“Made in China,” reads the sticker on the backside of my rubber Tomahawk. As you drive through the downtown area you see Native Americans in full suit, and I don’t mean button up and tie. Yes, they are dressed like not so true Native Americans from the past. The article is certain to tell us that this is not the true Native American culture.
Driving on into Cherokee you will see a Visitors Center/Museum, it contains many artifacts of Cherokee culture, and they aren’t made of rubber. The Native American ancestors of this region are very excited in sharing with visitors their culture; they are the first to tell you that Native American life is nothing mike depicted in comic books or western movies. This Mecca of artifacts offers tours every ten minutes and shows off Native American beadwork, pottery, canoe hulling, blowguns, weaving, arrowheads, dwellings and more.
As an outsider coming into this culture it would be a good idea to think about these possessions in the Museum as items in your home. Asking the right questions isn’t always the biggest thing when observing a difference in culture, especially when you are in the position where you can sit and listen to others questions.
The article includes broad information to the true and not so true culture of that Native Americans. It also tells of a place in the area that a visitor can go to find out specific information about the culture. During these demonstrations one can learn specific information, however a fieldworker could go and listen to questions from specific visitors or even ask questions that have to do with the project that they are doing. In example if the fieldworker was doing research on growing plants and how Native American in the past they could ask the person demonstrating the Agriculture part of the tour. The fieldworker wouldn’t want his questions to get a broad sense of how they produced bigger better plants in the past. They wouldn’t want the answer, “Well they put fish into the ground when they are planting the crops.” A fieldworker would want to know how and why they did this, when they began doing it. What effect did it have on the plant? How much bigger were they?
As far as an overall picture of the culture of the Cherokee, a fieldworker may want to know why they are so keen on telling visitors about the true culture of their ancestors. Why did they stop doing certain things their ancestors did ect? As a fieldworker, you want accurate answer to the questions you are answering; therefore it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do some research on how it was done in an encyclopedia. Then use that information to ask specific technical questions to the tour guides in this specific example.
Native American culture is a very deep and well thought out culture; they had one of the first forms of written language. Also many others firsts and things stolen from these Native American in the past have had its effect on our society. But look to what degree we have forced them to change. Think about the picture we have depicted of them, big feather suits, and tepees. None of this is completely true. I hope they don’t have such crazy ideas of how we live.
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/living/article/0,1406,KNS_2796_4858703,00.html
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
“Elvis is still alive, and is living on the moon,”
Every day we spend a majority of our time doing something that get absolutely nothing done. At the end of the day sometimes we look back and say, “What happened to those five hours.” We are also very intrigued by things that make absolutely no sense or are out of the ordinary. How often is a baby born talking and telling about Heaven and how great of person God is?
When learning rhetoric, it said basically to get the reader interested. How do you get the reader interested? Do exactly what I said above say something that they don’t see every day. Many of the magazines at the grocery counter catch my attention. I am educated enough not to believe that a dogs body and Hillary Clinton’s head had been fused and is running for president. And I know that Aliens aren’t leaving their offspring on the earth.
The reading we did for last week’s class did just that as well caught my attention in the beginning. Language has always interested me and I love to listen to others speak. I love being in a college setting because of the people from not only around to US but from around the globe are all in this one setting. It is sort of a mish mash of languages. Sometimes as I sit in the cafeterias I listen to other groups of students talk and have a hard time understanding them. I have noticed many differences in language and mostly it depends on where a person is from.
Our reading focused more on the way structure of our sentences in inborn into us, or so it seems. And how the sounds of a child’s native language sooths it as it is in the womb. I think that is totally miscued, it is not testable, you cannot rip the baby out of one mother and put it into another to see if this is true or not. But think about this, different languages take on different sentence structure. I am aware that most follow a Subject Verb Object, however many put different adjectives in front of the noun or vice versa. There is no way that this can be inborn into infants.
I am interested in how all this works, but the reading went on forever with tons of examples. OK, we believe you after the first five examples. And as far as languages with gender yes it is hard. Many people wonder how someone can learn a second language or even the first for that matter with gender rules, where not only people but objects have genders. It is somewhat confusing but it makes sense in the way that the objects are grouped together, and you know the basics of what is male and female.
