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Friday, April 15, 2011

The URL bummer

So I decide to dedicate a blog to my student teaching experience, and EVERY blog address I come up with is unavailable and already in use: toocoolforschool, tooschoolforcool, missenglish, miss-english, studentteacher, thestudentteacher. What in the world?? After numerous attempts, a mysterious light fell upon my fat dictionary. Aha! missoxford it is! Not – some word-loving blogger has it already. And so, I settle for misschambers instead (the better English dictionary), except that that’s been taken too…
At present, I am stuck with missplaced-e, for a blog titled Miss(placed) English. Agreed, it is not the best of titles, but it hints at the language errors students are wont to make in their writing; and conveys the sense of displacement of Standard English in a bilingual Capetonian society (in South Africa).

3 comments:

  1. I find it quite fascinating and innovative that you try to incorporate modern technology and social media in your teaching courses. It is indeed a paradigm all instructors should follow as it offers many opportunities and options. The "miss(placed) english" is a fine title especially since your society is bilungual.
    You are a literature instructor right? Do you have any particular interest in some literary trend? I was recently reading Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka and I was excited. I also read Sartre who is more of a philosopher though, not that the others are not profound of course...

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  2. Literature instructor is one nice way of putting it. Unfortunately, language teachers in South Africa cover have to cover everything from grammar to creative writing and cartoon/ advert analysis.

    The Black Consciousness Movement (BC) of 1960's S.A filtered into the writings of activist poets and authors of the time, who considered themselves to be BC poets. For some reason, i feel that i can understand this literary trend and its writing theories/ ideas, and i appreciate the clear depiction of those ideas in their work. The Romantic Poets were an interesting political bunch, too: vibrant and sometimes shocking.

    Kunders's "the unbearable lightness of being" is a book on my to-read list. And Sartre, well, his existential theories pervade many Modern and Postmodern writings, so much so that i doubt that i would be able to fully understand some of them without reference to him.

    Your questions regarding these authors are a cause for a bit of anxiety...
    The last paragraph of my post titled, "teachers: the unacknowledged experts in their fields" explains it:)

    Oh, and you nicked the (get over it) Royal Wedding post before i could!

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  3. Oh I see. The peculiar conditions in your country do not allow you to focus on a special topic.

    It is the unbearable lightness of being that I also read and Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

    About the wedding, well what I can I say... I already said it in my post... But you can still write something about it.

    Well that's all for now. Keep up the good work!

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