metaphors are easier to learn when put in context

The trouble with metaphors is that a lot gets lost in translation.

On the other hand, metaphor is everywhere - and is the stuff of language, whether it's the language of money... the language of religion... the language of love...

A lot of metaphors are also clichés - but, then, we all speak in clichés and as a language learner we want to know what people normally and regularly use. 

In the latest from Lexical Lab's regular blog by Hugh Dellar for teachers and students, we hear about Metaphors we live by: "a company is like a ship":

In their seminal 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggested that metaphors are a tool that allow us to use what we know about our physical and social environment to understand more – and to talk abut – abstract things like time, emotions, work and mental activity...

We could indeed go online and find lists of 25 metaphors about sailing and phrases and sayings that have a nautical origin - but, actually, having such language in an entertaining story-like piece means we are much more likely to understand it and so be able to remember it and use it!

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what is 'merit'?

This is something most of us think is a good thing - but what is 'merit' exactly?

the quality of being good and deserving praise:

MERIT | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

And what do we mean by 'deserving' what you get?

to have earned or to be given something because of the way you have behaved or the qualities you have:

DESERVE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

Most of us believe that 'merit' deserves recognition and should be rewarded:

In a meritocracy, the people are chosen who are thought to be the best.

Meritocracy - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But do we really 'merit' or 'deserve' what we get?

Do you feel lucky? The answer, well known to psychologists, is that you probably don’t. You probably think you got where you are today through willpower and elbow grease. We chronically underestimate luck’s role, and this seems to get worse the richer we get; surveys show that the wealthiest are least likely to attribute their fortunes to, well, good fortune. They also seem to be meaner: one ingenious study found drivers of luxury cars were more likely to cut others off than those in cheaper vehicles.

It’s hardly surprising many such people oppose taxation and government spending: why should others get a handout if they didn’t need one? The ironic result is that they vote against the very policies that helped them get lucky to begin with. In a recent Atlantic essay, Robert Frank, an economist who has studied attitudes to chance, quoted EB White: “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

Yet to see this purely as a problem of the super-rich lets the rest of us off too easily. Anyone living in a highly developed economy in 2016 is already the beneficiary of stupendous luck – for example, not being born during the plague, or living in the modern-day Central African Republic (average life expectancy:about 50). Ponder that, and it’s easier to see why Buddhists speak of the incomparable luck of being born human at all. You might have been a battery hen, or a mayfly with a one-day lifespan.

Don’t think you’re lucky? Think again | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian

Jay Doubleyou: don’t think you’re lucky? think again

In other words:

Do Those on Top Deserve Their Success?

Many people who find themselves on the wrong side of growing inequality feel the system is stacked against them.
But who deserves to succeed?
Should we reward talent and hard work?
If so, what do we do about those left behind?
Do they deserve their fate, too?
And is talent, in fact, little more than luck?
Using a pioneering digital facility at Harvard Business School, Professor Michael Sandel is joined by 60 people from nearly 40 different countries.
Together they look for answers to these tough questions; questions which lie behind some of the biggest political stories of the moment.

The Global Philosopher - Do Those on Top Deserve Their Success? - BBC Sounds

Jay Doubleyou: meritocracy

Even the Financial Times is questioning this:

Architects of Meritocracy

Michael Sandel has written a book about this:

The Tyranny of Merit

And he makes a provocative statement:

Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit' | Michael Sandel | The Guardian

Here he is talking about this:

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Michael Sandel: The tyranny of merit | TED Talk

Jay Doubleyou: the tyranny of merit: we are not self-made or self-sufficient

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There are two new books out on this:

Inheritocracy | Biteback Publishing

The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter review – a search for sense in probability and chance | Books | The Guardian

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On the radio:

Start the Week - Chance and fortune - BBC Sounds

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why are most teaching materials boring?

Even the 'best' teaching materials strike as rather boring.

This is from the British Council:

Robot teachers

Robot teachers | LearnEnglish

It looks at what it obviously feels is a 'current' topic that students would be keen to look at. 

BUT:

The format is so predictable.

First there is feeding in vocab which the students can't possibly know or work out or look up for  themselves. Especially when the words are ripped out of context and presented as yet another meaningless list.

Then there is the text which is so full of assumptions and bad thinking - for example that "Teachers waste a lot of time doing non-teaching work, including more than 11 hours a week marking homework." Yes, 'teaching' is more than marking homework, but 'teaching' clearly involves giving feedback - and, anyway, there are other ways to 'mark homework' - such as getting the students to put it through an AI machine themselves...

Then there are the irritating True/False questions - which is supposed to be about 'comprehension', ie, what does the text/author actually say? But couldn't we also see these as points for discussion: why not start with these and then consider what the text/author thinks? So often these silly questions seem to be more about deliberately confusing the poor reader.

Then there are more of the sort of 'questions' which a robot could easily mark - as there will be a list of correct answers somewhere. But again, where's the nuance, the discussion, the playfulness? Yes, we need to know exactly what it says in the text - we need to stop being so lazy ourselves when 'skimming' a text. But it's all so dry!

