Re: conlanging during class (Re: Grammatical Summary of Kemata)

On 15 Dec, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:
>
> > Q: Since it is the teacher who knows and the student who wishes to
> > know, why is it that the teacher asks most of the questions?
> >
> > A: Because the teacher's purpose is not to provide the student with
> > information, but to break down the conceptual blocks in the
> > student's mind that prevent him from realizing what he knows.
> >
> >         --Northrop Frye (paraphrased) (following the _Meno_)
>
> On the other hand, most people don't *actually* believe in the
> theory of metempsychosis on which that statement was premised,
> so it should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

    Personally, I can see the usefulness of that approach in something
like psychotherapy or mystical teaching
(Hey! _I_ didn't equate them!  ;-)  ) or even (up to a certain point)
in science where what is important is not so much imparting information
as guiding a student while he/she does research: mental, mystical, or
empirical. (Although, IMHO, the usefulness for a science student would be,
in practice, kind of limited when discussing topics for which the student
would need access to internationally financed super-labs in order to answer
the questions!)
    Actually, I find this technique useful (among other techniques) in some
of the therapy work I do (again, where _guiding_, not teaching is important)
    OTOH, I fail to see how just asking questions can benefit someone who
has no prior knowledge of something and no way to experiment in order
to find out. For example, there are a whole lot of natlangs that, AFAIK,
I am totally ignorant of. Suppose I wanted to learn one of them.
How would only asking me questions, using only one of the langs I do speak,
enable me to "break down the conceptual blocks in the student's
mind that prevent him from realizing what he knows" and enable me to leave
the teaching situation with a full competence in that lang?
    BTW, been there, done that!
    [Rant warning in effect!]: At a critical time in my studies of
the Russian language at University, I had to spend a term with a prof
who more or less followed that philosophy:
Every class was conducted entirely in English!
No Russian speaking; no Russian reading; no Russian practice;
no Russian nohow! (The guy himself wasn't even Russian!)
At the end of the term, I not only was  _not_ speaking like a native,
for some strange reason, I was even worse off than when I began with him!
The next term I had, for a prof, a slavic linguist
who was an excellant teacher, but even he couldn't repair all the damage
the other guy did with his "teaching" in English about Russian!
I finished my studies of the Russian lang with, shall we say, a rather
_imperfect_  mastery of the subject! :-(
    [End of rant]

Dan Sulani
------------------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.

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