Wrapping Up

Presents aren’t the only things I’ve been wrapping up. In fact, I have precious few presents to wrap. It’s a lean Christmas, y’all. To my daughters I’m bequeathing a couple things I’ve had for some time. To everyone else, I give only my good wishes, which saves on wrapping paper.

Last week I decided I needed to exercise my rusty critical thinking skills in the area of language pedagogy, since I sure feel like I’m floundering in the classroom. I determined that the path to my inspiration lay in the 500-plus pages of a volume about current trends in sociolinguistics. Here’s a taste:

Much, although not all, of the qualitative research to which we now turn, particularly that done in the ethnographic and interpretive  traditions, uses an examination of interactional processes as a principal site for identification of language ideologies, for which we will situate the pertinent research traditions and then examine some recent studies.

The text was so impenetrable that I was unable to learn anything, except possibly about contemporary sociolinguists themselves: what they lack in creativity and wit they compensate for in opacity. It can’t be easy to write something so completely severed from the vitality of the experience they attempt to describe.

Today I transformed the room that most recently was occupied by Molly into a grandbaby room. Here’s what it looks like now.