Last thing! An update on the Veteran that likes to make his keep by standing on the Entrance and Exit ramps, I seen him again last night, right after it started raining I really felt sorry for him if he is telling the truth. But I just can’t make myself believe that he has been trapped in Knoxville for this long against his will. I don’t know I kind of want to go buy him a bus ticket and see if he leaves. If as a class we pooled our money together we could get him home!
Thursday, January 24, 2008
C'est la crème de la crème ! Tu la sais !
Every child pretends to know how to speak a different language, write in cursive, and conduct a band - the usual kid things to do. It just so happens that my mother was always drawn to those infomercials that advertised something with an “unbeatable value” and that allowed the person to call in with a credit card and order a specific product with “6 low, low payments of 27.75” Especially the ones right out of the 80’s. This particular one started with, “Yes, that’s French they are speaking, and no these children aren’t French. They’re American, and they have acquired these amazing new language skills from Muzzy” (British Broadcasting Company). I am not so sure what compelled her to order these video tapes, but they were pretty awesome.
Je suis un garçon, et je parle français. I am a boy, and I speak French. This was the first sentence I learned to say. They cartoons were in fact dated but they kept my attention. I learned a lot of vocabulary and, in fact, I can recall the French word for scarf, “écharpe” faster than I can recall the word in English. I still find myself at a loss for certain vocabulary words in English, especially the words I learned in French before knowing what the English word was.
Quand j’étais une école Américaine, j’étudie français pour 4 ans. Quelquefois j’oublie que tous le monde ne parlent pas français. See like I said I sometimes forget that the world doesn’t speak French. I usually almost always make grammatical mistakes when I am trying to write a test, or write things down in French because I never really had to do that. I began by learning the basics how to count, the alphabet, and colors. I understood spoken French, and finally I began to pick up and be able to speak. I had the vocabulary and basic sentence structure in the present tense before I began to take formal classes in high school.
The class began with the stuff I already knew and stayed that way for about the first semester. Many of my classmates were surprised at how quickly I was to respond in French and that I didn’t have to take the time to convert it into English, think of the answer, convert the answer back into French and respond. Over the four years that I took French in high school, I learned almost all the different tenses and the irregular verbs and many things needed to have a in depth conversation. I can read through French text about as quickly as I can read through English. And, as a matter of fact, I type on a French keyboard.
“Thanks mom, for making me look like a queer,” apparently it is unacceptable that a boy be smart in school, particularly in a language that I must admit is very feminine. But I just liked the language; it gave me a sense of privacy. The French professor and I could hold a conversation in the middle of the classroom speaking about the other students, and no one had a clue what we were talking about. The school that I went to only offered two semesters of French for credit. Nevertheless, I stayed in those same two classes all four years. The professor wrote to the school board and they ended up giving me credit for French III because they allowed it as an independent study. I just had to read books and write essays and that sort of thing.
Over the four years I formed a decent relationship with the professor and helped out in all the French I and II classes modeling and translating complicated directions. This helped me by challenging me in something that is not readily available to hear in Tennessee, and helped the others learn French faster by not speaking any English inside that classroom. Every semester the classes moved faster and faster and we formed a great system of teaching. I became skilled in the methods of teaching a foreign language, and I decided that this is what I want to someday do.
I really enjoy teaching something that people don’t already know. For the most part in school students’ move through learning every year what a noun is, what a verb is, etcetera. But a language gives you a fresh slate to work with and that is why I want to teach this. The biggest barrier is getting the students to throw their humility out the window, forget what they look or sound like while they are in the classroom and don’t be afraid to speak up.
Moving on into the future to why I am here now. “I am a French major.” What has really thrown me for a loop is telling someone my major, and they give you that look like why. I still am very much in love with the language and the culture. But how many guys do you know with this as their major? I one day want to teach French to English students but I am not so sure that this is what I want to do right when I get out of school, but I am sure it will have something to do with language.
