What does this image mean?

 Even some rather basic images can communicate in some surprisingly intricate ways. You may remember this picture puzzle from childhood:

 Last night while with friends, I saw the this image on one of their hats. The friend had gotten the hat from lost and found and hadn't interpreted it yet. Together we mumbled through key words and stumbled upon the hidden meaning in a brilliant flash of illumination. I'll put our key words in light text below so you can work through it for yourself. Select the text if you want to see them though.

(source of above image)

  The interesting takeaway is that an apparently random picture can cause a group of people with shared knowledge to suddenly yell the same thing. Images are powerful.

"Is that a Bengal goat? 😀" 

"My friend had a golf hat."

"It's striped. Isn't it a tiger?"

"Oh!"

Tiger is the GOAT!!!

Ruth: Overturned expectations

  I'm doing some studies in the books of Judges and Ruth, and I am currently reading a commentary written by a Jewish scholar on Ruth, Yehoshua Bachrach; it's called Mother of Royalty. It's got a variety of helpful insights, but two that I found particularly interesting come from Ruth chapter 2.

  This chapter starts out by introducing Boaz, the wealthy, "mighty man of valor" and relative of Naomi's dead husband, whom one might naturally expect to take up the slack and fill the needs of Naomi and Ruth which were known to the town and which Boaz can intuit from what he has been 'fully told' (2:21). Yet, he does nothing apparently. Then 'by chance', Ruth ends up gleaning in his field, and when he speaks to her, he allows her to continue as one of the poor who glean in the corners of the field and offers her water. Her response to him contains a rebuke: "I am a foreigner. Why do you even care about me?" (2:10) He should have already cared and shown it:

Ruth’s remarks contained an unintentional reproach – a rebuke to the kinsman, the redeemer, who had ignored his own relatives and had allowed Naomi to sit at home, alone and hungry. Here was Naomi’s daughter-in-law. She had come to gather food for her aged mother-in-law. […] Was she not instead crying out in protest at all the humiliation inflicted on the entire house of Elimelech, so cruelly treated in Beth-lehem? (pg 85, emphasis mine)

  Whether or not the reproach is intentional, Ruth is suddenly rebuking the 'mighty man of valor' who has not taken responsibility for his aged relative's poverty and has instead allowed a foreigner to do so! Indeed, Ruth's being a Moabite almost certainly told against her being socially accepted in Bethlehem according to the understanding of the Mosaic Law, but did it require others' inaction to care for her poor mother-in-law? Here was a 'foreign woman' who had acted upon YHWH's Law better than YHWH's people.

 A bit later (2:19-20), we find another reversal of our expectations regarding this 'man of valor'. Instead of the wealthy man blessing the two widows, it is the two widows who have here blessed him, and one of them is a Moabite! Citing Yalkut Shim’oni, Ruth Rabba 5.9, Bachrach quotes:

More than the householder does for the poor man, the poor man does for the householder, for so Ruth said to Naomi: “The man’s name for whom I wrought.” She did not say “who wrought for me” but “for whom I wrought.” I wrought him many benefits in return for the one morsel of food which he gave me. (94, emphasis mine)

 Even if Ruth is not quite as bold as the above comment suggests, this is still a remarkable set of verses as the order of blessing is unexpectedly overturned. Over and over in the LORD's system, we see that the weak, the poor, the unworthy, or the unknown are only so labeled in the eyes of those who don't see clearly. May we grow in seeing and being properly, as the One does!

CoTESOL - What I still want to remember 4 months later

 Last November, I got to go to CoTESOL, Colorado's TESOL conference; it was a great experience with a healthy variety of speakers. Many of the sessions focused on a different area of language learning than I usually do, cross-cultural K-12 English users. Due to this, some of the most interesting sessions were connected to the presenters' stories of migration, emigration, and immigration (or their families'). I thoroughly enjoyed many of the speakers' sessions: Lulu Buck, Emily Francis, Don Vu, and Beth Skelton are all people to learn from and enjoy it. But I want to mention a few other sessions that I found particularly interesting. 

 But before that... For any non-teacher Americans who have gotten this far, some statistics might be the most interesting takeaway. In the USA, 10% of K-12 students have a home language other than English. 80% of those multilinguals speak Spanish. After Spanish, the next four most common additional languages in US schools are Arabic, Vietnamese, Russian, and Mandarin. Overall American schools have a rich diversity with over 300 different languages being spoken in its K-12 schools nationwide. 