Finally, we have the exciting 'open for debate' question which allows the students some free rein. But, again, why not put this at the beginning or have the question there throughout?

So, yes, this is lesson plan provides a framework of sorts - but we can turn it upside down and inside out - just to make it a bit more interesting for both students and teachers. 

And just maybe the students can teach the teachers something - and can give their own verdict of how good the lesson plan, the text, the author's views, etc were...

There are plenty of others thinking the same thing out there:

Why do most teachers make learning so boring? : r/TrueOffMyChest

We found that students adopt a variety of strategies to cope with boring lectures. The most popular are daydreaming (75% of students admitted doing this), doodling (66%), chatting to friends (50%), sending texts (45%), and passing notes to friends (38%).

Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring? | Sandi Mann | The Guardian

For two weeks in third grade, I preached the gospel of the wild boar. My teacher, the sprightly Mrs. DeWilde, assigned my class an open-ended research project: Create a five-minute presentation about any exotic animal. I devoted my free time before bedtime to capturing the wonders of the Sus scrofa in a 20-minute sermon. I filled a poster as big as my 9-year-old self with photographs, facts, and charts, complete with a fold-out diagram of the snout. During my presentation, I shared my five-stanza rhyming poem about the swine’s life cycle, painted the species’ desert and taiga habitats in florid detail, and made uncanny snorting impressions. I attacked each new project that year — a sketch of the water cycle, a history of the Powhatan — with the same evangelism.

Flash forward to the fall of my senior year in high school, and my near-daily lunchtime routine: hunched over at a booth in Wendy’s, chocolate Frosty in my right hand, copying calculus worksheets from Jimmy and Spanish homework from Chris with my left while they copied my notes on Medea or Jane Eyre. Come class, I spent more time playing Snake on my graphing calculator than reviewing integrals, more time daydreaming than conjugating verbs.

What happened in those nine years? Many things. But mainly, like the majority of my fellow Americans, I fell victim to the epidemic of classroom boredom. A 2013 Gallup poll of 500,000 students in grades five through 12 found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students were “engaged” with school, that is, attentive, inquisitive, and generally optimistic. By high school, the number dropped to four in 10...

Bored Out of Their Minds | Harvard Graduate School of Education

And it's happening in the EFL classroom:

Frontiers | The Effects of Boredom on EFL Learners' Engagement

Boring TEFL Lessons & Bored EFL Students • ICAL TEFL

Why Are So Many EFL Textbooks So Bland, Boring, and Culturally Tone Deaf?

English Language Teaching Now and How It Could Be - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

And the alternatives? Here's somebody really inspiring:

Most recently I have discovered mobile learning. I think it is especially promising when it recognises mobile devices as personal to the user (personalisation of features and use), as forming an integral part of the ways in which the user communicates (through call function and SMS but more importantly perhaps by giving the user access to social networks) and as a means to capture life as it happens. Pegrum nicely summarises the benefits of using mobile devices for language learning:

"[L]earners shift between contexts that feed directly into their unfolding learning. […] In the classroom or the schoolyard, as well as on excursions and outings, mobile devices support situated learning, as students receive or seek information from online sources, peers and mentors to inform their interactions with their contexts, and as they use their devise to make and share multimedia records of their contextualised learning experiences." (Pegrum, 2014: 19)

My newest discovery in this context is a book called The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies (Farman ed., 2014). It is a collection of essays aimed at making the reader reimagine the potential of the mobile phone as quintessentially a tool that we can use to tell our stories in ever new, personal, situated and creative ways. So far I have read one about dancers using Twitter to communicate ideas for dance improvisations remotely to each other. Their Tweets become embodied, situated and transformed into a new text code and improvisation continues across time and space. How fascinating!

A Principled Rejection of the Coursebook | Alex Collins on ELT Materials

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rhyme rhythm repeat: the cumulative song or tale: "this is the house that jack built"

A cumulative song is a song with a simple verse structure modified by progressive addition so that each verse is longer than the verse before. Cumulative songs are popular for group singing, in part because they require relatively little memorization of lyrics, and because remembering the previous verse to concatenate it to form the current verse can become a kind of game.

Cumulative song - Wikipedia

"The feather on the wing, and the wing on the bird, and the bird on the nest, and the nest on the twig, and the twig on the branch, and the branch on the tree, and the tree in the bog,
And the bog down in the valley-o."

The Rattling Bog Down in the Valley (with lyrics) - YouTube

Rattlin' Bog - YouTube

And more:

Old MacDonald Had a Farm - Wikipedia

This Is the House That Jack Built - Wikipedia

There are of course several different versions:

This is the horse and the hound and the horn

That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn

That kept the cock that crowed in the morn

That woke the priest all shaven and shorn

That married the man all tattered and torn

That kissed the maiden all forlorn

That milked the cow with the crumpled horn

That tossed the dog that worried the cat

That killed the rat that ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

The House that Jack Built Cumulative Tale - English Nursery Rhyme - YouTube

Storybord by Darina Shmidt / This Is the House That Jack Built by Simms Taback - YouTube

What such rhymes and stories are there in other languages?

