Long time no write!
Feb. 13th, 2018 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistUrgh, I feel like I lost the first two weeks of this semester to a fog of coughing, exhaustion and snot. I was mostly able to breathe by halfway through last week but I still struggled with a couple of busy days in uni, the latter (Thursday) being a comedy of errors that culminated in me not getting the homework handed in that I had worked so hard to get done in time (sacrificing things like Time to Eat along the way) because the wi-fi wasn't working. It was so frustrating.
As I feared/predicted, having basically an extra class on top of what I could cope with last semester is kind of sucking. I'm still going to all the lectures and doing all the readings, but in semantics particularly I just have no idea what's going on. It's a lot of new terms for things that however much I try I can't understand. It doesn't help that they're all about different ways of talking about what things mean, so not being able to understand them is like its own meta-problem.
That lecture is weird too because it's split into two bits. The classes are split into two hours of lecture a week and one of seminar, but for some reasons the semantics lectures are split into two so I have one hour Tuesday night (the only thing I'm in uni for) and one on Thursday lunchtime. I'm not sure if this is better or worse, maybe neither, but particularly having to drag myself into uni for just an hour at five o'clock feels a bit shitty. Even though going for an hour seminar on a Tuesday or Friday last semester didn't feel so wasteful/pointless, maybe because they were earlier in the day? Maybe because seminars are a bit more interactive and actually take attendance (not that I'm usually that cynical; I show up because I get to not because I have to).
Then there's History and Varieties of English, the one chosen module (except for Arabic, but I mean this is the one I've chosen that's in my department) for me this whole year. I was really excited about it, it was the history of English that got me interested in linguistics in the first place when I did it at Morris, and "varieties" seems to be the sociolinguistics of present-day English that seems at the moment the area I'm most likely to concentrate on. The class is taught by two different people, basically one doing history and one doing varieties, so history is the first half of the semester. We get a week each on Old, Middle, Early Modern etc. English and that's it. So far we've done Old English and this week is Middle. I love Old English, again thanks to the history and grammar classes I took from someone whose specialty it is. And I'm glad of that, and what I already knew, because I don't think I'd be getting much out of this class otherwise? I dislike the TA, who was quite harsh with us about not knowing how the class was run in the first week (and yes we could be more proactive but berating people who haven't been isn't likely to encourage better behavior in future I don't think). Still of course I find the readings interesting and vaguely familiar (helped by the fact that I'm up to Middle English in one of my favorite podcasts, also called The History of English.
Then there's phonology, which like semantics is trying to bury us under terminology, but I'm coping a bit better here in getting some idea of the parts of the vocal tract and of what sounds the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols refer to. The seminar for that was kind of funny because the tutor was talking about all the different vowel sounds, trying to explain them and show us what the symbols were, but of course vowels are mostly what change among different accents, so he was telling us how they'd be transcribed in the book, which is RP, but also how people are likely to say them...and rarely was it how I say them because I am in the tiny minority of the class who has a rhotic accent, which means I pronounce r's after vowels. And this makes the vowels sound different, sometimes even if they'd still be transcribed the same. My accent has changed a lot in the time I've lived here, to the point where some people are surprised to learn I'm not English or British, but at times like this I feel very weird and alone. (Though of course I'm not alone; as well as North American accents, Scottish and Irish and other accents are rhotic. I was the only one piping up to say "I don't say it like that!" in my seminar group, though.)
Then there's Arabic, which continues on from last semester being as challenging as ever. I didn't even go to that the first week, and when I asked the teacher what I could do to catch up she said "Just do unit 9." So I looked over it and it was all about countries, some of which I'd seen already on Memrise (an app like Duolingo but this one has our textbook associated with it so you can actually learn the vocab you'll need for your test! I've found it really helpful.) Then I get to class and actually what they did is unit 10, which is numbers. So they can all count to ten, and I completely cannot. And they can write numbers in Arabic (for all that we call our numerals Arabic, to distinguish them from Roman numerals, they're mostly not too similar to what our textbook is teaching us now) so I felt so behind. And I'm usually pretty dim when it comes to Arabic anyway. I'm enjoying it, but I'm not very good and I'm kind of relieved I was already planning to do another language next year. Hopefully BSL, but I think that means I'll have to talk to someone to see if I have any chance in being able to do it.
