Doubt well, do what you can, then let it be. Presidents, priests, wage slaves, hustlers, men and women, kids, we all live by the grace of those we love to despise...
Leidenschaft ist, was Leiden schafft
(passion is what makes you suffer - German Proverb) |
I don't care what you believe in, so long as you don't believe in it too strongly. A belief is a weapon in the armoury of your heart, and its razor edge will murder the innocent. The ice, the fire of your passion will seduce mundane men and women. Your clarity will excite respect. And the first demagogue who comes along with a key to your heart's armoury will wrest the weapon from your moral grasp. The first cause which wears the colours of your belief will enlist you as a soldier in ravaging crusades. Peace friend. Keep your passion to doubt with. Our civilization is a simple matter of live and let live, of giving dreams a go, but stepping back with a wry smile when we get it wrong. Let the fundamentalists perish in their own pillars of fire. Spare a dollar for the living, and have a nice day.
- Thor @1 November 1991 |
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Books for sale |
Teaching Productivity and Its Enemies
is now on sale for US$12.50 (click the title link)
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A study of factors affecting teacher productivity, supported by case studies in teaching English as a foreign or second language from Australia, New Zealand, China, South Korea, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia
© copyright Thorold May PhD 2011; All Rights Reserved
published by The Plain & Fancy Press
ISBN 978-0-9871390-0-9
e-mail thormay AT yahoo.com
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English for Mechanics (1st edition)
is now on sale for US$15 (click the title link)
Paragraph Units on Topics in Automotive Mechanics
for teaching to NESB students
(non-English speaking background) and others
Thorold May
© copyright Thorold May 1996-2005; All Rights Reserved
published by Lulu.com
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A further list of books that Thor has prepared to various stages of being 'publication ready' can be seen at Thor's Bookshop |
Feature
Anchluss or ANZAC? - A Solution for Taiwan
What would be the consequences, to follow a crazy thought experiment, if the Peoples Republic of China were to formally renounce all claims to sovereignty over Taiwan? Well, at first there would be a very confused Chinese public in the PRC and a desperate need for some inspired domestic persuasion out of Beijing. However, once that contradiction had been finessed (they've had tougher knots to untie), my guess is that within a short time Taiwan would become China's best friend and ally. They have so much in common. A free Taiwan choosing between America and China? No contest. Of course they would choose China. Taiwan has already shown the world what its enterprise can achieve under conditions of great handicap. Give its people back their hope and spirit, then Taiwan would be the best little brother that China could ever wish for. China would win immense international respect and trust. It truly would be on the fast track in that new Great Game, the contest for competence.
.<> copies of this posting can be found on this website here, and on Thor's Wordpress blogs, Thor's New China Diary and Thor's Unwise Ideas
. Continue reading
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China Readings - Archived news and articles about China: I read a large number each year
a) General Readings on China from 2007 to October 2011; b) Readings on Education in China; c) Readings on Finance, Banking and Business in China
note: Readings for all the world up to 2009 are indexed => here
Work in Progress 
This website is now ancient, at least in the annals of cyberspace. In various forms, it has been accumulating with bits and pieces for around fifteen years. It is formatted haphazardly in basic html, categorized a bit forlornly into "interest areas" and therefore attracts (or fails to attract) readers from sometimes unrelated worlds. Mostly though the website has documented the journey of its author, Thor May, through time and almost imperceptibly become a part of his identity. At times there have been frequent additions, while for other extended periods I have been absent on different missions and readership has fallen away. Why anyone bothers to read along has always been a bit of a mystery.
The Passionate Skeptic website makes sense to Thor, but to you accidental visitors from outer space it might seem like a rambling mansion. In fact, I don't truly know what it seems like to you. The site statistics do show around half a million visitors this century. How many paused to smile, agree, disagree or wail we will never know. Since a tsunami of blogs began to sink the visibility of websites like this around a decade ago, few of you have bothered to email. The traditional static format really doesn't allow for comments to be casually posted.
For a long time now I have been aware that major renovations are necessary. Life is short however. Each day is a tiny sliver of time. The task of a makeover would be enormous. What to do? Compromise of course. I will leave the website here in all its shabby glory. Bit by bit though, large chunks of it will be copied to a stable of blogs as well. Their dynamic format should allow for proper discussion, and their separation will encourage each community of interests to develop its own ecology. The copying process will take months (years?), depending upon other distractions. As each new blog is brought online a link to it will be posted below. In the beginning, these blogs will be mere shadows, but at least anyone inclined can come back to the old site here to rummage through things past, if that is their fancy. That is, The Passionate Skeptic website will remain Grand Central Station for departures to all these brave new worlds.