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quiet quitting... white strike... great resignation... antiwork... lying flat

There are some interesting 'trends' happening in the world of work:

QUIET QUITTING

Quiet quitting refers to doing the minimum requirements of one’s job and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary. As such, it is something of a misnomer, since the worker doesn’t actually leave their position and continues to collect a salary. In the early 2020s, driven largely by social media, quiet quitting emerged as a much-publicized trend in the United States and elsewhere. However, some observers have questioned how common it actually is—and whether it’s even a new phenomenon. What Is Quiet Quitting—and Is It a Real Trend?

The notion of quiet quitting suggests a norm where people have to perform extra, often undesirable tasks outside of their job description, and where not doing that additional work is considered a form of “quitting” your job. Forcing employees to do this extra, unpaid work is wrong, but the debate around “quiet quitting” also raises important questions about who is actually doing much of this unpaid labor. ‘Quiet quitting?’ Everything about this so-called trend is nonsense | Tayo Bero | The Guardian

While its disruption to organizational functioning may be less visible than that of the Great Resignation, quiet quitting can in fact be even more damaging. To address this challenge, leaders must focus on motivating employees to fulfill their core tasks, listen to workers and address their unique needs, and create cultures that invite workers to craft their own approaches to citizenship. When Quiet Quitting Is Worse Than the Real Thing

WHITE STRIKE

Work-to-rule (also known as an Italian strike, in Italian: Sciopero bianco, or slowdown in US usage[1]) is a job action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of their contract or job,[2][3] and strictly follow time-consuming rules normally not enforced.[4] This may cause a slowdown or decrease in productivity if the employer does not hire enough employees or pay the appropriate salary and as such does not have the requirements needed to run at the level they desire.[5][6] It is a form of protest against low pay and poor working conditions,[3] and is considered less disruptive than a strike or lockout as obeying the rules is not susceptible to disciplinary action or loss of pay. Work-to-rule - Wikipedia and Sciopero bianco - Wikipedia

An Italian Strike (aka Work-to-Rule) is a version of this aimed at minimizing ci... | Hacker News

Work-to-rule: a guide | libcom.org

What is Quiet Firing? 6 Signs You Are Being “Quiet Fired” From Your Job

THE GREAT RESIGNATION

The Great Resignation, also known as the Big Quit[2][3] and the Great Reshuffle,[4][5] is an ongoing economic trend in which employees have voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse, beginning in early 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.[6] Among the most cited reasons for resigning include wage stagnation amid rising cost of living, limited opportunities for career advancement, hostile work environments, lack of benefits, inflexible remote-work policies, and long-lasting job dissatisfaction.[7] Most likely to quit have been workers in hospitality, healthcare, and education.[8][9][10][11]
Some economists have described the Great Resignation as akin to a general strike.[12][13][14] However, workforce participation in some regions has returned to or even exceeded the pre-pandemic rate.[15][16][17] This suggests that instead of remaining out of the workforce for extended periods (which can be financially difficult, especially at a time of high inflation), many workers have been simply swapping jobs.[9][8] Great Resignation - Wikipedia

Are we witnessing a ‘General Strike’ in our own time? - The Washington Post

The 'great resignation' didn't happen in Australia, but the 'great burnout' did

AND

r/antiwork is a subreddit associated with contemporary labor movements, critique of work, and the anti-work movement.[1][2][3] The forum's slogan reads: "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!"[1] Posts on the forum commonly describe employees' negative experiences at work, dissatisfaction with working conditions, and unionization.[1][4] Various actions that have been promoted on the subreddit include a consumer boycott of Black Friday as well as the submission of fake jobs applications to the Kellogg Company after the company announced plans to replace 1,400 striking workers during the 2021 Kellogg's strike. The popularity of r/antiwork increased in 2020 and 2021, and the subreddit gained 900,000 subscribers in 2021 alone, accumulating nearly 1,700,000 subscribers by the end of the year. It is often associated with other ideologically similar subreddits such as r/latestagecapitalism.[5] r/antiwork has been compared to the Occupy Wall Street movement due to the subreddit's intellectual foundations and decentralized ethos.[1] r/antiwork - Wikipedia

Tang ping (Chinese: 躺平; pinyin: tǎng píng; lit. 'lying flat') is a Mandarin term that describes a rejection of societal pressures to overwork, such as in the 996 working hour system, which is often regarded as a rat race with ever diminishing returns.[1][2][3][4] Those who participate in tang ping instead choose to "lie down flat and get over the beatings"[citation needed] via a low-desire, more indifferent attitude towards life. It can be thought as the Chinese equivalent of the hippie counter-culture movement.[5] Tang ping - Wikipedia

Refusal of work - Wikipedia

Anti-Work – Wikipedia

Critique of work - Wikipedia

SILENT SURRENDER...

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greenwashing fashion

We like to donate our old clothes to charity - but where exactly do they go?

Julian Epp, writing in the Nation, follows the trial - and then asks a few awkward questions: click on the link for more from an excellently researched piece:

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Greenwashing Fashion

These days, sustainability is on trend. But the trend cycle of fast fashion isn’t sustainable.

