Well, it's the New Year. Everyone on booktube is talking about their reading goals. I've noticed most of my fellow booktubers are setting goals for themselves in terms of the number of books they want to read in 2024. But measuring reading by the number of books never made a lot of sense to me, because books vary widely in length.
[Perhaps this disparity is because of my reading habits. Maybe I like to mix up epic classics and children's books more than most booktubers. Maybe your average booktuber just reads a lot of novels that are all solidly 300-400 pages long.]
But anyway, I prefer to do it by page count.
Now, I know, even page counts are not accurate across books. Because the number of words per page also varies widely per book. Some books have very large font, some books have very small font. But, at a certain point you just have to throw your hands up and accept the limitations of your chosen measurement. I mean, word count would be the most accurate means of measuring my reading progress. But I'm not going to count the words of everything I read, so page count it is.
Many years ago (back when I still lived in Cambodia), I decided my daily goal for reading was 20 pages a day. This was about the amount of pages I could read in an 40-60 minutes. It was also just about the amount of pages I could comfortably read before I started to get antsy and lose focus. After about 20 pages, I felt like I needed to take a break from my book and do something else for a while.
So, a good reading week for me, then, is 140 pages (20 pages times 7 days).
But I've decided to round that number up to 200 to try to push myself just a little bit more.
200 is a stretch for me, to be honest, but then the whole point of making New Year's goals is to try to push yourself.
The other reason for choosing 200 is I was watching Steve Donoghue's interview with Jared Henderson, and at one point Jared said that since having the baby he was so busy now that he only had time for one book a week. And I thought "I'm also crazy busy since having kids. But if he can manage a book a week, then maybe I could push myself to 200 pages a week." I mean, it's not quite a book, but 200 pages is close to a book.
So that's my goal. We'll see how I do.
In 2021, I averaged 164 pages a week. In 2022, I averaged 99 pages a week. In 2023, I did 168 pages per week. Maybe I can get that closer to 200 in 2024?
Of course, the problem with New Year's goals is that they all have to be balanced against each other. I've also committed myself to finishing Vietnamese on Duolingo in 2024. And for this first week of 2024, I spent loads of time on Duolingo, but not so much time on my reading. So I'm going to have to figure out if I can keep both my Duolingo goals and my reading goals in 2024. But I'm going to try.
Here is a Baamboozle game for giving advice. This Baamboozle Game was given to me by a colleague when I was covering one of her classes. (I don't think she designed it herself--it looks like she found it on the website.)
I used it in the class, and it worked well.
The game itself is designed to be used for functional language for giving advice in general. (The suggested answers are "You should... / You'd better... / If I were you..." However, my colleague was using it specifically to review a lesson on using "should' for advice. So the game could be used for either.
I was talking to a colleague recently, and she mentioned that she uses the website Baamboozle in a lot of her lessons. The name sounded familiar. I had definitely heard this website mentioned in the teachers' room before. (In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but was this website a lot more popular like about 5 years ago? I feel like I used to hear it mentioned more in the past.)
Anyway, I may be a bit late to the Baamboozle party, but I'm always looking for new tricks, so I checked the website out.
Like all of these websites, there's a basic version that you get for free, and then a more advanced version that you have to pay money for. And, like all of these websites, I'm only going to do the free version.
The basic version appears to be somewhat of a one trick pony. You can design quiz games suitable for doing an all class quiz using the projector. It's very similar to Hurricane, but you can play it right off of the computer instead of having to write the grid up on the white board.
This website works best if you create an account. (You can create a free account using your email address.) Once you create a free account, you can create games. You can also play the games with up to 4 teams.
However, you can still play the games in your class without creating an account. You'll just be limited to only 2 teams in the class.
Anyway, I've created an account now, and have started created games. My Baamboozle profile is here. I've got a few games created, and I'm hoping to add to that in the future.
I recently had to teach a lesson on prepositions of movement, and thought that this song illustrated the sentence structure very well. The Super Simple English version linked above also gives additional sentence structures that were not in the original nursery rhyme, making it even more suited for illustrating prepositions of movement
* The bear went across the river.
