Express Yourself: A Letter of Invitation to Language Teachers Everywhere

Dear Esteemed Colleagues:

I can say "Language is not a" in my honors class and the students will respond "word to word translation." This is one of my catch phrases this year, along with "staring is not studying" and "how you feel and where you are, always use the verb estar." I use them so often that I'm thinking of having posters made to hang in my room of what I dub as Cleggisms.

Language is not a word to word translation.

I began saying this two years ago when I collected journals from my students and found the rampant use of translators. It was frustrating and that's putting it mildly. I always start the year talking to the students about what cheating is and how translators are not acceptable. I talk to them about online dictionaries and have embraced wordreference.com as a mainly reliable online dictionary.

However given how trusting my students are of anything online, be it translators or online dictionaries, I started looking into Google Translator and how it works. I put together a twenty minute lesson on translators wherein I wrote a paragraph in English, put it through Google translator and then translated that back to English. We talked about how translators can sometimes give you an idea but they largely work on the idea that languages do translate word to word but languages don't. Languages require context and meaning, not simply a word for a word.

PWC: My Second Family

PART ONE

Two years ago, in early fall, I was invited to attend a CDWP leadership retreat. I never really viewed myself as a leader as I’ve always seen myself as a follower or wallflower but I said yes since I knew a couple people who were also going. Unfortunately, that weekend I was terribly ill and was unable to attend. When the group met again in December, I popped the address into my GPS and finally found out how far Averill Park was from anything I knew. I entered a stranger’s house and broke bread with a dozen people, only three of whom I really knew. We began the meeting with writing, in true CDWP form. The prompt given was “What do you think is our future? What do you want to get out of this?” This then led to a rich discussion as we talked about the function of CDWP in our lives and what we needed.

In reviewing my writing from that evening, I see that I wrote “I would really like to be involved with some writing project group to push myself to write personally/professionally, to refine pieces and get feedback or even co-write something to be sent to a newspaper, journal or the NWP/CDWP sites.” I remember having a discussion with another participant during which he expressed his frustration that teachers are being given knowledge, being handed common core, being told the best ways to do something and that we are ineffective. I wrote down this following conclusion from this discussion: Be producers of knowledge and not just consumers.