Erik TP6

I began my session with Hyejin by showing a video from Ted.com. Patricia Ryan, a TEFL teacher for thirty years in Kuwait, spoke about the cons of English growing as the prime bridge language for intelligence. With a love for anthropological linguistics, I agreed with many of her main points. She emphasized how a world with 6,000 languages could decline to 600 languages in a matter of a century. Currently, a language dies every 14 days! But ours thoughts are constructed by language. And each language inherently has a set of unique, complicated concepts engrained into it. Overall, the point was that language diversity leads to a broad array of intelligences. Hyejin agreed enthusiastically, and enjoyed it as much as I did.

We then shifted to an essay by George Orwell—the God of all English writers, at least in my book. She found it easier to read than David Sedaris, and we looked over each character he described, and how he constructed the mental picture for the reader. I then assigned her to pick one of her closest friends or family members to describe in a dialogue. She would start out by listing adjectives about that person, even the contradictory ones. The point is that each person is complex, and shows a diversity of behaviors for different situations. Then in her dialogue scene, she would pick the behaviors that applied to the scenario, and humanize the person for me to grasp that aspect of them. Since she’s working towards a PhD in social work, the ability to describe behaviors seems fit for the professional field. I'm glad that this type of writing seems to work for her--she even says its fun.