Sauvons Avenue du Parc

Le maire de Montréal, Gérald Tremblay, veut changer le nom de l'Avenue du Parc, one of the funkiest streets in the whole city. Il veut lui donner le nom de Robert Bourassa, one of Québec's most boring politicians (c.f. even Trudeau called him a "mangeur d'hotdogs"), a total loser if ever there was one. Premier ministre de 1970 à 1976 et encore de 1985 à 1994, l'affaire la plus marquante de son temps au pouvoir c'était son incapacité de gérer "la crise d'Octobre". Qu'est-ce qu'il a fait? Il a fait un coup de téléphone à Trudeau pour envoyer l'armée canadienne à envahir les rues de Montréal! Et pour ça une de ces rues-là va porter son nom. Ridicule! Et tellement triste. SVP, signez la pétition contre cette bêtise.

Clauses and Commas Make a Comeback

This article about the slow return of grammar to English classrooms appeared in the Washington Post this morning. It's about time! There are so many students out there who don't know how to write a proper sentence, let alone understand the parts of speech well enough to know what they are doing wrong in the first place. The move to take grammar out of the classroom was a mistake driven by people who prone "pedagogy" and unproven ideas about letting students "explore and express themselves creatively", as if writing a lot of bad sentences about subjects that may or may not interest them is somehow going to teach them how to write properly.

My favorite paragraph in the article was the last one:

"What you have is a generation of teachers from the early to mid-'70s who don't know grammar, who never learned it," said Benjamin, an author of the national council's publication. "We have armies of teachers, elementary teachers and English teachers, who don't have the language to talk about language. It's kind of their dirty little secret."

This too is true. I was lucky enough to learn a little bit of grammar in grades 6-8, but it was minimal. I learned most of my English grammar by accident because I studied French and Latin. I was one of the lucky ones, but not everyone learns a second-language and gets the side benefit of learning the grammar of one's own. I'm really happy to see that after nearly 40 years the tide is finally starting to turn, but it's going to take a long time before there is any widespread impact, especially since the teachers have to be taught before they can teach the students!

It's funny, but I was just writing my "statement of teaching interests" last week as part of my job applications, and I basically wrote that although I am a big fan of using technology in the classroom, I still think that it is really important to stick to traditional methods. Students may have access to grammar- and spell-checkers, but they need to know how to write on their own. It's nice to know that my opinion on grammar doesn't make me an old foggy but is actually slightly ahead of the curve.

Arden: The World of Shakespeare

Edward Castronovo, a prof at Indiana University at Bloomington, is creating a serious role-playing game called "Arden: The World of Shakespeare". This is a very cool project, and a long-time coming given how many role-playing games already exist for entertainment but how slow universities have been to jump on the bandwagon and to appropriate this technology as a pedagogical tool. A brief story on this was writen in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the original interview with Prof Castronovo is over at CNET. Here's a brief excerpt:

On Thursday, the MacArthur Foundation is announcing a $240,000 grant to Edward Castronova for his online game, "Arden: The World of Shakespeare."

The idea behind the project is to produce a virtual world steeped in the rich lore and characters of the playwright's work.

But Castronova--an Indiana University associate professor of telecommunications best-known as the world's leading expert on the economies of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games--sees his initiative as far more than just a historical adaptation of the Bard's work. He looks at it as a way to teach students about Shakespeare's life, times and writing, as well as a way to conduct innovative social-science research.

Traduction d'enfer

Score another strikethrough. Yesterday I finished the Translation From Hell. That's what I'd started calling it for the past few weeks that I've been working on it. It's an article that will appear in an edited volume, and it is BAD. Bad as in I've read many undergrad term papers that are much better than this. It was written by a senior scholar at another university, and I rather impetuously and foolishly volunteered to translate it from French to English over two years ago when I was an RA for the project that is producing the volume. I thought it would be an easy way to get a couple lines on my c.v. at a time when I didn't yet have any articles of my own to boast. I've been putting it off since then because there was no pressure from the volume editor and I had better things to do (like write my dissertation in just six months). I had no idea what I was getting myself in for. The volume editor obviously recognized how bad the original version was and told me to try to make it better, and I did make some editing suggestions along the way, but short of rewriting the entire article from scratch and changing about 90% of the content, there's no easy way to make it better through sheer translation alone. I'm so relieved that the translation is done, but somehow I fear that my relationship to this particular piece of writing is not yet over. I'm giving it to the editor tomorrow, but I can't give it back to the author--who thinks it's good and has been hounding me for months about how excited he is to see fruits of my labour--because it is full of red edits that I've made which I'm sure he will think are unjustified. I'm supposed to be a translator (despite not being formally trained), yet I'm finding myself in the role of editor of a particularly problematic author too. Any suggestions?