This year’s science and you
In my newly developed quest to educate you English Lit grads with the world of science that is passing us English teachers by, here are the highlights from the Discover Magazine 100 top science stories of the year that touch directly or less so on the world of TEFL:
-As many as 282,000 people are in a minimally conscious or vegetative state. It is unknown how many of these are teenagers in English classes in Japan, but it might be possible to bring them back to life with “a gentle current of electricity delivered by an implanted deep-brain stimulator (DBS)”. See here for the full story, here for how to work out if JHS school students are actually conscious even while giving off no signs of life, and here for a heartwarming story of TEFL Awakenings.
- On the bright side, if you have told your students that the Present Continuous is used for future plans and then get to the “Going to for future plans” unit just 2 weeks after, it might be possible to erase single memories in their brains and start that grammar explanation again.
- My theory that the ability to speak English has been bred out of the Japanese population by the natural selection effects of girls with good educations and an international outlook putting Japanese guys off and marrying foreigners gets some support from a theory that human evolution is speeding up from Cornell Univerity’s Scott Williamson. Our only salvation is to use the power of natural selection by making English teaching sexy, perhaps by training the next generation of trophy wives in Ukraine from birth as English teachers and then bringing them out to Japan to become Eikaiwa teachers before the hostess bar trade gets them.
And for some reason it occured to me that textbooks could be made to go through natural selection too in a version of this experiment that made robots evolve without outside changes to their system.
Finally, the “we already knew that, you twats” award to show that being a scientist, any more than being a grammar expert, in no way stops you being an idiot, scientists at the University of Southampton have proved that additives make kids hyperactive. With the budget cuts underway yet again in my company, I have feeling that won’t be enough evidence to make them buy the kids fruit for Summer School break time next year…