But I sincerely thank my mom for introducing me to something that I have grown to love so much and fascinates me, to the point that I notice people that are foreigners based on the way they hold their utensils at the dinner table or count on their fingers. I listen to the way people speak and am very interested in how we all learn things from our parents, from TV, and from school and how all of it finds a way to mix together. Others go through life saying something that is totally acceptable where they live and never notice that what they are saying sounds weird to other people that haven’t grown up in the same place. I am not saying that I don’t because I do, but I know when and when not to use certain sentences and structure in spoken language. Language is probably the most important thing to everyone, they just don’t realize it.
Je suis un garçon, et je parle français. I am a boy, and I speak French. This was the first sentence I learned to say. They cartoons were in fact dated but they kept my attention. I learned a lot of vocabulary and, in fact, I can recall the French word for scarf, “écharpe” faster than I can recall the word in English. I still find myself at a loss for certain vocabulary words in English, especially the words I learned in French before knowing what the English word was.
Quand j’étais une école Américaine, j’étudie français pour 4 ans. Quelquefois j’oublie que tous le monde ne parlent pas français. See like I said I sometimes forget that the world doesn’t speak French. I usually almost always make grammatical mistakes when I am trying to write a test, or write things down in French because I never really had to do that. I began by learning the basics how to count, the alphabet, and colors. I understood spoken French, and finally I began to pick up and be able to speak. I had the vocabulary and basic sentence structure in the present tense before I began to take formal classes in high school.
The class began with the stuff I already knew and stayed that way for about the first semester. Many of my classmates were surprised at how quickly I was to respond in French and that I didn’t have to take the time to convert it into English, think of the answer, convert the answer back into French and respond. Over the four years that I took French in high school, I learned almost all the different tenses and the irregular verbs and many things needed to have a in depth conversation. I can read through French text about as quickly as I can read through English. And, as a matter of fact, I type on a French keyboard.
“Thanks mom, for making me look like a queer,” apparently it is unacceptable that a boy be smart in school, particularly in a language that I must admit is very feminine. But I just liked the language; it gave me a sense of privacy. The French professor and I could hold a conversation in the middle of the classroom speaking about the other students, and no one had a clue what we were talking about. The school that I went to only offered two semesters of French for credit. Nevertheless, I stayed in those same two classes all four years. The professor wrote to the school board and they ended up giving me credit for French III because they allowed it as an independent study. I just had to read books and write essays and that sort of thing.
Over the four years I formed a decent relationship with the professor and helped out in all the French I and II classes modeling and translating complicated directions. This helped me by challenging me in something that is not readily available to hear in Tennessee, and helped the others learn French faster by not speaking any English inside that classroom. Every semester the classes moved faster and faster and we formed a great system of teaching. I became skilled in the methods of teaching a foreign language, and I decided that this is what I want to someday do.
I really enjoy teaching something that people don’t already know. For the most part in school students’ move through learning every year what a noun is, what a verb is, etcetera. But a language gives you a fresh slate to work with and that is why I want to teach this. The biggest barrier is getting the students to throw their humility out the window, forget what they look or sound like while they are in the classroom and don’t be afraid to speak up.
Moving on into the future to why I am here now. “I am a French major.” What has really thrown me for a loop is telling someone my major, and they give you that look like why. I still am very much in love with the language and the culture. But how many guys do you know with this as their major? I one day want to teach French to English students but I am not so sure that this is what I want to do right when I get out of school, but I am sure it will have something to do with language.
But I sincerely thank my mom for introducing me to something that I have grown to love so much and fascinates me, to the point that I notice people that are foreigners based on the way they hold their utensils at the dinner table or count on their fingers. I listen to the way people speak and am very interested in how we all learn things from our parents, from TV, and from school and how all of it finds a way to mix together. Others go through life saying something that is totally acceptable where they live and never notice that what they are saying sounds weird to other people that haven’t grown up in the same place. I am not saying that I don’t because I do, but I know when and when not to use certain sentences and structure in spoken language. Language is probably the most important thing to everyone, they just don’t realize it.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Post For Class Number 1 - Random Thoughts
In responses to what was discussed in the classroom and what we have read individually I would have to consider the last two days readings to be those that stood out to me. Firstly, I would like to call some attention to the attitude of the writer of “Me Talk Pretty One Day”. He says that there was no shutting him up before he went to this school that taught classes outside of his own language. In his case, French, I don’t particularly understand how the attitude of the teacher would make him no longer want to talk to people outside the classroom. He must notice that a HUGE part of learning another language is speaking it in everyday life, and by doing that you will make many mistakes.