Thor's Blogs (many more on the way; see explanation above)
1. Thor's Australian Spaces
Australia is a spacious place. Take an evening flight from the scurrying ant heap of some city in East Asia, settle down for a fitful sleep in cattle class, then lift the porthole shutter at dawn and gaze from 10,000 meters upon a continent in blazing creation. You are an avatar, a messenger come for strange messages from other gods in a strange land. The sun rises like a meteor, the night chill upon the land below shrinks like plastic wrap on an oven plate, and in a trice you are hovering above a terrifying, trackless waste of shimmering browns and reds and yellows, bony ridges of old rocks, sometimes a scar where a river might have been a million years ago. It goes on and on for hours. It is Australia, and it isn’t home.... more
Canned Demo'
There is a noisy island of demonstration in city square, with a small fringe of bored police. This blob of humanity fills just enough space to fit the viewing angle of a TV camera lens. I can see it 100 metres away, too far to read the placards but you can bet they are mass produced anyway. Predictably, nobody gives the demonstration a second glance, but there is something oddly irritating about it. Suddenly it strikes me. The chanting itself is pre-recorded and on a tape loop like the canned laughter of a failed comedy show. This is the sort of thing you’d think governments would stage to prove that they allow true democracy. Wow, whatever their cause, these people are losers. Maybe the demonstrators are just going through a biological phase, like the teen girls who want bad-boy boyfriends, the the bad-boy boyfriends with their painted on designer savagery, quaking inside.
2. Thor's New China Diary
- Somebody Else’s Problem
The Peoples Republic of China has many faces, and its inhabitants come in every imaginable shade of character. The seven deadly sins are richly represented, and a healthy bouquet of virtues can be found as well. There are however some constants in public life. Whoever the PRC belongs to, it is not Joe Wang and Molly Liu on Jiefang Lu in any of the 700 cities or countless thousands of villages. It probably isn’t the old men in Zhongnan Hai either, or even the Black Hands that shadow every lucrative trade. Perhaps, in the tradition captured so well by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the place is really owned by some prissy field mice wheeling a UFO above the Yellow River plains. In any case, it is totally predictable in every imaginable situation that in China nobody traceable is responsible for anything, ever.
continue reading
3. Thor's Language & Teaching Notes
 - Grammar for Language Teachers
1. What are we doing when we do grammar ?
1.1. Ducks _ _ _ _ [add one word / add one word / add one word …. complete this sentence ] (class game)
1.1.1. Why did you choose those words ?
1.1.2. Would native speakers choose the same words as L2 speakers on average?
1.1.3 Would Australians choose the same words as Americans? .... continue reading
4. Unwise Ideas (most content still remains here at http://thormay.net. All writings will take quite a while to transfer)
56. Choose When to Live and When to Die
The more your spirit lives in a culture, the more you get what you pay for. After all, the culture has evolved, or perhaps been manufactured, to satisfy people just like you. Blessed are the average amongst us. Maybe your accepted culture has you salivating over a delicious dinner photographed on the plastic packet of a snap frozen supermarket meal. You will microwave the dubious mess inside the packet and suck it up. By the time you suck it up, your mind is on TV football or a soapy anyway. Such is one kind of happiness. If your culture is a millenium old and tells you that meat (or whatever) is unclean, you will smother some overcooked vegetables in curry and wash them down with a litre of Coca Cola to prove that you are up with the times. Such is progress.
These notes have not been written for average people in any known culture. 'Culture' is shorthand for a rough consensus on the grab-bag of events, habits, attitudes and actions that make up daily living. Once you start to ask questions about any of this stuff, you are stepping outside of the consensus. You are no longer average. You are alone in the big bad world, and there is nothing heroic about it because probably there is no one there to clap. So these notes are about non-average survival, specifically my own. Take what looks useful, ignore the rest. ...
