura en El Quijote.
Semana 6. Las bellas artes
Arquitectura.
Pintura.
Música.
Las bellas artes en El Quijote.
Semana 7. La iconografía de El Quijote
Iconografía de El Quijote.
Adaptaciones nacionales.
Cervantes, El Quijote y el Siglo de Oro en el cine.
Week 1. Introduction: time and space
Time.
Space.
Time and space in Don Quixote.
Week 2. Daily life
Private life.
Public life.
Daily life in Don Quixote.
Week 3. Economy and Society
Economy.
Society.
Society in Don Quixote.
Week 4. Politics, religion and the Inquisition
Politics.
Religion.
The Inquisition.
Politics in Don Quixote.
Week 5. Literature
Writers.
Theatre.
Literature in Don Quixote.
Week 6. The fine arts
Architecture.
Painting.
Music.
The fine arts in Don Quixote.
Semana 7. The iconography of Don Quixote
Iconography of Don Quixote.
National adaptations.
Cervantes, Don Quixote and Spanish Golden Age in cinema.
Although the course started on 24 February, one could wait with weekly exams till April. The schedule as shown below could be fatal for procrastinators like me:
Weeks 1 through 3: exams due 3 April 2015
Week 4: exam due 10 April
Week 5: exam due 17 April
Weeks 6 and 7: exams due 20 April
As a result, I managed to miss a deadline for Week 1. Mind you, the task was not quite trivial: to adapt an excerpt from Quixote (there was a choice of three original fragments) by placing it in modern setting. I guess I could have done it by the end of the course. Oh well.
When I just started my first MOOC, the choice of courses at edX was very limited and most of them were called “Introduction to something”. Two and a half years on, edX has a bewildering array of courses, and not only in English but also in French, Spanish, Mandarin and Turkish. And check out the names: Alien Worlds, The Art of Poetry or How Stuff Moves. Somehow, Introduction to is not sexy anymore. On the other hand, even a verified course in Jazz Appreciation does not look that impressive on your CV (if you still care about these things).
As I did stop (or like to think that I did) to care about my CV, I thought one can do worse than take a course boldly named The Science of Happiness, “The first MOOC to teach positive psychology”. It turned out to be a happy choice indeed.
Now “happy”, together with “love”, is one of the most abused words in English. We ask “Are you happy with that?” when we merely mean “Are you OK with that?”. Likewise, one says “I am not happy with your service” meaning “Your service is rubbish”, as if one would be truly happy otherwise. No s/he wouldn’t. So why bring in happiness in the first place?
“Father, I must speak. I can be silent no longer. All day long you mutter to yourself, gibber, dribble, moan, and bash your head against the wall yelling ‘I want to die’. Now you may say I’m leaping to conclusions, but... you’re not completely happy, are you?”
You ask me:
What is the greatest happiness on earth?
Two things:
changing my mind
as I change a penny for a shilling;
and
listening to the sound
of a young girl
singing down the road
after she has asked me the way.
Logue himself once said: “Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced”. Could be the same said about happiness? If so, how could it be studied scientifically?
That’s what Science of Happiness is about. Created by the Greater Good Science Center (I love the name!), the interdisciplinary course was first offered in Autumn 2014 and ran for nine (or ten) weeks. This year, it is re-launched as a self-paced class so you can take it any time before May 2015. The last year program was as follows:
Week 1: Introduction to the Science of Happiness
Week 2: The Power of Connection
Week 3: Kindness & Compassion
Week 4: Cooperation & Reconciliation
Week 5: Midterm Exam
Week 6: Mindfulness, Attention, and Focus
Week 7: Mental Habits of Happiness: Self-Compassion, Flow, and Optimism
Week 8: Gratitude
Week 9: Finding Your Happiness Fit and the New Frontiers
Final Exam
Every week, the students were asked to “check in” by answering quick questions about how they’ve been feeling over the past few days. These weekly check-ins track the changes to the student’s general emotional state through the course. They are are voluntary, confidential, and do not affect the final grade.
Apart from lectures, readings, homework and exams (easy-peasy, I should say), the course includes optional weekly “happiness practices”, such as Random Acts of Kindness. Unfortunately, I took their “optionality” rather literally; in other words, I skipped the practices. But nothing really prevents me from doing them now.
As you can see from my progress chart above, even without “happiness practices” my emotional state (the left part of the chart) had improved quite significantly. Does it mean I am a happier person now? I am not sure, but strongly suspect that the answer is yes.
Racism, as well as native speakerism, only survive if they are constantly reinforced through daily discourses that make them seem natural, increasing their power through making them invisible and less likely to be challenged.
Todd Ruecker
Six, no, wait, seven months after my CELTA course, the euphoria has all but evaporated. The reason? Job hunt.