* The bear went through the forest. * The bear climbed up the big tree.
I suppose I should explain a bit about my current philosophy watching movies.
For years I felt guilty about watching movies. Of course I still watched them. (I had, as I confessed in an earlier post, a television addiction). But I always felt guilty about it. I regarded movies as a waste of time. I was wasting my life watching things on screens when I should be out living life and having adventures and gaining experiences.
But my philosophy has changed as I've gotten older.
For one thing, now that I'm middle-aged, I've completely lost interest in going out and having adventures. A quiet night in front of the television sounds much preferable to me now than a wild night out on the town.
Secondly, I've decided that the real problem nowadays is not television or movie addiction, but Internet addiction.
Movies are actually an important part of our culture. They are also a work of art that can be analyzed, criticized, dissected, and discussed, just like any other work of art.
Watching movies, and discussing movies, can make you an interesting and cultured person in much the same way that reading and discussing books cans.
The real time waster these days is not movies, but Youtube. And if I'm not careful, I can catch myself wasting tons of time on Youtube. And Youtube videos are often completely deviod of value. Especially because you often catch yourself watching them without intention. (e.g. I wasn't intending to watch 5 videos of police body cam footage, but I just started clicking and then before I knew it 2 hours had gone by.)
Watching a full movie, by contrast, requires intention. It's a choice you make to sit down and watch a full movie from beginning to end, and then when you finish it, you're left with an identifiable work of art that you can digest and discuss.
Similarly, another bad habit I can fall into is watching clips of movies on Youtube--i.e. not whole movies, but just the most exciting scenes. Whenever I catch myself doing this, I try to stop myself. Only watching highlights of movies (instead of the full movie) is a really bad habit for your attention span. So I tell myself, "Stop it, Joel! Don't waste time watching movie clips. Instead, wait until you have a free 2 hours some night, and then sit down and watch a whole movie."
[I wonder sometimes if watching full length movies is becoming a dying habit. Occasionally during the speaking tests, I'll ask teenage students what kind of movies they like watching. And many times now I've gotten the answer that they don't watch whole movies anymore, they just watch clips of movies on Youtube. It'll be interesting to check back in 30 years and see what the current state of movies is, and what the average attention span is like .]
Anyway, my current philosophy is that it's actually good to sit down and watch a few movies every year.
Despite writing a blog dedicated to book and movie reviews, I generally consider watching movies to be a complete waste of time. (I review them on my blog because my theory is that if I'm going to waste my time watching movies, I might as well review them as well.) So in that sense, the fact that I only watched 7 movies this year should make me happy about how little time I've wasted.
But the fact is, I've wasted SO much time this year mindlessly watching Youtube videos and television. And that REALLY is a waste of time.
By comparison, movies at least have an identifiable beginning, middle and end, and they have a plot structure you can critique. And so I'm beginning to think watching movies is probably LESS bad for my brain than my current habit of just mindlessly zoning out in front of the TV.
So my resolution for the new year is to actually try to watch more movies and spend less time just mindlessly watching TV and Youtube.
...I go through the trouble of explaining all this, because this philosophy is what explains why I made it a point to try to watch several movies this year, even though the selection wasn't great. My current situation is that I'm limited to only watching movies off of Youtube. Living out here in Vietnam, we don't have access to any DVD rental stores. We don't have Netflix or any streaming services. At the apartment we are currently living at, we don't have cable TV. Many of my colleagues just download pirated movies from the Internet, but I don't trust myself to do that without getting malware. (I'm not very sophisticated with these things.)
The good news, however, is that we do have a smart TV in the living room that connects to Youtube. So I can watch Youtube videos off of the television screen in the living room. (i.e. I'm not watching these movies hunched over my computer screen, I'm actually sitting in comfort on the living room couch--so at least there's that.)