Continue reading [The link above is to my Wordpress blog. The story is also here on this site, thormay.net]
47. The contest for Competence
If some people don't break the rules sometimes, then a normal society will cease to function. Breaking the wrong rules for the wrong reasons is like breaking legs though. And if everyone breaks the rules, then a society will disintegrate. A paradox? Yes. See how this cake is baked... more.
more unwise ideas (this website) OR here on my Wordpress blog Thor's Unwise Ideas
5. Thor's Videos & Recordings
This is a small collection of short biographical videos, a teaching demonstration, and some recitations of my own verse, together with several well-known verse ballads (for the benefit of learners of English). The blog duplicates material already on thormay.net at http://thormay.net/video/videondx.html
6. Thor's SHORT CUTS (Wordpress blog) OR the full list of short cuts on this site, thormay.net ....
239. The Competing Engines of Action: Greed and Benevolence
Thu 26-Jan-2012
The salesman and the teacher share much in method and immediate purpose. Both wish to move other human beings to decisive action, and in that quest they engage the target's motivation. Each however is driven by a different personal need, and transmits quite different outcomes. The salesman is (at bottom) driven by greed, and seeks to exploit weakness. To achieve success, he encourages desire, or even lust in the buyer. The long term outcome of the resulting "consumer culture" - a cultivated culture of greed, desire and quick gratification - is a widespread feeling of emptiness and discontent. Lust is never satisfied. The teacher (that is a teacher by nature rather than mere title) is driven by benevolence, and seeks to optimise the potentials of his students. To achieve success, he cultivates curiousity, inquiry and diligence in the learner. The long term outcome of the resulting culture of learning is lifelong personal growth, a pleasure in sharing and helping, and a strong value in doing things well. Benevolence often, perhaps usually, loses to greed. Why? Greed is urgent, the gratification of hot desire is a quick burn, and never mind the quick burnout to follow. Benificence is merely warm and enduring.
_________________________________________
238. Racism and the Paradoxes of Miscommunicaiton
Tue 24-Jan-2012
 It is an axiom that we will be misunderstood. "All the world old is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer" [Robert Owen 1771-1858]. It is chiselled in stone that our writing will be misunderstood. In every "literate" nation, approximately 50% of the population is not literate enough to properly decode a newspaper, and in Australia apparently only about 16% of people can compare the ideas in two newspaper editorials. Therefore, if the topic is controversial, millions are guaranteed NOT to decode the writer's meaning, but to insert their own preconceptions. Given all this, perhaps what follows is not surprising:
letters@thehindu.co.in
Dear Sir,
On 24 January 2012 the Brisbane Times ran an Australia Day speech by a well known and liked Australian of Chinese ancestry, Charles Teo (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/turning-point-to-a-greater-australia-20120123-1qdyl.html). It happened to deal with racism - a very difficult and complex topic. As usual the topic attracted many comments. However, the comment I made was rejected. Perhaps there is a kind of cultural censorship at work in this discussion. Anyway, here is my "bad" comment re-quoted, since it has some relevance to Indian-Australian relationships: "Shortly after Christmas I returned to the house where I rent a room in Brisbane, Australia, and found the place deserted. Eventually I learned that the lessee was in hospital. He had collapsed, hemorrhaging, passed out, come to and tried to call 000 and failed. He called to the Punjabi girl in another room for help. She refused to come out. He managed to text her a help message. She refused to come out. He passed out, then two hours later, barely alive, was able to phone an outside friend. As the ambulance took him away, he learned later, two Indian people rushed in the open front door and helped the Punjabi girl to flee with all her belongings. By my personal code, that Punjabi girl is a totally failed human being. As an ordinary Australian it would be normal for me to have a very dim view of "Indians" after something like this. As it happens however, I have spent my entire career working across cultures in Australia, and decades in Oceania and Asia - long enough to learn that racism is nobody's monopoly, and a very complex phenomena. It takes an effort to cross the boundaries of your group, and individuals everywhere vary greatly in their willingness and courage to make that effort. We can encourage tolerance, but we can't legislate courage or even decency." more short cuts
....
Research [Applied Linguistics] [Formal Linguistics]
 Language Tangle - Predicting and facilitating outcomes in language education
Doctoral dissertation in knowledge worker productivity (specifically, language teacher productivity), from the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, 2010. The thesis is on this website, and is also online in the University of Newcastle research depository at http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804346 .
This thesis argues that foreign and second language teaching productivity can only reach its proper potential when it is accorded priority, second only to language learner productivity, amongst the many competing productivities which are always asserted by stakeholders in educational institutions.
