My husband, who took many hours of his leisure time to make the first video, assures me that he will finish part 2 this weekend. I hope that everyone who sees it will get as much pleasure from listening as I got from teaching the class. There are many more videos to come, so stay tuned!

It’s on three consecutive Wednesdays, 3/21, 3/28, and 4/4. Each class will focus loosely on a different sister, and I’ll tie the whole subject together with a lot of references to and readings from their works. It should be an awesome time, so y’all come!

Here’s the synopsis I wrote:

Some literature just shouldn’t be taught in schools. Not because it’s too racy or too incomprehensible, but because a two-week reading and a list of comprehension questions just go nowhere towards describing the historical and literary context needed to really understand and appreciate the real power of a great novel.

This is definitely the case with the Bronte sisters. If you’re anything like me, you might have read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights in school and not gotten a lot out of them. You may never even have heard of Agnes Grey, Villette, or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet each of these novels has something fascinating to say about the time and place in which they were written, and the people who wrote or influenced them — as any lucky person who rereads these books in adulthood will find.

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte themselves are in many ways more interesting than the works of literature they produced. The more you know about their lives, the more questions you long to ask.

How could meek, sheltered clergyman’s daughters from the far north of England produce intense, morally ambivalent characters like Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester? The sisters each have a great deal to say on the rights and desires of women, but what do their writings on that subject mean, and can they really be considered feminists? If the sisters were intensely religious, as their writings show, then where does the thread of religious skepticism running through their books come from?

This class attempts both to answer those questions and to show what we can learn about our past and ourselves from reading old books.We’ll touch on historiography, 19th century literary history, the Luddite and Chartist revolts, Victorian morals and manners, the role of single women in society, and much more. There’s no need to have read any of the sisters’ novels beforehand, but I certainly hope you’ll want to pick them up afterwards.

Y’all come! You can sign up for the class here, or if you can’t make it, you’ll be able to find the class notes on this site after each class.

It’s taken me quite a while to put this resources page together, because there’s just so much incredibly awesome stuff to share. You’ll also find my presentation files in PDF format. I’ll add the sound files I used in the presentation to this page as soon as possible. Happy reading!

Presentations

Part 1, Origins-1500 (PDF)

Part 2, 1500-present (PDF)

Links

Sounds Familiar? from the British Library — This is a fantastic resource that gives a number of maps of English accents and dialects, and some interviews with native speakers.

The Great Vowel Shift, from Harvard — Now with sound files for comparison.

The History of English Phonemes, from Furman University — This site gives you examples of the same word pronounced in all four eras (Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Modern).

Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, from Yale — Some enterprising person scanned in the pages and put them online.

History of the English Language, from Dan Short — Super useful timeline here.

American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift, from NPR — It might be happening again!

English Spelling Reform — Some have tried, and all have failed. Here’s why.

If you want to learn more…

The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of ‘Proper’ English, from Shakespeare to South Park, by Jack Lynch

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter

Awesome Videos!

A tour of British accents (including the “Geordie” I kept mentioning):

Shakespeare in the original pronunciation!

The history of English in 10 minutes (super funny!):

Fortunately, there are a lot of great books and online resources you can use to teach yourself not only basic computer science principles (things like object orientation, information theory, etc), but individual programming languages and even advanced things like machine learning and natural language processing. Once you get the basic concepts down (which can be either quite easy or an absolute slog, depending on how abstract your thinking generally is), you’re pretty much ready to learn anything.

Here are a few links to help you get started. Enjoy!

Computer Science 101

Introduction to Computer Science and Programming from MIT — This class uses Python, which is currently a super popular language.

CS 101 from Stanford University — Online class starts February 2012.

Information Theory from Stanford University — Online class starts March 2012.

Programming Languages and Methodologies

Building Programming Experience from MIT — Intro to basic programming principles.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from MIT – Builds on the previous course. One of the basic comp sci classes for MIT students.

Design and Analysis of Algorithms from Stanford University — Online class starts January 2012.

Java Programming from Orange Coast College — Java is one of the most basic and well-known languages. Learning Java gives you a pretty good overview of what to expect in more modern languages.

Introduction to C++ from MIT — C++ is one of the oldest and most basic (pun not intended) of the currently-used programming languages. Most everyone learns it in school.

Practical Programming in C from MIT – C is a precursor to C++, and the progenitor of newer languages like Objective C, which is used for iOS programming. Sometimes people learn C instead of C++ in school.

Webpage Authoring from Gavilan College — This class covers HTML.

Developing Apps for iOS from Stanford — Build programs for iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone!

Technological Entrepreneurship

Lean Launchpad from Stanford University — Online class starts February 2012.

Technology Entrepreneurship from Stanford University — Online class starts January 2012.

Everything Else

Media Programming from Georgia Tech — Covers principles of user interface (UI) design.

Machine Learning from Stanford University — Online class starts January 2012.

Game Theory from Stanford University — Online class starts February 2012.

