Now that I'm working in the public schools again, I'm finding that it's helpful to organize my materials by grade level. Below is a list of which materials I've used for which grade. For my own purposes, I'm going to use this index as a record of which materials I have successfully used in each grade. That's not to say that the same material couldn't also be used in other grades, but this is just a record of what I've done so far.
Kindegarten
* Rosie's Walk Lesson for Prepositions of Movement (I had to adapt this for kindergarten since they can't write yet. I omitted all the writing exercise, and had students answer all the prompts orally instead.)
As was talking while filming this video, I remembered that I had in fact read one previous volume featuring Kang the Conqueror. In fact, after consulting my old reviews, it looks like I had read two:
This is one of those oldies that everyone knows, but, having been outside of the U.S. for several years, I hadn't heard it for a while, and when I heard it on the radio the other day, I thought, "I'd forgotten how catchy this song is." So I thought I'd write a bit about it.
Everyone loves The Supremes, right? They were the most popular girl group in the 1960s for a reason.
And yet, at least for me, The Supremes songs often do not reward multiple relistens the way other classic songs do. Their songs are catchy, but shallow. The first time you hear a Supremes song, you think, "Oh, this is pretty fun." But the second time you hear it, you're starting to get bored. And the third time you hear it, you change the radio station. This particular song, though, has been sticking with me. I don't know, maybe give me a few more listens and I'll probably get sick of it. But for the moment, I still like it. It starts out really catchy with those staccatoo strings, and then transitions into a nice flowing melody, while still keeping an up tempo drumbeat.
When I heard it on the radio, I thought to myself, "Hmmm, this sounds kind of like a Supreme's type melody. But it seems to be more of a male/female duet than a girl group."
Unable at first to get the vocal performance he desired from Ross, Johnny Bristol decided to try something different: he would harmonize with her, helping Ross to get into the mood needed for the record. On the first take, the engineer accidentally recorded both Ross's vocal and Bristol's ad-libs. Bristol and arranger Wade Marcus liked the results, and Bristol had his vocal recorded alongside Ross' for the final version of the song. Bristol's ad-libs and words of encouragement to Ross can be heard in the background throughout the song. When Berry Gordy heard the completed song, he decided to release it as the final Diana Ross & the Supremes song. Neither of the Supremes' remaining members, however, sang on the record.
Ah, so that explains that. That's interesting, though, that he was "unable at first to get the vocal performance he desired from Ross." I wonder what was going on with Ross? And it also makes you wonder: Did he finally get the performance he wanted out of Ross?
I took another listen to the song, and it's still not bad, but is it just me, or are Diana Ross's vocals a little bit subdued?
The girl group made their final of several performances throughout the decade with Diana Ross singing lead on the 1960s decennial finale of The Ed Sullivan Show that aired live Sunday, December 21, 1969, on CBS.[7]
...and when you watch that clip, it kind of looks like Diana Ross is sleepwalking through the performance, doesn't it?
Compare Diana Ross's performance on Love Child. Obviously Diana Ross could throw herself into a song when she wanted to.
I don't know, what do you think? Would Someday We'll be Together have benefited from more energetic vocals on Diana Ross's part, or is it perfect just the way it is?
While I was on Wikipedia, I also read up on Johnny Bristol (the guy mentioned above who contributed the male vocals.) Turns out he also had some hits under his own name, like Hang in There Baby, which I don't remember ever hearing before, but which sounds decent.
I was vaguely familiar with some of these events from listening to This Sceptred Isle. But this was mostly new information for me. Also, in his show notes, Historia Civilis lists as part of his biliography Eric Hobsbawm, "The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848", which I've reviewed on this blog before here.
Since I try to make this blog my repository of everything I read, watch or listen to, I figured I should probably post this. It is, after all, longer than most full length movies.
I didn't watch this video all at once of course. I watched it over the past few days. Mostly I had it on as background noise while I did my language stuides on quizlet. (Like a lot of these longer video essays, I didn't intend to watch the whole thing. I just thought I'd watch a little bit just to get the taste of it. But once you start watching, you get sucked into it, and the past few days I kept returning to it until I had finished it.)
I've been a fan of Lindsay Ellis for a long time (and have - frequently - linked - to - her - stuff -on - this blog over the years.) I consider her one of the best video essayists out there, and this video is another example of why she's so great.
...which is not to say that this is flawless. The middle sections go off on a couple of tangets (e.g the history of Jewish-Christian relations) which detract a bit from her main point, and probably should have been cut out.
