Lingo Dancing


My bent is academic, apparently.

The positive upshot of this is that, one day a week for the next two months or so, I'll be teaching "Academic English". The downside is that "Academic English" is the kind of tedious noncommunication used in academic papers.

Specifically I'm teaching IELTS. No one can remember what it stands for, but it's both a syllabus and a system of grading student's ability in the English they'll need for university education. There's nine levels, from 1 (barely able to communicate) to 9 (better than most native speakers).

To get into an anglophone university you'll need at least a 5 - or 7 if it's a posh one.

Considering that today's class gleefully produced sentences like "When will the television have been being watched by you tomorrow night?" - but had never come across "Debit Card" or "Traffic Jam" before - it may not be a difficult assignment.

I ought to take an IELTS test myself. To determine what actual level I needed to come top of the class in two degrees. I might scrape a 4.

In the meantime, if you look to the column of delicious links to the left, you might see five different programs and two scripting languages for creating new - and new kinds of - soundmaking software. And seeing as I don't know which, if any of them, is best for the slightly unusual projects I have in mind, I'm having to look at all of them.

The trouble with trying to invent something no one's tried before is, you don't know what the suitable tools are. I wonder how many materials were tried for silicon chips before someone hit on silicon?

I just started to write that I'd be seeing C tomorrow. Then there was an exchange of txts casting doubt on this and postponing the meet. Then after I deleted the sentence, more txts to the effect that we can meet tomorrow after all.

Have I mentioned my frequent suspicion that as soon as you write something on your blog, it ceases to be true?

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