[In years past, I used to take advantage of the streaming websites that were very popular in Vietnam--see HERE for one example of many--but I've grown more cautious about malware since then, so I don't use those website anymore. Also, and more importantly, the smart TV in our apartment isn't set up to access apps like Youtube, but not set up to access random webpages.]
Anyway, the choice of movies from this past year is influenced by the poverty of the selection. These aren't the movies I would have chosen to watch if I had complete free choice. For example, if I could have found a copy online, I would have much preferred to rewatch one of the original classic monster Universal monster movies instead of House of the Wolf Man. But I couldn't find any of the old classic monster movies on Youtube, so House of the Wolf Man it was.
And, of course, House of the Wolf Man, wasn't the greatest movie in the world. But I'm still glad I watched it. It was something where the filmmakers were trying to achieve something, and there was an interesting discussion to be had about why they failed to achieve what they wanted to, and what exactly went wrong. I still maintain it was time better spent than 2 hours of mindlessly watching Youtube. Similarly, Capricorn One, Riot on Sunset Stripand Barbarians at the Gatealso wouldn't ordinarily have been high on my list of movies to watch, and neither of them were great movies, but there were some interesting things to talk about for each one, and I'm glad I made the time to watch them.
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe was interesting. I'm not sure I could call it a good movie, but if you're interested in the history of pop culture, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. I'm glad I watched it.
In addition to the selection being limited, the other problem is that with two young children and a small apartment, it's very hard to find the space to watch movies. When the kids are awake, there's no peace and quiet to watch a movie. When they're asleep, I can't make any noise in the living room.
So, I was only able to watch movies when the kids were out. There were a couple weeks they were at my wife's parents house, which is when the majority of the movies from this-year-were-watched. Also one week in the hospital, in which I was able to sneak in a couple-more movies between hospital visits. And a got in a couple-more movies when my wife and her family went out to dinner, and I opted to stay home.
And I even managed to make one trip to the cinema this year. When Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. my wife, remembering how much I loved Indiana Jones, volunteered to watch the kids by herself for one night, and I got to go the cinema. (The movie itself was, of course, largely disappointing. But I'm still glad I saw it, just for nostalgia's sake.)
I would have loved to see Oppenheimer, but that one just didn't work out. The wife didn't volunteer to take care of the kids when Oppenheimer came out, and I didn't want to push it. (Plus the release date kept getting pushed back in Vietnam, which made it hard to make plans. Originally it was scheduled to be released for a week when the wife and kids were visiting the wife's parents, but then they changed the release date.)
It doesn't really matter, though. I'm sure I'll end up seeing that movie at some point. It doesn't matter if it's this year or next year or in 5 years.
The three Disney movies (Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp) were part of an attempt to get the kids to watch movies instead of Youtube videos. For the same reasons as above, I'm worried about my kids watching too many songs on Kids Youtube on the Smart TV, and thought it would be better for their attention span if we tried to transition them to watching animated movies on Youtube instead. Unfortunately, however, the kids weren't really interested in the Disney animated classics, and so this project got dropped.
(At some point in the future, I may make a project of trying to work through all the Disney animated classics just for my own nostalgia purposes. We'll see.)
bro seriously, get your shit together. she was an editor for 20 years before she was a novelist. she was never a poet by trade, her language just tended toward the poetic in a major way, it's to accentuate her communication with a precision that can only be attained by getting the right word, which is what the poet's entire life's work is geared toward.
For saying "...he uh teaches at a very large university whose name I forget, I think it's South Chapel Hill or something like that...". (In actuality, it's Chapel Hill, in North Carolina)
Nobel Peace Prize for Literature?! How can you get that wrong when it's written right there and you point at it?
Did Jesus Exist? By Bart Ehrman: Book Review When listing martyr traditions that happened outside the New Testament, I got the deaths of some of them mixed up. I said that James was killed by an arrow.
Apostle James never died from being shot with arrows. You seem very confused. He was beheaded by King Herod and he was the first apostle to die. This is elementary grade Christianity. It was Thaddeus (also known in Luke and acts as “Judas, son of James”) who was shot by arrows.