But in the main, the video is a very powerful critique of the Christian right and it's war on empathy. It's tempting to say more, but the video does such a good job of making it's point that we can just let the video speak for itself.
So what's your plan to stop this from happening again?
I watched Philip Defranco's latest video, which informed me that various right-wing figures like Lauren Boebert and Elon Musk are on Twitter blaming the latest shooting on trans people. To me, this seems like a mute point. You could blame the shooting on whatever group you want--trans people, mentally ill, rightwing extremists, Muslims, etc. The point is, all of these groups have easy access to deadly firearms. So no matter which group you try to pin the blame on, the root problem is still the same: in America anyone can get a deadly firearm and use it to kill children. Whoever you choose to blame this on, the real question is: what are you going to do to stop these people from getting guns in the future?
I realize, of course, that I'm just wasting my time. (Lauren Boebert is a professional troll. You can't talk reason with these types of people.) But sometimes I can't help myself.
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Just a quick thought that I wanted to bookmark here, in case I decide to expand upon this thought in a later post (no promises.)
Starting about 10 years ago, I lost my desire to go out and socialize, and much prefer just hanging out at home. I've attributed this to various factors. Mostly I attribute it to just getting old. (A number of people seem to have the same experience--they lose the desire to go out and party when they reach their late 30s.)
I also attribute it to me finally just embracing my introversion. For years I was young and insecure, and I was ashamed of being an introvert. Now that I'm older and settled into myself, I am not ashamed to be introverted any more. Yes, I'd rather stay home and read a book than go to a party. I've accepted this about myself. I'm not going to try to force myself to be social when I don't feel like it.
I feel like I'm done trying to fit in. I've spend my whole youth trying to fit in, and convince myself that I could (eventually) be one of the cool kids, but now I just want to stay home and read my book.
But, actually, am I actually staying home and reading a book? Or do I spend 10 minutes reading my book, and then spend 2 hours on the Internet? Am I an introvert, or am I really an Internet addict?
I want to envision myself as an intellectual--someone who would prefer to read than party--but is it books that are keeping me occupied at home, or is it the Internet. If I'm honest with myself, it's the latter.
And actually, now that I think about it, when I stopped going out and socializing about 10 years ago, that was also the same time that I was finally living in an apartment that had cable TV and free Internet. (Prior to this, I usually didn't have Internet hooked up in most of the apartments I had been living in. For various reasons--one reason being I didn't trust myself.)
When I was teaching in Vietnam, I was teaching a lot of teenagers, and I was suprised by how many of them were identifying as introverts. But I also noticed that a lot of them were permanently glued to their smart phones, and I was also beginning to suspect that a lot of them were hiding behind the label of "introvert" as a way to justify their various digital addictions. (Gaming addictions, tik-tok addictions, smart phone addictions, etc).
To what degree is it healthy to embrace an introvert lifestyle, and to what degree should we introverts still be pushing ourselves to get out there and socialize?
And is being an introvert an immutable personality trait that we get from birth, or is the Internet turning more people into introverts who might actually be extroverts.
Anyways, this Tweet appeared in my feed a couple weeks ago, and I can't stop thinking about it, so I'm going to leave it here to bookmark it for myself:
Like everything @jburnmurdoch makes, this chart is amazing.
The sharp decline in conscientiousness and rise in neuroticism among young people is astonishing.
But also of note: literally every age group has gotten less extroverted in the age of the smartphone pic.twitter.com/C4QrZlRjwM
It's apparently from this article here, which I haven't read because it's behind a paywall.
Like I said, I may come back to this idea in a future post, or I may not, but for now I'm just bookmarking it for myself.
Addendum: Actually looking at the replies to this Tweet, a lot of people seem to be taking issue with the methodology behind these graphs. Perhaps this isn't really accurate, and perhaps I'm wasting my time by linking to it. I don't know.
I chimed in in the comments: The 70s were before my time, but according to the Wikipedia article you linked to, wouldn't Green Arrow be the socially conscious one, and Green Lantern the conservative of the pair? I also recently read the DC Universe book "Inheritance", which also tended to support this interpretation.
And Whisky set me straight: technically, you (and Wikipedia) are correct: Green Arrow served as Green Lantern's tender, way-left-of-centre conscience (something Frank Miller capitalized on in The Dark Knight Returns). As with any comic book writing, particularly in the 70s, it was made quite clear that for all their head-butting, Green Lantern duly appreciated Green Arrow's point of view.