According to the CELTA website, the certificate will “open the door to exciting teaching opportunities all over the world”. What it fails to mention is that even if the door is open, you have to be a native English speaker to go through it.
When you browse through jobs at tefl.com, you quickly notice that most positions on offer require not just EFL teachers but native English-speaking teachers (NESTs), also (quite absurdly) known as “native English teachers”. For entry-level positions in Europe, say Spain, the essential requirements are neither experience nor qualification but English “nativeness” and EU citizenship. (In plain English: British and Irish only need to apply.) Worse still, being a “native” is considered... a qualification [1].
Why? After all, there is no such thing as a native violin player, Java programmer, or surgeon. There is no question that violin, programming or surgery can be taught by the professionals in these respective areas. What is so special about language teaching?
Nor the mere fact of being born or growing up in an English-speaking country is a guarantee of proficiency in English or even having English as a mother tongue. I know people born in Ireland whose first language is Irish. I know much more people who lived all their lives in England and whose command of both written and spoken English is absolutely dismal.
But here you are. Some advertisers go as far as to claim that it is against the law to hire non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in their school. Uh-oh.
You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that there could be no such law. You also would be right to suspect that it is actually against the law to discriminate on the basis of one’s place of birth [2, 3].
I think at least one of the factors to blame is a proliferation of language “academies” (sorry but most of them don’t deserve the title of “academy” without quotes) whose main claim to existence is “profesorado nativo” [4]. They are (rightly) worrying that being “diluted” by NNESTs will rid them of that singular advantage.
Mind you, they also excel at blame-shifting. One recruiter, bless him, confessed to me that he himself was OK with my candidature — he wouldn’t tell that I was not a native, um, American English speaker until I told him otherwise — but it is the parents of the students who demand native English teachers. Yeah right.
There are other reasons behind the “nativeness” requirements though. A few days ago I came across the analysis by Todd Ruecker and Lindsey Ives whose findings “confirm the connection between White privilege and native speaker privilege” [5]. They suggest that
commercialization of the ELT <English language teaching> profession allows for stereotyping of and discrimination against individuals based on age and marginalizes NNESTs despite relevant qualifications, thus denigrating the level of professionalism in the field. In addition, by commercializing the ELT profession in this way, recruitment websites rhetorically reproduce power relations at the intersections of race and language background in a few different ways. First, they delimit who qualifies as a native speaker through the use of repeated images of White teachers and text demanding that teachers produce passports from a list of predominantly White, inner-circle countries <that is, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA>. Second, they reinforce the White native speaker norm by positioning the target cultures as exoticized Others in opposition to whom the White, Western teacher is defined. Finally, they extend the possessive investment in Whiteness beyond U.S. borders by articulating the cash value that comes with White native speaker status in the ELT industry.
Apart from that, by perpetuating the myth of native speaker superiority, the ELT industry sends a signal to the EFL learners that they will never be able to have as good a command of English as “natives”. That must be demotivating, to say the least.
I have been contemplating writing a post on this topic for a while. I would procrastinate even longer if not for an email I got three weeks ago:
Many thanks for applying for the position of Freelance Medical Editor with Longdom Publishing <yes that’s their real name>. I am sorry to say that we are only hiring native English speakers for this position, and will therefore not be able to consider your application.
Normally, I never answer these emails, rather press “delete” and move on. But that day I couldn’t help it. In this particular case the requirement of “nativeness” it is even less defensible than for an EFL teacher (nobody was going to hear my accent anyway). It took me about three minutes to write and send a response.
Many thanks for your fast response. You may be interested to know that it is illegal under EU law to discriminate against non-Native English speakers, which is exactly what your company does.
There has been no reply so far. It matters not. From now on, I will treat similar emails like this, it costs me nothing and makes me feel good.
Vidales, R. (2014) La ‘burbuja lingüística’ dispara el fraude en las academias de idiomas. El País, 12 June 2014.
Ruecker, T. and Ives, L. White native English speakers needed: the rhetorical construction of privilege in online teacher recruitment spaces. TESOL Quarterly, 25 September 2014.
Monolingualism, that is, the ability to use only one language, is such a widely accepted norm in so many parts of the Western world that it is often assumed to be a world-wide phenomenon, to the extent that bilingual and multilingual individuals may appear to be ‘unusual.’ Indeed, we often have mixed feelings when we discover that someone we meet is fluent in several languages: perhaps a mixture of admiration and envy but also, occasionally, a feeling of superiority in that many such people are not ‘native’ to the culture in which we function. Such people are likely to be immigrants, visitors, or children of ‘mixed’ marriages and in that respect ‘marked’ in some way, and such marking is not always regarded favorably.
