Borat, My Very Nice Navigator

August 26, 2008 in The Way It Were
Tags: accent, borat, broken, died, English, eurotrash, gps, internet, intertubes, jerry, learners, lewis, navigator, online, personal, recommended, soul, telemenu, tomtom, voice

The personal GPS system my uncle gave me is one of the nifty ones where I could even go online and choose a new accent for it. After plugging it in for the first time, I knew I had to, and I held hope against hope that someone over the Intertubes came to the same conclusion as I:

Wouldn’t it be great if these things didn’t pretend they spoke anything but broken English?

Someone had already thought of this. Lo and behold, what for I found the perfect voice for my personal GPS device. For whenever I get to where I’m going, now I hear, in a thick, eurotrash accent:

Oh! Here we are, at destination. You drive like you are drinking fermented horse urine, very nice. High five.

Very nice, indeed. Next up: Stephen Hawking.

Postscript: Suddenly, I feel like a little piece of my soul died. It’s almost as if I had wrote:

Gone are the days of stilted telemenu voices, friends. Let us put new use to and make much light of English learners and the disabled.

It’s like I’m Jerry Lewis.

Maybe I’ll go back to the default voice. It, at least, doesn’t damage me morally.

Exercise in Futility

May 7, 2008 in Personal Reflection
Tags: 08, 2008, authority, blog, blogs, charts, ed in 08, education, el, English, exercise, futility, graphs, great, kremen school of education, language, learners, modeling, more, new, nominee, of, on, on the tenure track, pictures, scaffolding, strategies, student, student teacher, teacher, technorati, tenure, the, track, vocabulary, year

Check this out:

Though other, longer-lived blogs have found limited success with this, I’m confident that my meager double-digit Technorati authority will lift On the Tenure Track to the cusp. Which cusp is another matter, for another date.

Just click on the image above, and select On the Tenure Track when you do the poll. I’m about halfway down the list or so.

In the meantime, enjoy the following historical recording of the first high-tech user helpline.

We saw this in my godforsaken credential class, using it as a touchstone for discussion about English-language learners and how best to reach out when teaching the really basic skills. That in high school we have to teach really basic skills is a travesty. Call it a tragedy, if you prefer, but I try to avoid cliches.

How basic should I get, when I deal with real, mainstreamed English language learners? How much should I rely on modeling, or pictures, or charts, or graphs? Any more than normal, or should I instead concentrate on vocabulary acquisition?