...I actually knew that James son of Zebedee was beheaded by King Herod in Acts--in fact I did a whole post on it over here. But I was talking in the video about the deaths that are outside of the New Testament, so I was thinking in my head about one of the other Jameses from the New Testament--James, brother of Jesus or James, son of Alphaeus. Obviously I got my martyrdoms mixed up in the heat of the moment, but the whole thing was just a throw-away comment in a tangential point on a 30 minute video.
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These actually aren't even the worst comments I get. I get other nasty comments (here, here, here, here, etc), but it's the pedantry that gets under my skin the most. Like, dude, I'm clearly talking without a script. These are clearly not professional quality videos. If I mess up something minor, then calm down.
I actually don't mind it when people put a correction in the comments. (These videos are unscripted, I'm speaking entirely from memory, and I get little details wrong all the time.) If you nicely correct me on a detail I got wrong, I write a little reply thanking you for the taking the time to correct me. But for the life of me, I don't know what causes some of these people to fly into a rage every time I get a small little detail wrong.
It's a little depressing when you spend 30 minutes talking to the camera, trying to share your thoughts with the world and get some positive feedback, and then all people want to offer is negativity. They watch a video for 30 minutes, find something minor you messed up, and then can't wait to lord it over you.
I don't know... maybe it's me? Maybe I attract these kind of comments? Maybe I have a demeanor which aggravates people? Maybe I come off as smug and pseudo-intellectual, and trying to sound smarter than I am, and then people can't wait to try to take me down a peg when I mess up on something minor.
Or maybe this is just the comments section of Youtube generally. Go to any video with a lot of views on Youtube, and you'll see a lot of negativity.
Addendum:
I may just keep this list active, and add to it as I get more pedant comments.
I should clarify that, in my mind, to be a pedant requires 3 things:
1) You correct an error
2) The error is very minor to the main point of the video
3) You are rude or abrasive about it
You have to get all 3 of these to be considered a pedant in my book.
So, for example, these - guys are a bit rude about the fact that I described 1632 as in the Medieval time period. But admittedly that's a pretty major error on my part, so I'll give them a pass. They're not pedants.
Similarly, this guy is a bit snarky about the fact that I mispronounce "Aspidistra", but since it's a major part of the book, I'll give him a pass as well. He's not a pedant. This guy has made a hobby out of listing everything I got wrong in all of my Flashman videos, but as he makes some good points, and has pointed out multiple inaccuracies, I'll give him a pass. He's not a pedant. This guy takes issue with my pronunciation of French names, which I consider a minor thing, but he's not especially rude about it, so we'll give him a pass. He's not a pedant.
Et cetera. You get the point. If you correct a major error, I don't consider you a pedant. If you correct a minor error without being abusive about it, I don't consider you a pedant.
But if you find a minor error, and you're overly rude about it, I'm putting you on my pedant list. Consider yourself forewarned, Booktube!
Second Addendum
Actually, having had a few days to think about it, I've decided that this post and this list are all wrong.
If you take it upon yourself to speak about a topic, and you get something wrong, then you have to take your lumps. Even if you're doing it informally and unscripted. If you're in the public sphere, you have to expect you are going to get corrected on mistakes, even minor mistakes.
Now, in an ideal world, everyone would be polite and civil about everything, and there would be no rude or abrasive language. But clearly the Internet is not the ideal world. People are going to be rude because it's the Internet.
And, the person who made the mistake is not in a position to dictate the tone in which they are corrected. They made the mistake. They just have to shut up and accept the correction in whatever tone the corrector choses to give it.
...all of which is stuff I should have known. It's stuff I did know. I was just in a sensitive mood the day I made this post, and I temporarily forgot what I should have known.
This post was a mistake. But, I'm not going to delete it. I'm going to let it stand.
However, I won't be updating this list either. In the future, whenever I get corrected on anything, whether it's in a nice way or a rude way, I'll do my best to take the correction in good graces.
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