I'm sure I'm just wasting my time with this, (not to mention this whole issue is pointless), but the way misinformation spreads so quickly on right-wing social media really bugs me. So I jumped in.
@grok did cracker Barrel CEO say "Maga doesn't have to eat here" ?
No, there's no evidence that Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino said "MAGA doesn't have to eat here." This appears to be a fabricated quote from social media amid backlash over their logo change. The company stated their values remain unchanged.
Started: The History of Rome, Volume I: The Republic by Mike Duncan (This book is the printed transcripts of the first part of Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, which I listened to and reviewed in 2021. But this is my first time reading them in written form. Does this count as a reread then?)
It looks like I'm going to be teaching primarily Spanish speakers this year, so I've decided to step up my Spanish studying. And, as I learned from my study of Vietnamese, it's best to integrate studying contextual conversation as soon as possible. So, I'm going to start studying Youtube videos that contain Spanish conversation, in the same way that I am doing for Vietnamese. The project is still in the beginning stages, but I'll be indexing my materials in this post.
Wednesday, August 06, 2025
Well, yes and no. At the time The Iliad was composed, the legend of Aeneas founding Rome hadn't yet been formed. In the Iliad itself, Aeneas is destined only to be the leader of the survivors of Troy.
When I first started this Sharing Music I Like project, my intent was to share songs that I've either newly discovered, or songs that were generally obscure.
Now that I'm a few years into this project, however, I'd like to pivot to sharing songs that I've loved for a long time, including songs that are not so obscure.
Which I guess raises the question: how obscure is A Change Is Gonna Come? I mean, on the one hand, it's one of the most beloved soul songs from the 1960s. On the other hand, it never gets any radio play.
I grew up on oldies stations in the 1980s and 1990s, and I never heard this played on the radio. So my take is that unless you are particularly into old soul music, you might never discover this song. And if so, hopefully this blog post will help you discover this wonderful song.
But what's your take on it, dear reader? Have you heard this song before? How did you discover it? Did you ever hear it on the radio? Leave a comment and let me know.
And does anyone know why this song is never on the radio?
The first time I remember hearing this song, or at least noticing it, was in 2001 when I was re-watching Malcolm Xin Japan.
For whatever reason, Malcolm X is a movie that took me a few times to really appreciate. The first couple times I watched it, I felt a bit exhausted by the long run time of the movie. It's a movie you really have to be in the right mood to appreciate, because the pacing of the movie is slow. But the third time I watched it, I was settling into the slow pacing of the movie, and I began to appreciate just how powerful the movie was.
Now, if you've seen the movie, you know that at the end of the film, the movie essentially just stops so that A Change Is Gonna Come can play. It's the kind of pacing decision that exasperated me the first couple times I saw the movie, but when I re-watched it the 3rd time, I was able to appreciate it. And I noticed what a beautiful song it was.
This was back in 2001, when the Internet was still in its infancy, so it took me some time to actually track down what the name and singer were for this song. There was no Wikipedia to go to, no Youtube to search, and no reddit to ask.
I bought the soundtrack to Malcolm X (which I was actually able to find in a CD store in Japan) solely to get a copy of that song, and then was disappointed when that song wasn't on the soundtrack.
[Note: The Wikipedia article for Malcolm X (soundtrack) lists A Change Is Gonna Come as track 14 on the soundtrack, but it was definitely not on the Malcolm X soundtrack I bought in 2001. Perhaps there were different versions of the soundtrack released? I also don't know why A Change Is Gonna Come wouldn't be included, but perhaps it was a rights issue?]
Anyway, after several Internet searches, I did figure out that name and artist of the song from the end of Malcolm X, and then was able to buy a copy of Sam Cooke's greatest hits in Japan. Then, once I had finally tracked this song down, for several years afterwards, I became a big evangelist for this song.
I shared it with my old Calvin friend Brett, and my JET friend Ryan (neither of them had ever heard this song before, both of them loved it immediately.)
I used this song in my English classes in Japan, and have gone on to use it in my classes in Cambodia and Vietnam. See:
This is a reread. I originally read it in high school. But as this is my first time reviewing it on this blog, according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.
[Note: This is another video where I got cut off by the 30 minute time limit on my camera. There's a lot more that I could have said about this book, but I ran out of time.]