Personally, I like when someone asks me if I am fluent in French, usually because this is my major, I answer yes. A definition of fluency is usually misunderstood. People that have grown up speaking English their whole lives are fluent in English correct? OK, so the reader of this blog is fluent in English? Well then sir/ma’am please tell me a definition of upbraid? Most people that ask that question assume that by me knowing and being fluent in French that I MUST know every word. This is huge misconception of fluency. I feel that fluency is when you can understand written, spoken, and be able to identify what is and what isn’t a particular language.
Back to “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” I feel that he must see himself slipping into the wrong direction by avoiding talking all the time, however, I am realizing the overall attitude of a Frenchman and an American trying, but butchering, their language. I also understand that this person is in charge of assigning a grade to him. However, on the contrary the Frenchman makes many mistakes in English as well, but he conveys his point and we Americans understand. COME ON FRENCHIE GIVE HIM SOME CREDIT! HE IS TRYING TO LEARN YOUR LANGUAGE!
OH! This brings me to a follow up to a previous post, about the guy that was standing on the exit ramp, at the Cedar Bluff exit. I noticed him again the other day on my way to work. I noticed this time his sign had changed from a clichéd, “Will work for food,” to a much more convincing sign that must have struck the heart of many passing autos. He now displays a sign that reads, “Vietnam Vet 19XX – 19XX on way home to Texas PLEASE HELP!” First, I don’t want to sound unsympathetic but you can see from my earlier post that this really upsets me, seeing him every day and knowing the amount of money he must bring in. But KUDOS for the Vietnam Veteran hat, which must prove you really were a Veteran, because everyone knows you can’t go get one of those from Wal-Mart. What I feel that by doing this he probably did increase the number of donations because they feel they owe him something. This really ties back into what was discussed last semester. But it amuses me what changing one letter, one word, one sentence can do in coaxing someone to do what you want or believe you.
This is getting sort of lengthy so, I would rather not go into the spiel I have on the lady that labels herself as “crippled.” But, quickly here is my reaction. I don’t feel it is ok for someone to call themselves something but expect other people not to, or find it rude to call others what they call themselves. That is what sends mixed signals out. For example a homosexual person calling another homosexual a ”faggot,” but gets upset when a heterosexual calls a homosexual a “faggot.” This goes on with many other things such as the word “nigger” in African American culture.
DISCLAIMER: These views are possessed by me. Sorry if you do not agree! And my no means am I implying that homosexuals are “faggots,” or African Americans are “niggers.” However I am implying that the bum is a liar! :-)
Personally, I like when someone asks me if I am fluent in French, usually because this is my major, I answer yes. A definition of fluency is usually misunderstood. People that have grown up speaking English their whole lives are fluent in English correct? OK, so the reader of this blog is fluent in English? Well then sir/ma’am please tell me a definition of upbraid? Most people that ask that question assume that by me knowing and being fluent in French that I MUST know every word. This is huge misconception of fluency. I feel that fluency is when you can understand written, spoken, and be able to identify what is and what isn’t a particular language.
Back to “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” I feel that he must see himself slipping into the wrong direction by avoiding talking all the time, however, I am realizing the overall attitude of a Frenchman and an American trying, but butchering, their language. I also understand that this person is in charge of assigning a grade to him. However, on the contrary the Frenchman makes many mistakes in English as well, but he conveys his point and we Americans understand. COME ON FRENCHIE GIVE HIM SOME CREDIT! HE IS TRYING TO LEARN YOUR LANGUAGE!
