Randomness and Light

Science Fiction, fantasy, historical romance, paranormal romance, non-fiction history books - escapism and knowledge. I find it very hard to read popular science books about subjects that I’m halfway knowledgeable about. 

I’m actively working on two languages right now, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, and will soon add Korean into the rotation. 

My motivation for this is that at heart, I love languages and linguistics. My current job, albeit exciting and fulfilling, is pretty far away from what originally got me into academia. The three languages mentioned above are ones that are beneficial for my work and linguistically interesting. 

Spanish 

I have many potential and/or current collaborators in the Spanish speaking world (including Latinamerica). I can fluently read Spanish, and understand quite a bit of spoken Spanish, but my speaking and writing both suck. 

Goal: I want to be able to have work-related conversations, both face to face and via email, with Spanish colleagues. 

Method: Maintenance mode. Sentences using ClozeMaster to help me remember vocabulary, additionally maybe some novel reading .

Mandarin Chinese (focus) 

It’s a tonal language. Its writing system is an almighty challenge. Its vocabulary and writing system have profoundly influenced two completely unrelated languages, Korean and Japanese, to the extent that Chinese is a key to East Asian languages. In any given year, 50-60% of the students in the MSc Programme that I lead with a colleague from another College are Chinese. And I’m poised to take over our existing teaching relationships with three Chinese Universities. I want to do better than ni2 hao3. 

Goal: I want to be able to buy food, ask for directions, and have simple conversations with Chinese people without butchering the tones. I also want to be able to read what my students post on WeChat. 

Method: Active acquisition. 30 new words on Memrise per day using the standard Chinese courses, 20 ClozeMaster multiple choice “insert the right word” sentences per day. Sometimes I read about the grammar, which helps me make sense of the sentences I see. 

Korean

I can already kind of sort of read the alphabet, and I have an active vocabulary of 10 words and expressions of Survival Korean. Korean is a language isolate with a fascinating verb system and some very tricky honorifics - not to mention the phonetically fascinating three way distinction in the stop consonant system, which I want to learn to produce one day. Also, I have an active collaboration with colleagues at KAIST. 

Goal: I want to be able to buy food, ask for directions, and have simple conversations with Korean people without being grossly impolite. 

Technically, I should not have any spare time at all. I have so much to do at work that I could very easily routinely pull 60-70 hour weeks. However, in the course of my 43 years on this planet, I have found that if I routinely exceed 50 hours per week at work, and that if work is my only intellectual pursuit, I won’t do terribly well on the mental health front. 

So this is my effort at documenting my life outside of work. I’ll use this Tumblr for it. My goals are: 

- learn languages (#studyblr)

- read books (#bookblr)

James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh, which is in the process of being rebuilt, is already too small for its catchment area. 

The main building, called the Malala Building, opened in 2015. For the School Year 2016/2017, the number of potential S1 students already exceeds the number of available places, 200, by around 30. 

So far, so much business as usual. What is deeply troubling is how the current council is dealing with this shortfall of spaces.

Let me be clear: the current council is not responsible for misjudging capacity. James Gillespies High School is the designated School for children in Gaelic Medium Education, and at the time the new buildings were planned, the council was in denial about the growth in Primary School rolls and in particular about the growth of Gaelic Medium Education. 

A primary Gaelic Medium provision that started out as a couple of kids in a special unit at the fabulous Tollcross Primary School in the 80′s and 90′s now fills the old Bonnington Primary School building in Leith with intakes of 50-60 P1s per year. James Gillespie’s High School intake limits were clearly not designed to deal with those numbers; they operated on the unsustainable and incorrect assumption that there would be 10-15 Gaelic Medium kids per year. 

Now, if you were a councillor faced with this situation, what would you do? 

Would you recognize the need for a proper solution, and start consulting with parents, teachers, and schools as soon as possible? After all, you know the school rolls of all relevant primary schools at the start of the 2015/2016 school year, and you are aware of ever increasing numbers of Gaelic Medium kids that will be heading into High School come 2017.

Or would you suggest sending 9 out of 24 P7 kids off to a different High School at the last minute, where Gaelic provision is inadequate and where they will be separated from their classmates of 7 years, and pretend that this is a long-term solution to Gaelic Medium Education at High School level - making a mockery of the long, hard work of the Gaelic Medium teachers at James Gillespie’s High to establish proper Gaelic Medium high school education? 

Guess what the council did, and guess when P7 kids and parents heard - last week, a long time after transition preparations to James Gillespie’s had begun. 

I am not sure why the committee thought it would get away with this - maybe because Gaelic kids have a special status in the system, and it is much easier to cut away at a special status than to do the hard work of reviewing the provision of Gaelic Medium Education at High School level. 

But I am sure that what happened to Gaelic Medium High School provision can happen to any school. 

The Gaelic Medium parents only want the same as all parents, a say in the education of their children. 

Gaelic Medium parents want to be consulted and heard. Please support us in our campaign.

Appendix: Some reasons why splitting up kids from Gaelic Medium Primary Schools isn’t as easy as shoving a couple of kids off to a different school, courtesy of the Parent Council

Dividing the GME community across schools would be detrimental to the education of the children, to their emotional wellbeing, and to the development of Gaelic education in Edinburgh.