Oh yeah, and disability admin remains one of the biggest demands on my time and attention. I've had two training sessions for my DSA equipment, so I have been through all the settings on the screenreader/magnification software, but there's a ton of other stuff I don't really understand and after two weeks I never heard anything about scheduling another session so had to chase that up myself (it's happening next Monday). In the meantime, the same company that this training has been outsourced to got in touch with me, I thought about this, but these new people who kept e-mailing me said no, it's not about that it's about "specialist mentor support." Which I don't remember ever seeing or hearing anything about, I have no idea what it is. It might be something that was discussed at my original DASS assessment in September but I have no idea. They sent me a PDF with information about this, in case I haven't seen enough inaccessible PDFs yet this semester. I have a meeting with this woman at noon today so I guess I will find out soon enough. I just hope it isn't more hlepiness, someone who's decided what blind people need and is going to do that to them whatever they think. Though I'm not sure she knows I am blind; when she rang me yesterday to set up the meeting she said something like "I don't know what you look like and you don't know what I look like" and I had to find a nice way to say "yeah well it doesn't matter what you look like"...
My actual disability support this semester has been pretty good: I had the same sighted guide for my whole first week, which got me to all the lectures and one seminar, and the guy who did that was friendly and competent, knew where he was going and had even done practice runs to all these places. I did have another person for the one seminar room I needed to find for my second week, but she was fine too, and I was relieved she'd tested out the route too because it was in a weird M.C.Escher kind of building. So that's a relief, none of the shenanigans of last semester. Though the "supervisor" I dealt with was a bit of hard work, lots of silly questions, each in its own email. but it worked out all right. I just wish all this stuff wasn't outsourced to different companies so I didn't have to keep doing this kind of "getting people up to speed" every semester, and they didn't have to keep explaining to me whether they're from Barry Bennett DSA-kit-training or Barry Bennett specialist-mentor-support-whatever-tf-that-is.
One disability thing that is too awesome to stay inside the cut tag: I was complaining on Facebook last week about a couple of my books -- the textbooks for both semantics and phonology, actually -- meeting the criteria of my "support plan" by being electronically available, but in these cases "electronically available" just meant "you can look at them on the library website." Or, more accurately, you can look at an image of each page. There are limits on how much you can download, because as we know copyright is more important than disabled people. I was despairing a bit because while I'm sure there are things I can/am supposed to do about this, I didn't really know what they were. And in the meantime my academic friend Krista saw that she could get a chapter or two of the book, and then she asked a bunch of her friends to see if they could each get a chapter of the book, organized the whole thing and e-mailed me all ten chapters I need within a few days!
It is both awesome of her and ridiculous that the only way I can get a book I need in the format I need is to rely on strangers across an ocean. Heartwarming individuals overcoming an irritating status quo is pretty much the story of my disabled life.
As I feared/predicted, having basically an extra class on top of what I could cope with last semester is kind of sucking. I'm still going to all the lectures and doing all the readings, but in semantics particularly I just have no idea what's going on. It's a lot of new terms for things that however much I try I can't understand. It doesn't help that they're all about different ways of talking about what things mean, so not being able to understand them is like its own meta-problem.
That lecture is weird too because it's split into two bits. The classes are split into two hours of lecture a week and one of seminar, but for some reasons the semantics lectures are split into two so I have one hour Tuesday night (the only thing I'm in uni for) and one on Thursday lunchtime. I'm not sure if this is better or worse, maybe neither, but particularly having to drag myself into uni for just an hour at five o'clock feels a bit shitty. Even though going for an hour seminar on a Tuesday or Friday last semester didn't feel so wasteful/pointless, maybe because they were earlier in the day? Maybe because seminars are a bit more interactive and actually take attendance (not that I'm usually that cynical; I show up because I get to not because I have to).
Then there's History and Varieties of English, the one chosen module (except for Arabic, but I mean this is the one I've chosen that's in my department) for me this whole year. I was really excited about it, it was the history of English that got me interested in linguistics in the first place when I did it at Morris, and "varieties" seems to be the sociolinguistics of present-day English that seems at the moment the area I'm most likely to concentrate on. The class is taught by two different people, basically one doing history and one doing varieties, so history is the first half of the semester. We get a week each on Old, Middle, Early Modern etc. English and that's it. So far we've done Old English and this week is Middle. I love Old English, again thanks to the history and grammar classes I took from someone whose specialty it is. And I'm glad of that, and what I already knew, because I don't think I'd be getting much out of this class otherwise? I dislike the TA, who was quite harsh with us about not knowing how the class was run in the first week (and yes we could be more proactive but berating people who haven't been isn't likely to encourage better behavior in future I don't think). Still of course I find the readings interesting and vaguely familiar (helped by the fact that I'm up to Middle English in one of my favorite podcasts, also called The History of English.