Around 15 million garments per week flow through Kantamanto, one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world. The shopping center is located in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and is stocked with once-donated clothing that arrives in hundred-pound bundles, mostly from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Retailers take out substantial loans to purchase the bundles, hoping to find worthwhile garments in sellable condition. Yet almost half of what is bought is thrown away.

The excess clothing waste piles up in the streets, on the beaches, and in dumpsites around Accra. One landfill in Old Fadama sits next to a river and is over 30 feet tall, containing mostly secondhand clothing from the market. The water near the dump is toxic, causing the surface to ripple and bubble as if it were constantly raining. Some of this foreign clothing flows into the sea, wrapping around itself and other waste to create tentacles up to 25 feet long. These tangled masses put local fishermen in danger, ensnaring their boats’ motors and weighing down nets, which can leave them stranded or capsized. Clogged gutters from the clothing waste lead to flooding and standing water, even after only a light rain, increasing the risk of cholera and malaria for those in the community.

Why is there so much secondhand clothing? Increasingly, it’s built into the way we dress: fast fashion, the trendy, mass-produced clothing that can be made quickly and at low cost, has had disastrous consequences for the planet, while making the industry more profitable than ever. In 1960, around 95 percent of American clothing was made in the United States. As this labor began to be outsourced overseas, brands were able to cut costs while substantially raising production levels. By 1989, The New York Times coined the term “fast fashion” in reference to the 15-day period between an idea’s inception and when the physical garment hit the racks. The Times described the target market as “young fashion followers on a budget who nonetheless change their clothes as often as the color of their lipstick.”

Since then, fashion has only gotten faster... Thanks to fast fashion, the average person purchased 60 percent more clothing in 2014 compared to 2000, while each garment was kept for only half as long, according to a study by McKinsey & Company.

Liz Ricketts, cofounder of the OR Foundation, a charity that advocates for alternatives to the current wasteful fashion model, has been observing the secondhand clothing trade and its impact on Ghana for a decade. Fueled by colonialism and unsustainable business practices, the production of waste has only been increasing. “I saw how the acceleration of fast fashion was creating a toxic disposable culture across the entire industry,” Ricketts told The Nation. “Not just at the fast fashion level, but at every price point and at every segment of the industry.”

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Greenwashing Fashion | The Nation

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Here's an example of 'greenwashing' - where promises are made but there's no guarantee of anything happening:

Maisie Williams x H&M - YouTube

Maisie Williams Joins H&M as ‘Sustainability Ambassador,’ But Both Face Greenwashing Claims

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With a handy definition from the Green Queen:

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Greenwashing In Fashion Is On The Rise, Here’s How To Spot It

There’s been an increasing amount of buzz around the terms ‘sustainable’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘natural’, in everything from fashion to food. Unsurprisingly, this comes at a time when we’re all becoming more conscious of what we buy. In particular, the rising interest in sustainability amongst Millennial and Gen Z consumers, coupled with their increase in purchasing power, is influencing businesses to take notice. However, rather than truly going green, certain brands are taking the greenwashing route instead. It’s tough enough for fashion folk to navigate the greenwashing maze, so naturally, it makes everyday consumers confused! Read on for how you can spot and avoid fashion’s ‘fake news’ trap.

In a nutshell, greenwashing is a tactic that companies use to ‘appear’ more sustainable than they actually are. This could mean making false claims about green production practices or even purposefully being vague with facts. The term has been around since the 1960s, but American environmentalist Jay Westerveld popularised it in 1986.

How do I spot it?

Greenwashing can come in many forms. Here’s a few indicators you can look out for...

Greenwashing In Fashion Is On The Rise, Here's How To Spot It

What Is Greenwashing In Fashion And How To Spot It | British Vogue

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Here's a great overview from Forbes:

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Some Of The Favorite Greenwashing Tactics Of Clothing Companies

The fashion industry has proven to be adept at spin. It has an enormous environmental footprint, using up more energy than aviation and shipping combined. Thankfully, the public isn’t always gullible. One survey of EU citizens found that 81% don’t trust clothing products’ claims to be environmentally friendly.

But the abundance of information from all sides makes it hard to sort through the exaggerations and the understatements. Here are a few of the ways that clothing companies attempt to portray themselves as more sustainable than they really are, according to the recent “Fossil Fashion” report of the Changing Markets Foundation...

Some Of The Favorite Greenwashing Tactics Of Clothing Companies

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Finally, again from Catherine Erdly writing in yesterday's Forbes:

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Earth Day 2021: Independent Fashion Brands Challenge Industry Greenwashing

At the current rate of growth, by 2030 annual global apparel consumption could rise by 63% - the equivalent to more than 500 billion additional t-shirts. 

Environmentally, this is unwelcome growth from an industry that already has "a far-reaching impact on the natural environment, from the extraction of raw materials to the production, distribution, wear and disposal of clothes" according to the British Fashion Council's white paper on Fashion and the Environment.

With the stakes, and the environmental impact, growing ever higher, a group of independent brands across the fashion, rental and vintage market have come together on Earth Day 2021 to raise awareness of sustainability issues in fashion.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) make up half of the businesses in the fashion eco-system...

