How to be a lecturer just as good as me

Lately, perhaps as a reflex of the news that there will soon be a TEF, articles have often included advice on how to do lecturing better. This THE article, for instance, talks about how to engage with sullen students. It has some good practical advice in it, if you scroll down, but the contribution from Tara Brabazon is about as useful as her earlier advice on how to write a PhD thesis just like hers. She tells us everything that was wrong with the way her unfortunate colleague has been teaching the students, leaving them unresponsive and robotic. She tells us that she plays music five minutes before the start of her lectures, and '[they] have a dance and a sing and it orients students into a learning experience'. Eventually, after 'exertion and stress' and 'the constant trickle of stress down [her] back', the 'students revealed a shard of light'. Great. I'll just do that then, shall I? 

This person writing in the NYT is similarly exercised:

Holding their attention is not easy. I lecture from detailed notes, which I rehearse before each class until I know the script well enough to riff when inspiration strikes. I pace around, wave my arms, and call out questions to which I expect an answer. When the hour is done, I’m hot and sweaty.

I don't know what kind of place these people teach in. I can't play music five minutes before the start of my lectures: there's another lecture taking place in the room. I do see the benefit, though, as playing music during group discussion in seminars seems to help students relax (though it didn't make a difference to their marks in a study I conducted last year).

I don't think it's necessarily good advice to promote the idea that because you're working up a sweat and pacing around, that you're working hard and lecturing well. Students don't often appreciate pacing around, for example. It would be much better to find out what actually works in a lecture scenario from the students' point of view (and the advice lower down in the THE article does just that). Much of the subjective, I-work-bloody-hard stuff seems to be defensive in the face of a perceived slight against the traditional lecture format. I've seen other articles defending chalk and blackboard over PowerPoint and so on. If there is any attack on traditional lecturing, it's coming from the right place: from research showing how effective learning takes place, and from the need for accessibility for those with dyslexia, visual impairments, and other conditions that make taking down an hour of uninterrupted talking difficult.

I put a lot of effort into my lectures, because I genuinely find the topic interesting and I get excited about it. I hope that this comes across and helps students to find it interesting too. But sweating? I don't know how you work up a sweat by walking and talking, because I don't. Working from a detailed script is another matter. I don't. I have slides, and I know what I want to say, but I don't read a script because I think it can be boring for the listener. If you can do it well, I daresay this is an inspiring type of lecture to be in. But I don't have time to rehearse thoroughly before each lecture when I teach around 12 hours a week. Is the TEF going to penalise those of us with heavier teaching loads?

Pharrell-timed discussion

I think there is this idea that a seminar is a place for lively discussion and informed debate. In practice, it's not like that. More often, in my experience, it's the seminar leader who does most of the work, and the similarity of the endeavour to drawing blood from a stone varied depending on a multitude of factors: group size, group ability, group demographics, work set, how much other work has been set that week, what time the seminar is, how hot the room is...

Today I had the first proper seminar for my spring morphology module. It started off badly, with only 50% attendance. After getting just 75% to the lecture, this is slightly worrying, so I hope it picks up. Anyway, the group itself is a good one - both seminar groups are filled with bright, keen students. Today I wanted them to discuss a chapter I'd asked them to read. It's an interesting and important discussion of the kind of data we use by the ever insightful Maggie Tallerman, who taught me everything I know about morphology.

I wanted this discussion to be interesting for the students, more so than just doing exercises. I put some discussion questions up on the projector to get them going. I even started them out with an easy exercise to get them in the right frame of mind. Then I split them into groups of 5, not so big that they would fight to be heard, but big enough to generate discussion. Trouble is, with only ten students, that's only two groups, and the room was suddenly silent. Each group could hear the other, and it was too intimidating, and no one said anything.

First, I tried to stimulate conversation by joining each group. That was successful for about three seconds. Then, fantastically, I realised the problem was feeling self-conscious, and put some music on. I had to ask the students the best way to do this, of course, but having been told to YouTube something, I just picked the first song on the 'music' channel, which was Pharrell Williams' 'Happy'. Straight away, discussion was easier because they weren't aware of the other group and me being able to hear everything they said. OK, they were still shy and quiet, but it really did make a difference. They talked till the end of the song (well, with some lulls) and then we discussed the questions in the full group.

In future, all seminar discussions will be accompanied by songs.

Homo sapien

The name of the human species is Homo sapiens, which means literally 'thinking man' ('man' obviously used in this case with its meaning of 'person of unspecified gender', rather than 'male human').

It's a bit unsatisfactory that part of the name for the human species is a word that means 'human', and that that same word also refers to all other species in the genus, which most people probably wouldn't consider to be 'humans' but rather closely-related species (Neanderthals and so on). Usually, people mean 'modern human' when they use the word 'human'. Still.