Then there's phonology, which like semantics is trying to bury us under terminology, but I'm coping a bit better here in getting some idea of the parts of the vocal tract and of what sounds the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols refer to. The seminar for that was kind of funny because the tutor was talking about all the different vowel sounds, trying to explain them and show us what the symbols were, but of course vowels are mostly what change among different accents, so he was telling us how they'd be transcribed in the book, which is RP, but also how people are likely to say them...and rarely was it how I say them because I am in the tiny minority of the class who has a rhotic accent, which means I pronounce r's after vowels. And this makes the vowels sound different, sometimes even if they'd still be transcribed the same. My accent has changed a lot in the time I've lived here, to the point where some people are surprised to learn I'm not English or British, but at times like this I feel very weird and alone. (Though of course I'm not alone; as well as North American accents, Scottish and Irish and other accents are rhotic. I was the only one piping up to say "I don't say it like that!" in my seminar group, though.)
Then there's Arabic, which continues on from last semester being as challenging as ever. I didn't even go to that the first week, and when I asked the teacher what I could do to catch up she said "Just do unit 9." So I looked over it and it was all about countries, some of which I'd seen already on Memrise (an app like Duolingo but this one has our textbook associated with it so you can actually learn the vocab you'll need for your test! I've found it really helpful.) Then I get to class and actually what they did is unit 10, which is numbers. So they can all count to ten, and I completely cannot. And they can write numbers in Arabic (for all that we call our numerals Arabic, to distinguish them from Roman numerals, they're mostly not too similar to what our textbook is teaching us now) so I felt so behind. And I'm usually pretty dim when it comes to Arabic anyway. I'm enjoying it, but I'm not very good and I'm kind of relieved I was already planning to do another language next year. Hopefully BSL, but I think that means I'll have to talk to someone to see if I have any chance in being able to do it.
Oh yeah, and disability admin remains one of the biggest demands on my time and attention. I've had two training sessions for my DSA equipment, so I have been through all the settings on the screenreader/magnification software, but there's a ton of other stuff I don't really understand and after two weeks I never heard anything about scheduling another session so had to chase that up myself (it's happening next Monday). In the meantime, the same company that this training has been outsourced to got in touch with me, I thought about this, but these new people who kept e-mailing me said no, it's not about that it's about "specialist mentor support." Which I don't remember ever seeing or hearing anything about, I have no idea what it is. It might be something that was discussed at my original DASS assessment in September but I have no idea. They sent me a PDF with information about this, in case I haven't seen enough inaccessible PDFs yet this semester. I have a meeting with this woman at noon today so I guess I will find out soon enough. I just hope it isn't more hlepiness, someone who's decided what blind people need and is going to do that to them whatever they think. Though I'm not sure she knows I am blind; when she rang me yesterday to set up the meeting she said something like "I don't know what you look like and you don't know what I look like" and I had to find a nice way to say "yeah well it doesn't matter what you look like"...
My actual disability support this semester has been pretty good: I had the same sighted guide for my whole first week, which got me to all the lectures and one seminar, and the guy who did that was friendly and competent, knew where he was going and had even done practice runs to all these places. I did have another person for the one seminar room I needed to find for my second week, but she was fine too, and I was relieved she'd tested out the route too because it was in a weird M.C.Escher kind of building. So that's a relief, none of the shenanigans of last semester. Though the "supervisor" I dealt with was a bit of hard work, lots of silly questions, each in its own email. but it worked out all right. I just wish all this stuff wasn't outsourced to different companies so I didn't have to keep doing this kind of "getting people up to speed" every semester, and they didn't have to keep explaining to me whether they're from Barry Bennett DSA-kit-training or Barry Bennett specialist-mentor-support-whatever-tf-that-is.
One disability thing that is too awesome to stay inside the cut tag: I was complaining on Facebook last week about a couple of my books -- the textbooks for both semantics and phonology, actually -- meeting the criteria of my "support plan" by being electronically available, but in these cases "electronically available" just meant "you can look at them on the library website." Or, more accurately, you can look at an image of each page. There are limits on how much you can download, because as we know copyright is more important than disabled people. I was despairing a bit because while I'm sure there are things I can/am supposed to do about this, I didn't really know what they were. And in the meantime my academic friend Krista saw that she could get a chapter or two of the book, and then she asked a bunch of her friends to see if they could each get a chapter of the book, organized the whole thing and e-mailed me all ten chapters I need within a few days!
It is both awesome of her and ridiculous that the only way I can get a book I need in the format I need is to rely on strangers across an ocean. Heartwarming individuals overcoming an irritating status quo is pretty much the story of my disabled life.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 09:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 10:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 11:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 12:46 pm (UTC)(though, obviously, it doesn't help with a book)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 01:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 01:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 06:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-13 11:38 pm (UTC)