Earth Day 2021: Independent Fashion Brands Challenge Industry Greenwashing

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this gig-work market wouldn’t be run for profit but to facilitate local economic exchange

The 'gig' economy is now everywhere:

Pre-pandemic, 35% of adults were reliant on uncertain employment. In 2021 that could be 50%...

Employment is fragmenting. Odd hours of work through platforms like Uber are just the tip of an iceberg. Tens of millions of corporate W2 employees don’t know next week’s hours or pay. Ad-hoc work in the informal economy is bigger than “gigging” through platforms.

Beyond Jobs

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Last month in the UK, a Supreme Court ruling declaring that Uber drivers are workers who are entitled to benefits "sent shockwaves across the gig economy":

Is this the moment of reckoning for the gig economy? | Evening Standard

And in California, similar moves have happened:

Gig workers are independent contractors, online platform workers,[1] contract firm workers, on-call workers[2] and temporary workers.[3] Gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company's clients.[4]

In many countries, the legal classification of gig workers is still being debated, with companies classifying their workers as "independent contractors" while labor advocates have been lobbying for them to be classified as "employees", which would legally require companies to provide the full suite of employee benefits (time-and-a-half for overtime, paid sick time, employer-provided health care, bargaining rights, and unemployment insurance - among others). In 2020, the voters in California approved Proposition 22, which created a third worker classification whereby gig-worker-drivers are classified as contractors, but get some benefits (minimum wage, mileage reimbursement, and others.)

Gig worker - Wikipedia

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This is how a piece in the latest New Yorker starts:

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Should Gig Work Be Government-Run?

The labor reformer Wingham Rowan wants to reimagine labor markets for the digital age.

By Nick Romeo

March 23, 2021

Last October, the East Bay Economic Development Alliance, a nonprofit in Oakland, California, hosted a virtual event called “Beyond the Gig Economy.” The Presidential election was a week away, and a new law on the ballot, Proposition 22, promised to affect the fate of many of California’s gig workers. In 2019, the state’s legislature had reclassified some part-time and gig workers—including drivers for services such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash—as employees, rather than contractors. This would entitle them to paid sick leave, a guaranteed minimum wage, and other benefits. But Prop. 22, which had been crafted by the gig-work platforms, made app-based companies exempt from the new rule. Work part time as a nurse in a doctor’s office, and you’d get benefits; drive part time for Uber, and you wouldn’t.

Throughout the fall, Prop. 22 had been a subject of intense debate. The gig-work companies argued that, if it didn’t pass, prices would go up; they threatened to take away workers’ flexible schedules. Gig workers, labor unions, and Democratic politicians, meanwhile, contended that the platforms were impoverishing their workers, dismissed as a false choice the trade-off between flexibility and benefits, and cautioned against setting a legal precedent for other states. It was the costliest ballot measure fight in California history, with the gig platforms pouring more than two hundred million dollars into the campaign for Prop. 22—outspending their opponents ten to one. The mood in California’s progressive circles was grim.

The invited speaker at that morning’s event, a British policy entrepreneur named Wingham Rowan, maintained that the real battle lay elsewhere. Sixty years old, with dark hair, a lean face, and glasses, Rowan has a youthful affect and a quick wit honed through a career as a TV host. He called Proposition 22 a “tempest in a teapot”—“a sideshow”—and told the audience not to think of it as “some sort of endgame in the fight for precarious workers’ rights.” During a data-dense presentation, he outlined eight major challenges faced by gig workers: misclassification, lack of benefits, no progression, high worker overhead, misleading promises from employers, sudden market closures, pay cuts, and having an algorithm as a boss. He said that defeating Prop. 22 would solve only the first issue, part of the second, and maybe the fourth, then offered an ambitious plan that he thought could address all eight.

Rowan’s idea is to create markets for gig work that are run as public utilities, by non-profits and governments. Instead of getting work through a private company, such as Uber, a job seeker in Rowan’s system could use a Web site or app overseen by the government and regulated to promote the public interest. Many kinds of work could be offered through such public platforms, not just driving. The platforms could be run on open-source software, such as the system that has been built by his nonprofit, Modern Markets for All; private companies might bid to operate them, following the concession model currently used in national lotteries and parks. Such an approach wouldn’t use regulation to hobble the gig-work Goliaths. It would compete with them, combining many gig-work options into a broader labor market designed to benefit workers and the public.

“What does a really healthy hourly labor market look like in the twenty-first century?” Rowan asked the Zoom’s participants, from his book-lined office in London. As he enumerated such a market’s optimal features—the power to draw economic activity out of the informal economy; minimal transaction fees; responsiveness not just to labor laws but to workers’ ultimate goals, which might include education and training—it became clear what he was not imagining. “Everything I just described does not add up to a sizzling Silicon Valley investment opportunity,” he said. “It’s a public utility.”

