Jumbled Words

Jumbled = An untidy collection or pile of things

That is how I feel about my life lately, jumbled, may as well add my words to that.  I  will do some house cleaning with those words and get some of it out here in print. I am a list maker and will have a few going at once.  My India preparation list gets crossed off and added to frequently. 

Currently on the list:

• Finish and send in restricted area permit stuff
• Get vaccinated 
• Find good resources for studying Tibetan
• Read more of Tibet Tibet (this is pretty much ongoing, however)
• Put all compilation of annotated sources on the blog - oops, should have been done LONG ago...

 Crossed Off:

• Find Mentor

 After my internship prep class for the internship teaching English portion of this field study I talked with the professor over this program who also teaches our class.  He looked over the requirements for a mentor with me and discussed a few ways he could help me, along with agreeing to be my main mentor. He has already been a big help.  He provided me with a few articles on curriculum development and sent an email to a professor teaching the curriculum development class to see what help he may be able to give me.

My focus will go here for some time, maybe note immediately, but I need to spend a substantial amount of time looking at curriculum possibilities and creating a few for myself so I have a better idea of what resources I can and will use in my teaching. So much of the curriculum development is dependent upon the needs and desires of the individuals being taught that a lot of this work will continue and be a focus of my research and study, also, once in India.

As for my current thoughts of language and a bit about my reading in Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French; language is so rich in meaning and yet it is also just a bunch of symbols.  We've talked about symbols in class and how we put meaning on them. I have some previous ideas about language and words as symbols and adding to my list is doing some research on this idea to see what others may have to add to my own musings and then to do a post about my findings and reveal my own thoughts.  What I'm saying here is, more to come.

Closing now I will include a quote from Tibet, Tibet about the culture part and richness of language, and how culture makes up a lot of the meaning of words or the creation of them in the first place.  It is, therefore, important to learn culture in order to learn a language and by learning language a person is also learning culture and a new way of thinking entirely.

On p. 23 of Patrick French's book he says, "For Tibetans the idea of self-loathing or of loneliness in a crowd is hard to comprehend; there is no way to translate, for instance, the concept of low self-esteem into Tibetan. You are what you are."

This observation of his ties right into my ideas on language and interest in studying culture, identity and language. Tibetans view life differently and it is observable through the way they speak or what qualities their language has.  My new question is, or a way of re-framing my old and often revisited question, what concepts that the English language has and Tibetan does not will add to or change their culture because of the use of the language, or will their use of the language simply be different because they will speak it from a Tibetan perspective on life and not be effected or influenced by certain English words simply because they exist or could be used? That's a lot, or it goes into a lot more than what I will ultimately be studying or even able to study but the questions are interesting to me nonetheless.