 Specific to Colorado, in 2022, there were 110,000 multilingual learners with 280 different languages. Here Amharic (#4) is added to the above list of commonly spoken home languages. All of this suggests why it's possible to see monolingual people as somewhat limited. 😳😬🙊 (This data also suggests why it could be reasonable and beneficial to expand the amount of translation that is done in official spaces since only 4-6 additional languages would be needed in most states, not 300. Oops, this is beginning to sound political... 😳😬🙊, again.)

Carol Salva 

-  I don't have a long list of quotes from Dr. Carol, but she talks about teaching in the way I want to teach. She exudes love and hope for her students. If you get a chance to hear her or follow her on FB, I'd highly recommend it. Her ideas are practical and caring and focused on the students' potential. Also, she's humble enough to ask for help and then talk about it publicly...

- "[Students] aren't going to believe anything more than what I believe." (for and about them and their abilities)

Monica Lara

- "When you're a second language learner, you're a second language learner for life."

-  quoting Luis Moll, "The concept of 'funds of knowledge is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge."

- She also talked about the QSSA strategy for conversations; it seems like a valuable riff on think-pair-share.

Jamal Khlifat - "Cross-linguistic Syntactic priming between Levantine Arabic and English in bilingual speakers"

- This presentation sounds incredibly complex, but it was extremely interesting. Basically, Dr. Khlifat's study shows that exposure to greater complexity moves students to express themselves with greater complexity. This is true even if the exposure occurs in the learner's native language! In other words, if you give a language learner a relatively complex text in their own language and then have them write in the target language they are learning, they will write with relatively more complexity than if you prime them with a simpler text (in their own language). The research was done between Arabic and English, but studies to explore this in other languages are ongoing.

- This study seemed to me to both support the concept of grammaring (showing grammar in real contexts instead of starting from the textbook with definitions and prescriptions), and it also "could serve as a counterargument to monolingual-immersion  teaching/instruction." This was one of three pedagogical implications given. The other two were "A learner's native language should be viewed as a resource, rather than a problem for educators to circumvent." and "Priming texts in a learner's native language serve[s] as a scaffolding tool."

Sonia Felix Naix - regarding "Ilots bonifiés" - "Collaborating to Maximize Participation in EFL Classrooms"

- This presentation was fascinating and presented a beautiful system for encouraging participation. She shared the main form needed to implement the system as well. The major challenge with learning the system was that one needed to know French as it was developed by a French teacher, Marie Rivoire in 2012. Little to nothing about it seems to have appeared in English before this presentation. Ms. Felix Naix was most interested in hearing from anyone who tried out the system.

Dogs in the Bible

  Yesterday evening in our small group Bible study, a couple of us were interested in this reference: "But not a dog shall growl against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that the LORD makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel." It's in the context of the angel of death who is going to execute the firstborn sons throughout Egypt, and it is of rather minor theological significance. However, in a culture which loves puppies, it is interesting: this appears to be the first reference to dogs in Scripture.

 So, how are canines mentioned in the Bible? Well, honestly, the references to dogs don't seem particularly different from today.

"Pets" (domesticated or household dogs)

- Exodus 22:31; Matthew 15:26-27 & Mark 7:27-28 (food thrown to dogs)

- Job 30:1 (sheep dogs)

- Psalm 68:23 - 'the tongues of your dogs may have their portion from the foe' - sounds like guard dogs

- Isaiah 56:10-11 - watchdogs

Name-calling or Self-deprecating humility

 - 1 Samuel 17:43; 24:14; 2 Samuel 9:8; 16:9; 2 Kings 8:13; Psalm 22:20; Philippians 3:2; Revelation 22:15

Packs of Dogs

- The above Exodus 11:7 reference seems to be concerned with possible violence from a dog. It could be a watchdog, but it seems more likely to refer to packs of dogs in light of some of the later references. Other references in this category would include 1 Kings 14:11; 16:4; 21:19, 23-24; 22:38; 2 Kings 9:10, 36; Psalms 22:16; 59:6, 14; Jeremiah 15:3

As dirty animals or animals with dirty or inappropriate-for-a-human habits

- Judges 7:5 - "a dog laps"

- Proverbs 26:11; 2 Peter 2:22 - "A dog returns to its vomit"

- Matthew 7:6 - "do not give dogs what is holy"

Unclear or Random 

- Deuteronomy 23:18 - "wages of a dog" - maybe a dog loaned out for hunting purposes???

- Proverbs 26:17 - "a passing dog"

- Ecclesiastes 9:4 - "a living dog is better than a dead lion" - maybe for guarding???

- Luke 16:21 - dogs licking sores - this could be seen as sympathetic and healing, or a sign of misery; the dogs could be from the household or a pack potentially ???

 

**Prov 30:31 mentions an animal which is unclear for translation ("girt of loins"), possibly a greyhound or a strutting rooster.