Rowan offered an example of the sort of transaction that might be conducted on publicly run gig-work software. Suppose that you were Oakland’s city government, and you were in search of window-washers. “If you wanted to know how many people did window-cleaning bookings on a Tuesday morning, within three miles of Oakland City Hall, where the worker was under twenty-six and had previously been in the services, it will tell you,” he said, of the software. “If you want to compare their earnings to classroom assistants, working part time, on the eastern side of town, it will do that for you. You gain huge pools of actionable data that can be used to plot interventions, find the strugglers who need help.” Citizens could use the same software to book child care, yard work, tutoring, or bike repair, and to buy or rent appliances, vehicles, and living space. As on Uber, buyers and sellers would accumulate reliability records; unlike on Uber, features such as health-care contributions and retirement benefits could be built in. This gig-work market wouldn’t be run for profit but to facilitate local economic exchange. “You can have it for the East Bay tomorrow,” Rowan said, of the core software.

...

Should Gig Work Be Government-Run? | The New Yorker

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Here is more from the Guardian in 2015:

One man’s quest to meld Adam Smith and Marx – by creating an Uber for jobs | Work & careers | The Guardian

And here he is doing a TED Talk:

Wingham Rowan: A new kind of job market | TED Talk

Here's his website:

3-minute read « Beyond Jobs

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the splinternet

 The internet is splintering:

The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. "Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it", writes the Economist weekly, and it may soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.[1] Countries such as China have erected what is termed a "Great Firewall", for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet,[2][3] while other nations, such as the US and Australia, discuss plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.[1]

Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of "parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes."[4]

Splinternet - Wikipedia

This is from September last year:

Splinter-net? Is the internet fracturing along geopolitical lines? - YouTube

There have been a lot of articles about this over the last month or so:

The rise of 'splinternet' amid heightened nationalism - TechHQ

The ‘splinternet’ pervades both the East and West - Tech Wire Asia

The worldwide web as we know it may be ending - CNN

Back in 2019, writing in Computerworld, there was a different opinion:

How I learned to stop worrying and love the splinternet

The web was never going to be worldwide. The idea of one single global internet is an obsolete fantasy.

By Mike Elgan Contributing Columnist, Computerworld

Have you heard the one about the “splinternet”? It’s the idea that the internet could someday be split into different national or regional mini-internets.

It’s usually talked about as something that could happen someday, or that is beginning to happen.

I’ve got news for you: It’s already happened. The splinternet is here.

It’s time to stop pretending that the ever-increasing “cyber-balkanization” of the internet will ever be reversed.

Who and what is splintering the internet?

In 1996, John Perry Barlow penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”

This naive and now-cringeworthy screed said, in part, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” He continued: “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

The response by Governments of the Industrial World: “Challenge accepted.”

Barlow’s free-speech utopia never happened, and never will. Since Barlow’s declaration, the division of the global internet into separate, incompatible and walled-off mini-internets has increased, and it will continue to do so.

Here are the actors and forces that have already splintered the internet into many internets.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the splinternet | Computerworld

This phenomenon is not just being discussed in the English-speaking world:

Splinternet: Wenn digitale Grenzen wachsen – Sicherheit & Datenschutz – Funkschau

Hotet om ett förbud mot Tiktok bortblåst – öppnat kontor i Norden | SvD

Login: l'Australia e il rischio "splinternet", smartphone usa e getta, il fenomeno Valheim - Video - Rai News

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the commonplace book as a language-learning tool

Writing helps you to get to know yourself - but also to get your thoughts together:

Why Writing Helps You Understand Yourself | by Bill Widmer | Medium

One way to do some regular writing is to create a 'commonplace book':

Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.

They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.

Commonplace book - Wikipedia

In other words, you are not writing out your own created words, but someone else's:

A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important. His earliest essays were little more than compilations of these thoughts. Thomas Jefferson kept one. Napoleon kept one. HL Mencken, who did so much for the English language, as his biographer put it, “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang” and favorite bits from newspaper columns he liked. Bill Gates keeps one.

Not only did all these famous and great individuals do it. But so have common people throughout history. Our true understanding of the Civil War, for example, is a result of the spread of cheap diaries and notebooks that soldiers could record their thoughts in. Art of Manliness recently did an amazing post about the history of pocket notebooks. Some people have gone as far as to claim that Pinterest is a modern iteration of the commonplace book.

How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book” - RyanHoliday.net

This programme looks at the 'commonplace book' - where we would write down things we heard or read or thought of during the day - where you focus on the language as well as the content:

The Death of Nuance - Regaining Nuance - BBC Sounds

This can be a great way to improve your English: 'copying' is learning:

Teaching English composition with early modern-style “commonplace books” | Vade Mecum

The Commonplace Book Assignment /

100+ COMMONPLACE BOOK ideas | commonplace book, journal writing, sketch book

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a critique of phonics

This blog has looked before at 'phonics' and the criticism coming from Stephen Krashen, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Education at the University of Southern California:

Whole Language

Krashen is a strong advocate of the whole language approach to the teaching of reading, and has written many articles in support of it. In essence, whole language proponents claim that children learn to read most enjoyably and efficiently by exposure to interesting stories that are made comprehensible to them through pictures and discussions. This is in contrast to structured decoding programmes (usually designated phonics) in which children learn to read by sounding out the various parts of words.

