What am I about?

I had to write this post this week for LSH 498 at Charter Oak State College. It is the first small step toward completion of my capstone and graduation. Who doesn't need to jolt out a purpose statement like this at least once a year?

What are you about?

My name is Nathan Straub. I am 23 years old, and I have six younger sisters and one younger brother. In my free time, I am a violinist and an avid researcher. In fact, my first year of college I studied to be a paralegal.

Three years ago I volunteered as an English teacher in Taiwan; my time with the Chinese-speaking students there awakened a long-held desire to learn as much as I could about language, and to use linguistic tools to serve people from other cultures in areas like language teaching, sociolinguistic survey, or Scripture translation.

Right now I am taking Spanish as part of my concentration, and after graduation I want to learn Chinese and Hebrew. Ultimately I would love to do a doctorate in linguistics. I realize this is ambitious, especially since I will be the first in my family to graduate from college. But my family has been very supportive, especially my mom, who dropped out of Oregon College of Education to get married in 1979 and taught me at home from kindergarten through high school. My dad is very encouraging as well, and he has included me in countless discussions and projects, on the berry farm, in the cabinet shop, and during our house remodel, to teach me common sense and uncommon persistence.



What is this course about?

LSH 498 is a 5-week pass/fail course designed to guide me through the process of defending the outcomes of my concentration and crafting a proposal for a capstone project such as a senior thesis based on those outcomes.

In order to pass the course, I need to demonstrate three specific competencies in each of the five outcome areas outlined in the course policies. Competency will be assessed based on my posts on this forum and my project proposal.

I will need to identify and justify the appropriate outcomes for my concentration, explain how my concentration met those outcomes, and write a proposal that focuses the skills and knowledge I have gained through my concentration into an important project.

The proposal for the project should communicate clear goals and a realistic timetable, as well as relevance and sound methodology.



What is your concentration about?

My concentration reflects two major interests: literature and linguistics. I used the GRE Literature in English test to demonstrate my competence in literary history and analysis. Then I studied the history of the English language, and the history of the Old Testament, to provide further background in the literature I value most.

I took Spanish as a way to meet the foreign language requirement for grad school, and simply to expand the number of people and writings with which I can converse. The linguistic tools I have studied include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition.

Although I’m very interested in the history of ideas as expressed in literature, the “big picture” of culture, I feel I must earn the right to be heard in these “soft” areas by working hard at the details of linguistic description and textual analysis. For the capstone project, I hope to use these tools and background to analyze a significant historical text.

The worm turns for Marci Hamilton

Marci Hamilton, "The Election of Scott Brown, the Newfound Power of Independents, and Why the Framers Would Be Smiling" on Findlaw.com.

For someone normally hostile to my point of view, I appreciate her applause of independent voters, her invocation of the framers' intent, and her castigation of the President's hubris in relation to health insurance reform and the election of Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.

Her Face by Arthur Gorges

Sir Arthur Gorges, "Her Face" in R.S., The Phoenix Nest pp. 71-72. (London: Iohn Iackson, 1593)

I copied the image straight from Early English Books Online. There's nothing like a primary source. The cleverness of composition, how you can read each stanza top-down or left-right, and the charm of the rhyme pricked like a dart and stayed in my memory ever since I first read this lyric in the great Elizabethan anthology The Golden Hind.

Search more and you'll find more stanzas than appear in The Phoenix Nest compilation, but the matrix above is all you need to picture the beams of your love's face.

Dawkins on Information Increase

If you're interested in the information increase aspect of Intelligent Design theory, you really should examine Richard Dawkins' article "The Information Challenge". He wasn't the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford for nothing.... very clear and didactic. Follow his argument through, and you'll learn much. Things to watch out for: although his definition of information increase slips from the microgenetic level to the macro level when he speaks of natural selection, and he equates genetic information with expressed phenotype in order to reduce the argument to the familiar one of complexity increase.

Inviting Americans To Iran By Kourosh Ziabari

Inviting Americans To Iran By Kourosh Ziabari

Posted using ShareThis