A theoretical foundation for the research is established by examining the historical concept of productivity, and its more recent manifestation as knowledge worker productivity, especially as applied to teachers.
The empirical basis of the thesis is sourced from a chronological series of twenty biographical case studies in language teaching venues in Australia, New Zealand, Oceania and East Asia. The biographical case study methodology, although rare in applied linguistics, is justified by reference to its wide and growing application in other fields of qualitative research. The case studies are analysed for common patterns of productivity, as well as teaching productivity inhibition or failure.
Fluency and Accuracy in Language Teaching
Abstract : This is the outline of a seminar on teaching methodology given as a teacher inservice for Chinese English teachers in Zhengzhou, Henan, China, in November 2009. The seminar indicates a fundamental difference in objectives between language learning for certification and learning for live use. Whereas accuracy is an absolute goal within schooling contexts, its value on the street is highly variable. This difference is reflected in teaching perspectives.
... Other articles on language teaching here
Thor's Big Links List to
ESL Resources & Jobs
General Index to
Thor's stuff on language learning & teaching
FOR
TEACHERS
Lectures
on Second Language Acquisition
Lectures
on
Grammar in
EFLLinks to Online
Resources for Teachers
Articles
by Thor on Language Teaching
FOR
STUDENTS
Thor's
ESL Everything Index
The
Barebones Index - stuff from Korea & China
Poetry
 [ also see Thor's Poems
at http://thormay.net/literature/poems.html
]
Australian Blue
Centre
country scene: A
thousand miles of desert,
Ten thousand miles of
shimmering heat.
In and out the Dead Heart,
Only one great vastness;
Up and down the Diamantina,
Sand torrents stopped and stilled.
Hills dance like rainbow serpents,
Mirages race like
shadowed giants,
Trying to vie with the sun in their reach.
A wild eye is needed
To view this wilderness decked with blue
In all its unforgiving beauty.
Thor
(cheerfully ripping off Mao Zedong, “Snow”)
April 2008
WRITING 
Managing
Downward
Spirals - Getting from Here to There
Hey,
will you be here tomorrow? Seg back twenty years and all the news was
of a planet overrun by recklessly breeding humans. Today in the media
of rich nations, the slightly hysterical whisper is that liberated
women are on a baby strike and we’ll all be doomed to robot care in our
old age. This downward spiral of fertility is an almost sedate affair
in the grand scheme of things. Compare it to the supposed disappearance
of dinosaurs after the nuclear winter from earth's traffic accident
with a giant meteor. People though, count for more than dinosaurs,
don't they...
<> Bus
to Heaven (a
story for learning English) 
Every
morning Helen put her left shoe on before her right shoe. She combed
her hair before she put on any mascara. And she made her bed before she
ironed her dress. There wasn't any special reason for doing things in
that order. It was just a habit, and she never thought about it...
(continued
...)
<> Mr Dog
Looks for Breakfast
(a children's story for learning English)
Mr. Dog
woke up one Spring morning and yawned.He stretched his
legs and wrinkled his nose.Then he sniffed the
breeze. There were many
interesting smells in the air.He could smell the
jaoze steaming in Mrs. Li's
kitchen. That made his to tongue hang out, and he panted a little with
pleasure.Presently
he caught another scent. It was that damned Tabby cat. He frowned, and
growled deep in his throat.The silly thing was
watching him for sure, hiding
behind a fence or something. He looked around suspiciously, but Tabby
was not to be seen...
(...
continued)
Stumpy and the Decision Tree
~~~ a daggy epic from virtual space
Photos
A photo essay from students in Zhengzhou photo index
Thor's Videos .... index of videos & recitations here [ All of my videos are also now on a blog, Thor's Videos & Recordings, at http://thorsvideo.byeways.net/ ]
The following three short, and very amateur videos were made in China in 2010 for the purpose of giving me a current professional and personal identity. At least from that perspective it was a wasted exercise: the Chinese Public Security Bureau threw me out of China a little later for the crime of turning 65. Ce la vie. An earlier, further small collection of personal "identity" videos can be seen here.
see the video, "The Journey of a Passionate Skeptic " (4 minutes) here
see the video, "Born 1945 - Still Running Strong" (2.5 minutes) here
see the video, "Teaching English is Fun " (4.5 minutes) here
writing & photography on this site is
copyrighted © Thorold (Thor) May 2011
all rights reserved, http://.thormay.net
thormay AT yahoo.com |
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