More on Whole Language

Whole language is the term for a conglomeration of holistic theories of learning, not only of reading. The principle is that proficiency is acquired by engaging in whatever is to be learned (complex though it may be), rather than separating out the component subskills for discrete practice before putting them together again.

The whole language approach became a major educational paradigm in the latter decades of the 20th century. In recent years, however, there has been something of a backlash (often called Back to Basics). Phonics has made a comeback, particularly in the US, where it has been facilitated by the policies enacted under the No Child Left Behind programme in 2002.

Comments

The whole language/phonics debate has become politicised and increasingly vitriolic. Constant media reports about falling literacy standards have alarmed parents, many of whom vehemently protest if they consider their child's school to have chosen the wrong approach. The issue is further complicated by the involvement of publishing houses which stand to make large profits if school districts can be persuaded to buy their comprehensive sets of phonics-based materials. Such an entanglement of interests is rarely conducive to making the best pedagogical decisions.

More comments on Whole language

Reading proficiency is in many ways the primary academic skill. Children who are poor readers usually struggle badly in school. It is no surprise, therefore that there has been such an enormous amount of research on the issue, and a similar amount of debate on the pedagogical implications of the findings. Teachers who would like to know a little more about the main issues are recommended to follow these links:

• Wikipedia article
• EducationWorld article
• The Reading Wars

An introduction to the work of Stephen Krashen

Jay Doubleyou: krashen and second language learning

Krashen is certainly not alone in recognising the failings of this approach:

Phonics Doesn’t Help Reading Comprehension
Another common criticism of phonics instruction is that it does nothing to help reading comprehension, as this passage illustrates:
“A child filled full of phonics rules may be able to pronounce a word flawlessly without having any idea what it means, much less what its relation is to the words sitting next to it.” 2

Phonics Criticisms | TheReadingAdviceHub.com

With more here:

Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction | SpringerLink

Why Phonics Isn’t the Be-all and End-all of Learning to Read | Learning and Development | Teach Early Years

An Evidence-based Critique of Synthetic Phonics in Literacy Learning

The phonics versus whole language controversy | Language Debates

And a piece from Misty Adoniou from three years ago:

How the national phonics test is failing England and why it will fail Australia too | EduResearch Matters

She writes again in the EL Gazette in October - with some excellent points made.

Click on the link below for the full piece.

English language learners need the whole linguistic picture

Anglophone countries have been struggling for years with declining achievement in reading and writing as students move through primary school and into high school.

In 2019 more than 25 per cent of Year 6 students in England failed to reached the minimum requirements in the annual national reading and writing assessments. This means around 1 in 4 students in England are leaving primary school ill-equipped to cope with the literacy demands of high school. Similar statistics are reported in Australia and the United States.

The US has decided the problem is that students do not have the skills to comprehend complex texts. So, they have developed a more challenging curriculum (the Common Core Standards) to raise expectations of what students should be able to read and write.

England has decided the problem is that students do not have the skills to decode basic texts. So, in 2011 they instituted a mandatory Phonics Screening Check for Year 1 students. Students are prepared for the test through government-approved commercial, synthetic phonics programs. Those who fail the test receive more phonics instruction and re-take the test in Year 2. The rationale is, if we can get the basics right, the rest will follow. Eight years on, it is clear the rationale is flawed.

But why hasn’t this phonics ‘first, fast and furious’ approach worked? And are there lessons for those who teach English language learners?

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English language learners need the whole linguistic picture | E L Gazette

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the tyranny of merit: we are not self-made or self-sufficient

Do you believe that 'passion and perseverance' - focus and dedication - will get you where you want to be?

Jay Doubleyou: grit

Do you 'merit' - or deserve - what you get if you use your talents and work hard?

Jay Doubleyou: meritocracy

But there are several weaknesses in the argument:

Jay Doubleyou: don’t think you’re lucky? think again

Jay Doubleyou: 'I have met many people who earn way more than £30,000 and have literally no discernible skills, not even one.'

Prof Michael Sandel of Harvard University has just written a book on the subject:

The Tyranny of Merit | Michael J. Sandel | Macmillan

As he says in the Observer:

'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit'

“The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them. This is what I call in the book the ‘rhetoric of rising’. It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope. We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”

Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.” 

“Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.”

Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure. Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.” 

The Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular the new appreciation of the value of supposedly unskilled, low-paid work, offers a starting point for renewal. “This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem. We now realise how deeply dependent we are, not just on doctors and nurses, but delivery workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, lorry drivers, home healthcare providers and childcare workers, many of them in the gig economy. We call them key workers and yet these are oftentimes not the best paid or the most honoured workers.”

To those who, like many of his Harvard students, believe that they are simply the deserving recipients of their own success, Sandel offers the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding… but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

The Tyranny of Merit is the latest salvo in Sandel’s lifelong intellectual struggle against a creeping individualism that, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, has become pervasive in western democracies. “To regard oneself as self-made and self-sufficient. This picture of the self exerts a powerful attraction because it seems on the face of it to be empowering – we can make it on our own, we can make it if we try. It’s a certain picture of freedom but it’s flawed. It leads to a competitive market meritocracy that deepens divides and corrodes solidarity.”