Computer Security from Stanford University — Online class starts February 2012.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere — Lots of different classes, both computer and engineering-related.

Free Math, Physics, Science, and Comp Sci Textbooks — NYU has a ton of interesting material here.

This January I’ll be teaching another class at the Brooklyn Brainery. The Evolution of English will be a super-fun two-part romp through the past 1,000 years of the written and spoken English language, complete with a ton of multimedia, in-class spoken language examples, and potentially the biggest IPA chart ever carried along the streets of Brooklyn. (Be afraid!)

As usual I’ll be posting the presentations and notes right here for your perusal, and Greg and I hope to record the class this time and post screencasts using Screenr so that y’all can get the full experience. You’ll definitely have a better time if you come in-person, however!

Right now sign-ups for this session (Tuesdays, January 3rd and January 10th) look completely full, but the more of you who get on the waiting list, the more likely the Brainery folks are to ask me to teach the class again. Help a sister and sign up for the waiting list, won’t you?

Thanks to everyone who came out for one or more of the sessions this month. I truly enjoyed getting to know all of you, and I hope to see you at future classes! Teaching was extra fun this time because of your great questions and comments. Thank you!

A little further ado…

Here are the class resources for this week. You’ll notice I’ve not only put down some primary sources, but also a couple of links to articles on the Great Vowel Shift and some other things I briefly touched on but couldn’t cover in-depth. Of course, there are also links to a couple of Medieval cookbooks, so if you ever have a hankering for porpoise haggis or anything suitably… interesting — well! Can’t go wrong with Medieval mac and cheese, anyway.

One thing I do recommend: Rush out to the store and buy you some of this stuff. Imagine pepper that smells of citrus and flowers and cardamom. Then imagine something like 10x better, give Whole Foods $7 of your hard-earned money, and grind this on your eggs for authentic Medieval flavor.

Part Two: 1300-1453 CE

Presentation: (PDF)

Class Resources:

The Hundred Years War, by Jean Froissart. (Froissart is the most famous chronicler of the Hundred Years War. Awesome stuff.)

Letter to the King of England, 1429, by Joan of Arc.

Ordinance for Sanitation in a Time of Mortality, 1348. (The Italian town of Pistoia enacted these rules in order to try to prevent the Plague spreading.)

The Decameron, Introduction, by Giovanni Boccacio. (This is the book I mentioned where the fellow fled with his friends to a mountaintop to escape Plague and wrote a book.)

The Forme of Cury. (The porpoise haggis comes from here. This cookbook dates to 1390.)

Le Menagier de Paris. (Also a good cookbook, from 1390s France.)

The Great Vowel Shift.

If you missed something…

…you can find the notes for part 1 and the notes for part 2 on the site as well. Enjoy!

This week’s class was really fun, and I enjoyed all of your questions and discussion. As always, please free to contact me with any questions or comments. I love feedback!

Here, again, are some fascinating primary sources in modern translation. The Alexiad and the collected Crusader letters are especially worth reading because of the dual perspective on similar events. I’ve also given the one Muslim account of the crusaders that I can find online in good translation for a further perspective.

Part Two: 1000-1250 CE

Presentation: (PDF)

Class Resources:

Speech at Clermont, by Pope Urban II. (Five versions!)

Peter the Hermit: Collected Accounts, by various chroniclers.

Crusader Letters, including one by Stephen of Blois. (Remember, when he wrote to Adela, he wasn’t fine!)

The Siege of Antioch, by various chroniclers. (This shows you how not fine Stephen was.)

The Alexiad, chapters 10 and 11, by Anna Comnena. (This was the Byzantine Emperor’s daughter.)

The Battle of Hattin, 1187, by Ernoul.

Autobiography, by Usmah ibn Munqidh. (A Muslim account of the European Crusaders, from about 1175.)

If you missed last week’s class…

…you can find the notes for part 1 and the notes for part 3 on the site as well. Enjoy!

I’m so glad you came! It was great meeting you all, and I hope you enjoyed the presentation. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments. I love feedback!

Because I’m a huge fan of primary sources, I include, along with my presentation, some short selections from primary sources that will hopefully be of interest and shed some more light on topics I’ve only briefly touched on. All of these are in modern translation, so they’re easy to read and rather fascinating to go through.

Part One: 400-1000 CE

Presentation: (PDF)

Class Resources:

The Secret History, by Procopius. (Check out Chapter 9!)

Justinian Suppresses the Nika Revolt, by Procopius.

The Ruin of Britain, by Gildas. (Gildas was a historian-monk. Here he writes about the stupidity of Vortigern inviting barbarian mercenaries.)

The History of the Britons, by Nennius. (Nennius is a major source for stories about King Arthur. Here he gives the legend I talked about.)

The Life of Charlemagne, by Einhard. (These selections talk about what Charlemagne was like as a man, which is very interesting!)

In case you missed it…

Notes for part two of the class (on the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, etc) are here. Notes for part three of the class are here.