So, thinking man. Homo sapiens. Ever heard the song Homosapien by Pete Shelley? Or the band Del tha Funkee Homo Sapien? Both, you'll notice, use the 'sapien' part without the final s. Why? Well, it's a pretty straightforward case of mistakenly analysing a singular ending in s as a plural. 

The same thing happened to give us peas: we had a substance, which we knew as pease. We made pease pudding out of it. One day, someone started thinking that each of the little individual things was an instance of a pea (spelling not being people's strong point back then). It's as if we'd begun to refer to a grain of rice as a rie. That didn't happen because the final [s] sound is pronounced as [s], whereas in pease it's pronounced [z], which is just how the plural <s> is pronounced after a vowel. 

So we've got some people thinking sapiens is the plural of sapien. Can see how that happened: generally, when you hear the term Homo sapiens, someone's talking about the species as a whole, so it makes sense to assume it's plural (referring to all the members of the species). When you want to talk about just one, you use the singular. Obvs. 

So why am I blogging about it? Doesn't seem that fascinating. Although you have learnt about pease, which is definitely worth knowing. Well, I'm blogging about it because although this is a totally predictable, plausible, not-surprising reanalysis and you would think millions of people would get it wrong, no one does. Seriously. Apart from those two musical references, the google hits are sparse. There are not thousands and thousands of people typing blogs and questions and comments and all the other things you'd expect. Why not? How are they all getting it right all of the time? Are they always using the plural and so getting it right without knowing it? Is it just a term that no one who isn't reasonably well-educated uses? What's happening? I feel like I can no longer rely on real-life language to be messy and complicated.

Here is a link to Wikipedia's list of alternative names for the species. 

Serial verbs, rhoticity and detective work

 

There's a song out at the minute called Come save me by a band (or maybe a person, I don't know) called Jagwar Ma. It's quite good - you can listen to it at Soundcloud. It caught my attention because although the title is Come save me, he clearly sings Come and save me in the chorus. I wonder if it was a typing error somewhere that's ended up becoming official.

The come save me construction, we'll call the serial verb construction (because that's what it is, basically, though it's not as productive as in languages that have proper serial verb constructions), and let's call the other, with and, the conjoined verb construction. It probably has a proper name but I'm teaching in a few minutes so don't have time for extensive (or any) research.

To my ear, the serial verb construction is much more a US usage, and in the UK we would tend towards the conjoined verb construction. This is unsubstantiated by anything other than my own intuitions, and corpus research would no doubt prove me wrong (especially as I think the serial verb construction has increased in use over here in recent years - though that may well be the recency illusion). But there we are, that's my intuition.

So then, I thought, where are they from, these Jagwar Ma people (or this Jagwar Ma person)? Rather than, you know, google it, I used linguistics. First, I eliminated the US, or at least most of it. Almost all US accents are rhotic (r-pronouncing) (some are not, in the South for instance), so they would pronounce the /r/ at the end of Jagwar. That would mean that the name wouldn't rhyme, and surely you don't give yourself a name like that without intending it to rhyme. That leaves the UK as a possibility, but what about Australia, for example? They're also non-rhotic down under. Well, it turns out that Jagwar Ma is from Sydney (yeah, I googled it), which fits just nicely with the non-rhoticity and also makes the words rhyme very well. I can't easily find out if the serial verb construction is more common than the conjoined verb construction, or vice versa. I'd bet that the singer/song-writer has the conjoined verb construction, though.

A side note: I expect that, if the serial verb construction is indeed on the rise in the UK, some people would complain about this terrible Americanism sweeping the language of today's young people. But Wikipedia tells me that Maggie Tallerman (1998) gives this as a construction surviving from Early Modern English, so yaa boo sucks to those people.

Kate Bush, Eskimos and snow words

It's a well-known linguistic myth that 'Eskimos have [insert high number here] words for snow'. This has been conclusively shown to be stupid*, and I think a lot of people now know this. But it's still a nice little 'factoid' and Kate Bush has made good use of it in her new album, 50 words for snow. Via Language Log, which documents this sort of thing, I found out about the album and now a link to listen to the song online.

Ben Zimmer at LL has put the link, together with the lyrics, online in a nice blogpost on the topic. The title song features Stephen Fry speaking the titular 50 words (English words and phrases, not Eskimo - although there is a Klingon one) and the results are really quite beautiful. The words are a mix of nice-but-nonsense and witty, like blown from polar fur, spangladasha and icyskidski.

*For many reasons, argued persuasively by Laura Martin some years ago. For instance, what do you mean by Eskimo? It's kind of a blanket term for a group of languages. What do you mean by 'word'? That family of languages is polysynthetic, which means there's a heck of a lot of affixes and you can make many words from a single root. In fact, a single 'word' can actually be a whole sentence, making the number of 'words' presumably infinite.