However, in many parts of the world an ability to speak more than one language is not at all remarkable. In fact, a monolingual individual would be regarded as a misfit, lacking an important skill in society, the skill of being able to interact freely with the speakers of other languages with whom regular contact is made in the ordinary business of living. In many parts of the world it is just a normal requirement of daily living that people speak several languages: perhaps one or more at home, another in the village, still another for purposes of trade, and yet another for contact with the outside world of wider social or political organization. These various languages are usually acquired naturally and unselfconsciously, and the shifts from one to another are made without hesitation.
There is a long history in certain Western societies of people actually ‘looking down’ on those who are bilingual. We give prestige to only a certain few classical languages (e.g., Greek and Latin) or modern languages of high culture (e.g., English, French, Italian, and German). You generally get little credit for speaking Swahili and, until recently at least, not much more for speaking Russian, Japanese, Arabic, or Chinese. Bilingualism is actually sometimes regarded as a problem in that many bilingual individuals tend to occupy rather low positions in society and knowledge of another language becomes associated with ‘inferiority’. Bilingualism is sometimes seen as a personal and social problem, not something that has strong positive connotations. One unfortunate consequence is that some Western societies go to great lengths to downgrade, even eradicate, the languages that immigrants bring with them while at the same time trying to teach foreign languages in schools. What is more, they have had much more success in doing the former than the latter.
Scientific job advertising clearly went downhill since... well, since my last successful application, some time in the last century. In the olden days, when they published job ads in Nature and Science hardcopies and had to pay per word, they at least made sure the ad was concise and to the point. The title had to catch the applicants’ attention and make sense. How the times changed. Now we don’t browse, we search with keywords. That means, the employers think the titles can be rubbish and the ad will be found anyway. That’s how I found these, for example. In (previously) respectable online sources. (I did not change a single word and left the capitalisation intact.) I wonder how many of these positions are filled now, and by whom.
Android Engineer (all genders)
ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING
Ass Professor
Associate Lecturer / Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Flute
Associate Professor in Autobiographical Memory Research
Experienced Researcher for Missions to Phobos
Food Sensory Scientist
Hard Rock Geologist
Head of Bioprocessing (President minus 2 position)
Ladder Faculty in Space Physics
Mechanical Technician
MOLECULAR BREEDER POSITION
More Experienced Researcher
Plant Fellows
Poor Law Research Assistant
Post-doctoral position in Food Habits
Post-doc position in strong fields
Postdoc-Solid Electrolyte
Postdoc for Post-mortem analysis
Product Manager Allergy
Research Assistant (Anachronism and Antiquity)
Research engineer in the field of silent air flows
I can’t say that I never thought of doing something useful to earn my living. For example, teaching English. It was not until last year though that I began thinking about it seriously. Well, as seriously as I could. Doing CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) seemed like a good way to learn how to do it.
And so, some time last November, I started to look for a reasonably priced place, preferably in the sun, offering four-week CELTA courses. That’s how I learned about The Irish Academy in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: probably the best deal (and location) in the whole of Spain. On the last day of the last year, I sent an email enquiry about the course... and got an immediate response. In the following week, I filled the form and completed a short pre-interview task. I had my skype interview on 17 January and started the course exactly two months later.
Transitions may be the only type of human-like words and phrases that could make mathematical texts accessible for — and, hopefully, even understandable to — humans. On the other hand, in this document dealing with issues of mathematical communication Zajj Daugherty warns:
Be careful with clearly, obviously, and surely, as graders often interpret these connectives to mean that important parts of the problem are being glossed over and that they should therefore read over the surrounding text more diligently.
And you wouldn’t want that. I recall an anecdote about great mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov who for many years was a professor at the famous Department of Mechanics and Mathematics (мехмат) of Moscow State University. Now Kolmogorov normally was snoozing his way through the exams. A successful exam strategytactics approach was to talk non-stop whilst trying not to wake him up with a careless transition word such as obviously. Otherwise, he would open his eyes and say with a smile: “Очевидно? Докажите!” (“Obviously? Prove it!”)
Contrary to what you read in Wikipedia, -logy is not a suffix. If anything, it is a root. It is derived from Greek word logos (λόγος) which has a lot of meanings:
speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, reason.
Three months ago, I started another “low-throughput” blog, just some words. I wanted to have not-Blogger blog. But why did I choose to host it on Maneno? First, Maneno is multi-lingual, and I want to have an option to publish in more than one language.
There are only a few buzzwords which irritate me more than this one. But what exactly is crowdsourcing? According to Wiktionary, it means “delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without substantial monetary compensation”.
Earlier this month, Sue Keogh gave a seminar entitled “Seven Steps to Great Web Copy” at the EBI. Good thing that EBI Interfaces published a round-up including the presentation and some useful notes. Most of it is just plain common sense (“it’s actually harder to be concise than to write a load of waffle”), but how many science-related websites actually use the common sense?