If you’ve attempted to learn a second language in a classroom setting, it has most likely been a dull, joyless exercise in reading fixed phrases out of the textbook to your neighbors in a feeble attempt to have a “conversation.” Said textbook generally contains very little information about the culture behind the language you are studying, and nothing in the way of material that you would read outside of class in your native language if you had your druthers.

How do most people learn languages?

School-based language education has gone through many fads, but the current fad (and the method of pedagogy I was taught while studying to be an ESL instructor) is called the Communicative Approach.

The Communicative Approach stresses speaking as the main method of pedagogy. The student actually spends rather little time hearing the teacher correctly use the language, but instead spends the majority of his or her time “communicating” with the teacher and the other students in the target language (i.e., the language to be learned). Each class usually also contains a short grammar section, with attendant written exercises.

While it’s true that most people want to learn languages in order to speak them, the Communicative Approach actually keeps you from speaking by introducing a very limited working vocabulary and focusing on grammar to the exclusion of allowing the students to hear the language fluently and properly used in context.

At the end of two years of Communicative Approach language classes, students will have learned about 1,000-1,500 words in the target language. The minimum needed to carry on a sustained and somewhat fluent conversation is about 5,000.

What a waste.

When you don’t know something, you simply cannot teach it to others. Why, then, does the Communicative Approach focus on interactions between students as one of the main sources of language acquisition?

If you’ve never before spoken French, for example, you don’t want to copy your French accent from your equally ignorant neighbor. Doing this just ingrains mistakes in pronunciation. Nor are you likely to get much out of parsing eminently forgettable dialogues between textbook characters for whom you care nothing, or poring over grammatical texts whose content is utterly devoid of any context.

No wonder that people find it such a difficult, expensive, frustrating task to try to learn a language. It shouldn’t have to be that way.

The alternative? Input-Based Language Learning

The input-based language learning method stresses taking in as much authentic material as possible, and progressing from beginner books to real, living language texts within three months (at most) of beginning to learn. This has several distinct advantages:

1. Using interesting, authentic material that you have picked yourself is more likely to hold your attention than canned textbooks.
2. You’ll get a sense of how the language is currently used in context.
3. It’s a lot cheaper than classes: material at all reading and listening levels is widely available for free or at low cost on the internet.
4. Because the main focus at the beginning is on listening and reading, you’ll understand when people speak 50 miles an hour at you when you visit other countries.
5. When you do start to speak, your big vocabulary (from listening and reading) will make conversations easier and more pleasant, because you’ll be able to say and understand a broader range of things. The more good conversation experiences you have, the more likely you are to keep speaking.

Ironically enough, input-based learning prepares you better for writing and speaking because it introduces language in context, allowing you to hear and see the language as used by a wide variety of people. In choosing the topics of reading and listening that are most interesting to you, you build up your vocabulary in these areas, paving the way for being able to converse on those topics in future.

Challenge the language-learning orthodoxy.

Steve Kauffman runs a company called LingQ, whose product is pretty useful in automating the input-based language learning approach. I have no affiliation with Steve — other than having used his product and spoken to him once or twice in my faltering French — but I think he presents a pretty good case for the input-based approach in the video below.

There’s no way to make the language learning process effortless, or we’d all speak 50 languages. Learning languages can be made a lot easier, however, and I’d like to show you how.

In future posts in this series, I’ll be showing you a bit more about how I go about finding material suitable for language learning, what my study schedule is like, and what to do in order to keep up the language you’ve learned.

This November I’ll be returning to the first subject I studied on my own in earnest, and teaching a three-session course on Medieval history at the Brooklyn Brainery. I studied the Middle Ages in deep earnest from the ages of 12-17, and it was the goal of becoming a Medieval history professor that I gave up when I left academia (that’s a whole other story). It’s great to be able to share this fascinating topic and all the random awesome tidbits I know with other people.

The three sessions will cover the early, high, and late Middle Ages, with a focus on bringing everyday life into sharp focus with lots of multimedia and some tactile displays. Of course, I’ll also cover the favorites, including the Crusades, the Black Death, Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years War, and a lot of the really crazy and stupid myths perpetuated by Victorian “historians” who saw the era through WASP glasses and kind of ruined it for the rest of us. It’ll be a fun, funny, and (hopefully) completely non-threatening — but accurate — look at what really went down between the years 476 and 1453.

The Brainery is a collective of cool people who hold cheap, informal teaching/learning sessions about various subjects out of their space in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The people I’ve talked to there seem very friendly and competent, and the physical space and variety of classes look awesome, so I can’t wait to give it a go myself!

If you live near NYC and can make it to Brooklyn the first three Wednesday evenings in November, you can sign up here. I’ll post the presentations and (hopefully) audio/video of the class  sometime after the course finishes for my out-of-town friends who can’t make it.

I’m really looking forward to teaching this class, and I’d love to see some of y’all come out and support!