[If you teach well, people might pay you to help them with things you’re skilled at, even without expertise.]
[Putting people in a group or course would yield better outcomes when they have been vetted to have similar needs that can be addressed by your offering. The transactional ‘buy and enroll’ misses this opportunity.]
[Living documentation that everyone can access. Many people have talked about doing it, but you actually do it in a relational way. Nice reminder of the beauty created through that process. No logic or reason behind it, other than connection, recognizing that something cool is happening and doing it.]
Poorly dressed in other folks’ old clothes, with a dog and a noisy borrowed bicycle, I’d see half the eyes in the room wish they hadn’t come the moment they realised that it was me giving the workshop. ’this is the guy?!’. Some would quickly look away as if to hide the way their faces openly displayed their shock. I quickly learnt to play off of that, and to enjoy it too; it was the first tension contour to resolve! Knowing that I would resolve that tension, I could enjoy it, a little like sitting in front of a big cake you know you are about to eat, and waiting a little!
[Problematic learners can become observers. Problematic rapports in one-on-one might work out better in a worokshop setting, or in an audio course. Terminating a relationship with the student can still maintain their engagement with the method.]
[Bear with difficult learners as long as they help illuminate deficiencies in your method. Try to convince them to play ball, but ultimately leave the choice with them.]
[Explaining etymology can help mask repetition.]
not a tree shaker but a forest shaker
[Moving at the speed of trust.]
How can I include a piece of those I’ve met so that they see themselves in me?
If I can sleep comfortably on a yoga mat, I have significantly expanded the ‘surface area’ of what’s possible.
No side wins when humans suffer; more to ‘win’ by finding out why are there are sides in the first place.
“Platform data” and “Other” disk usage
Reclaim Docker storage:
docker image prune
# or
docker image prune -a
docker volume prune
# remove downloaded packages
sudo apt-get clean
# clear package caches that can't be downloaded
sudo apt-get autoclean
# remove unused packages
sudo apt-get autoremove
5 Linux commands to check free disk space
# show disk space in human-readable format
df -h
# show disk usage in human-readable format for all directories and subdirectories
du -h
Cannot update due to one tiny app filling up 20GB drive
Remove swap storage
sudo swapoff -a
# or
sudo swapoff /apps.swap
# if desired
truncate -s 1G /apps.swap
sudo rm /apps.swap
Hydrate skin without blocks.
Critique, The Internet, and You
[Offer critique only when you understand: 1) is it for you?; 2) under what conditions was it created?; 3) who is your audience? 4) what are your goals?. Important not to misalign by simply sharing whether you ’like’ it, or by complaining that “your seafood is bad because I don’t like seafood”.]
[Note the context for when something is relevant so that it can be easily removed when things change.]
[Use git commit messages to document the reasoning behind certain changes.]
[Do it only once, not in multiple rounds. Consider salary reductions instead (also only once), accompanied by lower labor expectations. Be very direct without trying to lighten the mood. Management signed up for this.]
[Teaching a language vertically is quickly tedious. Nobody makes a sentence from only prepositions. Better to tie together various concepts to enable creating simple expressions.]
[Teach common words after the necessary knowledge to understand them, not at the beginning.]
To put lots of effort into ’looking’ unique versus a deep acceptance that everyone is already differentiated.
As language methods often completely ignore the language of instruction, they tend to have an irritating habit of describing absolutely everything a language does. Learners are often forced to spend too much time trying to make heads or tails of grammatical descriptions provided to them for a new language, without ever realising that the target language functions in the same way as the base language, or indeed realising it when it’s too late and the knowledge can do little to spare the learner any effort. What’s worse, is that superfluous descriptions run the risk of becoming mental debris that the learner is unsure how to apply. They may lurk in the shadows and raise their ugly heads later on, interfering with other thought processes (often in fascinating ways, mind!).
In short, we don’t need to describe everything the target language does, and what should remain unsaid will have much to do with the structure of the language of instruction. To describe certain things in the target language which are indeed the same in the base language (without a particular reason for doing so) would serve to make our learner feel less in control than they would have with less information. We will avoid burdening our learners with irrelevant observations they’re not sure what to do with, and in this way we also cue that what we do tell our learners is important.
[We often already know, without realizing that we know.]
When it comes to importing vocabulary, we are almost always using the vocabulary for something other than learning a word. When Complete Spanish opens with -al words, it is not so we can learn legal, normal and metal, but so that we can begin dissecting what vowels sound and look like in Spanish, whilst raising the learner’s consciousness of word stress, too. In the same course, when we access verbs through the pattern ‘cancelation - cancelar, we do so to highlight the infinitive and its function, to then begin establishing the infinitive as a launchpad for building other tenses. The vocabulary conversion itself is secondary to these goals. Our learner will be taken aback by all the free words, of course, but our own focus as writers is elsewhere!
What are the messages that only I could write? What are the experiences and stories that only I could share? What can be seen only from where I’m standing?