I've decided to subsume my Sharing Music I Like Index into a more general Music Reviews Index. There are a couple reasons for this:
1) Labelling these posts as "reviews" helps fit the current theme of this blog, and allows me to list these posts as one of my Reviews Indexes.
2) It also allows me to include my posts about songs or albums that were a bit more on the critical side--e.g. here, here and here.
My other review projects are comprehensive (e.g. every single book I read or movie I watch has to be reviewed). But in this case, obviously I'm not going to attempt to review every single song I hear. I'll just post about music as I feel like it.
In one episode of the TELFology podcast (I forget which exact episode) one of the TEFLologists remarks that one of the dirty little secrets of the industry is that many English teachers are very poor language learners themselves.
Alas, c'est moi, mes amis. Despite the fact that I've studied applied linguistics and second language acquisition, and have been working for the past 24 years as a language teacher, I've always been embarrased by my own poor track record with language learning. (*1)
If I were in any other profession, I would probably just give up and find another hobby. But I've decided that for as long as I'm a language teacher, I should also be a language learner.
When I was living in Vietnam, I focused all my energies on learning Vietnamese (*2). I at times flirted with trying to study other languages at the same time--like I mentioned here and here--but in the end decided that living in Vietnam was the perfect time to focus all my energy on learning Vietnamese. If I ever left Vietnam, I told myself, then I would go back and try to consolidate all the languages I'd studied.
In addition to Vietnamese, my other languages are:
* Latin--which I studied for 3 years in high school, and 2 semesters in college, and
* Japanese--I lived in Japan for 8 years, and during that time studied Japanese both independently and through organized classes. (*3) , (*4)
My initial idea was to just concentrate on Vietnamese, Japanese and Latin. (Three languages should be enough to keep anyone busy.) But after some thought, I eventually decided to add one more language to the mix--I'm going to try to learn some Spanish as well. (*5) As long as I'm working in ESL in the United States, it's probably going to be useful to know some Spanish.
So, 4 languages now: Vietnamese, Japanese, Latin and Spanish.
So, my goal is to come up with a system where I can study each language a little bit each day, but not have it take over all my free time.
Duolingo is the obvious choice, since this is exactly what duolingo was designed for. And I have already started studying all 4 languages on duolingo--my target is at least one lesson a day for each of these languages.
However, as I've discovered, while duolingo is very convenient, it is not by itself sufficient to learn a language.
For Japanese, I'm only using Duolingo. Japanese is the one language that I feel confident enough in that I don't need any extra resources. Everything I've come across in the Duolingo course so far has been stuff I already learned. (*6) Maybe this will change when I work my way up into the more advanced levels of the Japanese Duolingo course, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
So that's my list of resources. Now, how to make this all manageable so that it doesn't take over my whole life?
I've been keeping to this system the past couple months, and I usually manage to keep my language study time down to 40-60 minutes a day. Which I think is reasonable. I mean, I still grudge the time somewhat, because this is time that comes out of my reading time, and consequently means I won't get through as many reading projects this year. But, as I said at the top of the post, I believe it's important for someone in my profession to dedicate some time to language learning. So here we are.
This is also the minimum for each day. If I have extra time, and I feel like it, I may sometimes study a bit more. But this is what I force myself to do as a minimum.
Once again, I have my excuses. When I first arrived in Vietnam, I was focused on studying for the Delta, and viewed studying Vietnamese as a secondary priority. After I got married to a Vietnamese woman I realized I would always be connected to Vietnamese, and that I should prioritize studying it. But then, by that point we were having kids, and it was difficult for me to take Vietnamese language classes in the evenings because I needed to help with the child care.
(*4) At various points, I've flirted with the idea of learning other languages, as I've described on this blog: Korean, French, Cambodian, and German. But I never got far with any of those languages, so I'm not considering them as languages I've learned.
Part of me is tempted to write up a much more detailed account of my language studies--a sort of language studies autobiography, in which I would explain among other things why I started studying Latin, why I stopped, why I became proficient in Japanese, but never learned Cambodian, etc. But this post isn't the place to get into all that. If I do decide to write that all up, it would be in a different post--which I might or might not write someday.
(*5) As I wrote in a couple previous posts (here and here), I never actually learned Spanish in school, because I took Latin instead. I did a couple years of Spanish club in 7th and 8th grade, but that's as far as I got.
(*6) Arguably what I should do is just skip ahead to a higher level in Japanese. (Duolingo does actually give you that option.) But, you know me, I like to do things systematically--start at the very beginning, and then work my way all the way to the end.