Fair competition does not constitute a just vision of society. Even if Trump is defeated in November’s presidential election, this is a truth, Sandel says, that Joe Biden, and his counterparts in Europe, must take on board. For inspiration, he says, they could do worse than turn to one of his intellectual heroes, the English Christian socialist RH Tawney.

“Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture. My book comes out of that tradition.”

Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit' | Michael Sandel | The Guardian

Here he is giving a TED talk back in May:

Michael Sandel: The tyranny of merit | TED Talk

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Michael Sandel: The tyranny of merit | TED Talk

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how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think

Boris Johnson has accused the BBC of 'wetness' over not wanting to have singing at its biggest classical music festival:

Jay Doubleyou: rule britannia?

A linguist looks at the origin of the term:

‘Stop this wetness!’: the roots of Boris Johnson’s watery contempt | Language | The Guardian

And he's just written a book - reviewed in the Guardian:

Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language

A myth-busting account of how languages emerge, change, and influence the way we think

Joe Moran

Sat 10 Aug 2019 07.30 BST

414

As a boy, David Shariatmadari would sit in the hallway and listen to his Iranian father speaking Farsi on the phone to his family in Tehran. It was an early introduction to the estranging beauty of unfamiliar language. So began an interest in linguistics that has given birth to this book, a skilful summation of the latest research on how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think.

Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining. This is a centuries-old lament for which, he points out, there has never been any evidence. Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life. Their habit of saying “aks” instead of “ask”, for instance, is a perfectly respectable example of metathesis, a natural linguistic process where the sounds in words swap round. (The word “wasp” used to be “waps” and “horse” used to be “hros”.) Youth is the driver of linguistic change. This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English.

Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. It amuses us to think that there are 27 words for eyebrow in Albanian. But we only really think this because of our grammar-blindness about Albanian, which can easily form adjectival compounds by joining two words together.

Languages do shape how we think and act, but this usually happens not at the level of vocabulary but of linguistic structure. The psycholinguist John Lucy has given language as one explanation for the starkly different rates of workplace accidents in Sweden and Finland. In Swedish, prepositions allow for the nuanced account of actions over time; in Finnish, case endings stress static relationships. This may make Finns less alert to the temporal arrangement of a process, leading to more interruptions and accidents at work.

Shariatmadari borrows from Iris Murdoch’s idea of language as a net cast over the mind, constraining our thoughts according to how its knots and threads land – wrinkled in some places, straight in others. Every language is a different throw of the net. Language sieves and strains reality but never imprisons it. There are always holes for the real world to escape.

Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry. No linguist would disagree with his argument that a word’s meaning depends not on its etymology but on how it is used. (Adam Gopnik once wrote that prescriptivism was “as bogus a concept in linguistics as green cheese is in astronomy”.) But he fleshes out this argument usefully, offering ammunition against the tiresome hairsplitter who, for example, insists that “decimate” comes from the Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier as a collective punishment. (It doesn’t.)

Words aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything

He also rescues nonstandard forms, such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), from the routine condescension meted out to them. AAVE misses out the linking “to be” verb (“you late”) but then so do many other languages. The AAVE construction “he be singing” does not mean “he is singing” but “he sings [as a hobby, professionally]”. It is an efficient means of marking the habitual aspect. “Imma” for “I’m going to” is another standard linguistic move: cutting a word or phrase that is just a grammatical marker. “Imma” doesn’t work with the more literal sense of “going to”, which is why you can say “Imma let you finish” (I’m going to let you finish) but not “Imma the shops” (I’m going to the shops).

All languages move naturally towards abbreviation and compression, guided by what the linguist Rudi Keller calls “the invisible hand in language change”. Shariatmadari compares it to the desire path that forms on the lawn of a university campus after thousands of students have taken a short cut across it.

He is sceptical of Noam Chomsky’s notion of a universal grammar, the idea that human beings have a sort of syntax-generating implant in the brain. Language for Shariatmadari is not a piece of brain software but something that emerges when we interact with others. It is “a medium that is formed as it is used … a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it”.

This is quite a scholarly and serious book. I admired its refusal to lighten its denser arguments with that jokey “here comes the science bit” flippancy that so often grates in non-fiction books on complex topics. Shariatmadari’s style is never less than clear, but there isn’t too much handholding. His account requires a little patience, but then so does linguistics.

Stick with it and it is a meaty, rewarding and even necessary read. Shariatmadari begins by pointing to “an almost insatiable appetite for linguistic debate” in our culture. But as he then shows, most of the focus is trivial – “how to speak like a millennial” – or myth-ridden. Our wider culture seems profoundly uninterested in the dynamic, makeshift nature of language, the way that it gives birth to thought as much as articulates it.

Politicians, caught out saying something that they actually believe, instantly apologise for their “poor choice of words”. It is as if words were just a light dusting of salt on the meal of meaning, and not that important. But words, as Shariatmadari reveals, aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything.

This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.

• Don’t Believe a Word is published by W&N (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language | Books | The Guardian

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