[lojban] Re: Teaching methods, especially WRT terminators, and validation thereof

[Lindar <lindarthebard@yahoo.com>]

> It just doesn't make sense.
>
> mu'o mi'e xorxes

I have tried my best to express -how I feel- about this in the
following paragraphs. Sadly I have no facts, logic, or anything solid
to back this up. My only case is what I present here. So I mean not to
offend, attack, or say "No you're wrong."; simply to state my case and
how I personally feel about the issue.

That being said, I can't possibly express this without sounding like a
douche.

1. You have both ridiculous amounts of time and proficiency against me
that I could not possibly test within a reasonable time frame. So we
could either operate on the presupposition that I -am- correct so we
can test this and know for sure over a reasonable period of time, or
we can continue to operate under the assumption that your way
(hereafter known as The Wrong Way zo'o) is correct. It wouldn't hurt
anything, and it would find an answer.

2. While you are a very productive and valued member of the community,
I feel that you haven't been a part of it. I haven't seen you produce
anything (like Remo, selkik, or kampu), be the backbone of the
community (like Robin), or be a helpful sage to newbies of IRC (like
xalbo, ARJ, or Shoulsen). I definitely haven't seen you try to make an
effort to reach new audiences and expand the community to new venues
of learning and social media like I've been doing/trying/failing at.
Really, the only thing I have seen you do is pitch in your two cents
here and there. Whether or not any of this is the case, that is how I
perceive you. Subsequently, I don't feel like you have very much
weight to say much of anything. You come off as old guard, attached to
old ways simply because they're what you had when you weren't old
guard, and completely out of touch with anything modern. You sound to
me like how a surgeon from 1910 must sound to a modern one.

3. Whether or not you or anyone else has directly viewed any kind of
statistic or result based on any new learning style, the unfortunate
truth is that I have spent at least 20 hours per month (likely much
more than that) teaching new people, and I have directly observed that
people that learn from CLL or L4B (and subsequently use {cu} over
everything else), don't understand why we have terminators, don't
grasp their use very easily, and have a very hard time understanding
when they are needed. These students invariably speak very clunky
Lojban that is riddled with grammatical flaws or uncomfortable
phrasings and is frequently shifted around in strange ways to
accomodate for the fact that they can't actually say what they want to
say without {cu}. There have even been cases of people being able to
speak perfectly coherent Lojban upon first entering the channel, but
then ask me what {ku} means. One of my current students, Amber Shadow
(not sure if he goes by anything else, he may have posted here) has
been taught the new way, and is doing extremely well. I actually
completely left out {cu} until he asked, and he even commented that he
didn't understand why it was necessary since at most one needs two
terminators before any selbri. It's extremely unfortunate that I have
no log or evidence of any of this, you really just have to take my and
kribacr's word on it.

4. Nobody wants to stay with the community long enough to prove either
point. The sad reality of it is that no matter how hard we teach this
way and no matter how many students we actually get to learn and speak
this way, our new students don't actually stick with us.

What it comes down to, in my opinion, is that you learned the wrong
way, and simply by merit of having learned the wrong way -the best-,
you now claim that you're right. This is faulty logic. We are in a
room full of people trying to put on their shoes. Half of the people
have never heard of shoes, the other half don't understand why we need
shoes. Barely a tenth of everybody has managed to get one shoe on, and
nobody has their laces tied correctly. However, you stand triumphantly
at the centre with both shoes on and tied, but you've got them on the
wrong damn feet. So it's a toss up between the guy that knows which
shoes go on which feet, but isn't great with laces, or the guy that's
got his shoes on the wrong feet.

Your mileage may vary. The views expressed herein are not claimed to
be factual, correct, coherent, lucid, or polite. The views expressed
herein are not meant to be rude, pushy, attackish, ignorant, or
superior-sounding. Side effects of Lindar may include irritability,
upset stomach, acid reflux, headaches, mood swings, sideburns, and a
vague to overt feeling of having been insulted and/or that somebody
much less intelligent than yourself has just tried to sound smart.
Available at participating locations. (NO CASH REDEMPTION VALUE)

I hope we gain a mutual understanding through all of this and actually
figure out what really works, because the debate is getting tired at
this point.

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