OH! This brings me to a follow up to a previous post, about the guy that was standing on the exit ramp, at the Cedar Bluff exit. I noticed him again the other day on my way to work. I noticed this time his sign had changed from a clichéd, “Will work for food,” to a much more convincing sign that must have struck the heart of many passing autos. He now displays a sign that reads, “Vietnam Vet 19XX – 19XX on way home to Texas PLEASE HELP!” First, I don’t want to sound unsympathetic but you can see from my earlier post that this really upsets me, seeing him every day and knowing the amount of money he must bring in. But KUDOS for the Vietnam Veteran hat, which must prove you really were a Veteran, because everyone knows you can’t go get one of those from Wal-Mart. What I feel that by doing this he probably did increase the number of donations because they feel they owe him something. This really ties back into what was discussed last semester. But it amuses me what changing one letter, one word, one sentence can do in coaxing someone to do what you want or believe you.
This is getting sort of lengthy so, I would rather not go into the spiel I have on the lady that labels herself as “crippled.” But, quickly here is my reaction. I don’t feel it is ok for someone to call themselves something but expect other people not to, or find it rude to call others what they call themselves. That is what sends mixed signals out. For example a homosexual person calling another homosexual a ”faggot,” but gets upset when a heterosexual calls a homosexual a “faggot.” This goes on with many other things such as the word “nigger” in African American culture.
DISCLAIMER: These views are possessed by me. Sorry if you do not agree! And my no means am I implying that homosexuals are “faggots,” or African Americans are “niggers.” However I am implying that the bum is a liar! :-)
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Random Things
For my first post I want to tell everyone about two things that really struck me as absurd today. So for those of you that don’t know I work at Best Buy off of Cedar Bluff. Today on my way to work I pulled out onto Philip Fulmer Way I drove a bit and came up onto the parking garage that is on the right. As a driver pulled out of the garage in front of the car that was driving about 100 feet in front of me. The car honked its horn, and the dumbass that was driving the jeep that pulled out looked at the lady in the car like she was an idiot and he had done nothing wrong. It all seemed as though it lasted forever and I couldn’t help but notice the Buckle Up sign posted on the exit of the garage that he had just pulled out from. Then as I glanced back over to him, he grabs his seat belt and buckled up. I found it very ironic that we do absolutely nothing to protect ourselves unless something bad happens that reminds us that we need to do so. Even then we only stick with it long enough until it is old news. The last thing I have to note on that is how crazy it is that everyone feels that they are the best driver and that they are doing nothing wrong. It’s just something to think about.
Next thing is this guy that stands on the Cedar Bluff exit holding a sign that changes from time to time but usually says, “Looking for work” or “Will work for food.” He sits on a trash bag full of clothes and it there about 80% of the time. Well it took me some time to get through the light, and it amazes me how many people actually give this guy money in the time that I waited to get through, I know at least 4 people gave him money. Even if they only gave him a dollar each, I only was at the light for about 7 minutes so he made 4 dollars in 7 minutes. If I made that much in that amount of time that would mean that I would make 34.28 an hour. That is a hell of a lot more than I make and god forbid he has to get up and walk to a person’s car 34 times an hour. It is hard for me to get this straight in my head, if this is fair or if he really deserves it of what. I would like to hear everyone’s reply on this.
Next thing is this guy that stands on the Cedar Bluff exit holding a sign that changes from time to time but usually says, “Looking for work” or “Will work for food.” He sits on a trash bag full of clothes and it there about 80% of the time. Well it took me some time to get through the light, and it amazes me how many people actually give this guy money in the time that I waited to get through, I know at least 4 people gave him money. Even if they only gave him a dollar each, I only was at the light for about 7 minutes so he made 4 dollars in 7 minutes. If I made that much in that amount of time that would mean that I would make 34.28 an hour. That is a hell of a lot more than I make and god forbid he has to get up and walk to a person’s car 34 times an hour. It is hard for me to get this straight in my head, if this is fair or if he really deserves it of what. I would like to hear everyone’s reply on this.
Friday, January 11, 2008
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