As we know, the reading class and, then, the classified-note session, was not always interesting. Bruder Joss, as an experienced teacher, realized this situation, especially when the class was scheduled in the critical period around noon.

He didn’t want his lesson to be soporific and let the student to droop. Once he noticed a student yawning, he would take out a “tuning fork” and he asked us to sing a song. His tuning fork was a real multi purpose instrument. On one hand,  it was tuning our voice so that we sang in harmony and in the right pitch. On the other hand, it could be used to hit our head, or at least the desk so that we wake up from our droopiness.

I think the tuning fork technique was very effective. Once Bruder Joss took out the fork, we, the students were ready to sing a song, or else, he would hit the fork on on our desk or our heads (of course in a gentle and comical way).

“WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.”

If I want to be able to write that kind of flawless article, I have to master all the words.

Thus, my new year’s resolution is here. I plan to master as many advanced vocabulary in English so that I could write flawless articles that are worth to publish in papers.

Those are some words that I found on the GRE test preparations. There still hundreds or probably thousands words that I don’t know. Most of them I never found in any texts or conversations before.

I have been learning and even teaching English for years and I still do not know what those words mean. What a pity!

I should know all the words with their wide nuances, synonims, and antonyms or else, I’ll fail on the GRE test.

Anyway, those words are sophisticated words and most of them are used in very specific fields.

Communication can still go on without knowing all the words. Those words just build the gate into the advanced academic world. And I know, I have to pass the gate.

I don’t know what the canteen people say. It’s so difficult to grasp what they say when I go there for breakfast and lunch.

In this case, my English is useless. I just use the universal language: pointing at what I want to eat. Anyway, there is a problem in this situation. When they talk about the card cash, I have no idea about what they say. I just say OK and I don’t need to pay.

This morning I ate at the dining hall at UMBC and I got my omellette.

All of these are exciting. That’s why there is always something to learn about English.

I just realized my mistake when I felt that there was something wrong. The whole context of the text I read was so confusing. The word “trivial” must have meant a different thing.

Following my uneasy feeling, I opened the dictionary and everything became clear. The confusing text was now understandable. It meant the opposite of my guess–unimportant, petty, minor, insignificant.

Now I am wondering how could I misinterpret the word. My brains had worked to infer the meaning from the context but It just referred to the opposite meaning. Probably, the brains need more contexts and need a wider discourse so that they can trigger my uneassy feeling.

Untill one day, I corrected my friend who said it correctly. He said [ro-bust] like when we say “buster” in “block-buster” or “ghost buster’. I told him that he mispronounced the word and I asked him to say like what I said it.

What a fatal mistake.  He insisted that his pronunciation was right so that I opened my dictionary. I was ashamed. He was right and I was wrong. I had pronounced the word for years in a wrong way and it echoed in my mind and it was almost fosilized. What a pity.

I learned from my mistake in a hard way. The lesson is: “Don’t just trust your instinct! Check on the reliable source!” It turned out that a good dictionary was a real great help.

On a vocabulary test I made mistake on the word but I have no difficulties in more unfrequent words such ‘pebles”–my friends had difficulties in those sophisticated words.

Realizing that I had made a mistake on the word, I opened a dictionary after the test and I could figur out what it meant. Since then, I remember it and I remember the event poceeding it.

Eureka! I learned a new word the easy way.

Now after a long time, I ponder on the event and I understand that putting a word in the long-term memory needs a significant effort: (1) The word should be significant and important for me, (2) there should be a kind of urgency to acquire the word, and (3) a previous mistake strengthened the feeling of urgency.

It was long time ago when I was in the first semester of my college. In the third semester, I decided to repeat the subject and I chose a different teacher (this time she was a fair lady)–hoping I had a better atmosphere and a better mark. I got C again and I swore that I won’t repeat the subject but I would improve my listening skill by watching movie a lot.

I realized my weakness. Listening skill and pronunciation were my achilles heels: the left and the right. I hated to concede these but that was the reality. When the teacher played the tape, I could not catch a word. What a pity. My friends were easy to encode the sound waves of English but I could hear only the buzz and the hiss. The encoding machine in my brain could not work well. It might ran out of battreys.

It took years before I could fix the encoding machine in my brain to understand spoken English. It took a lot of effort: listening and repeating everything.

Thanks God now everything is OK. The machine works well in my brain.

I still remember when my Reading teacher, Pak Gunawan, asked me to read loudly I stumbled on the word “vaque”. The whole class laughed at me because they heard I said something like “f–k” (the four letter word).

I thinkmy attitude in high school cost me the shame. In highschool I didn’t think that oral communication in English was important. At that time, I focused my effort on written language. Anyway the perceived goal in learning English was mastering the grammar and the ability to read and write in English. My English teachers focus on that areas too and rarely asked the students to practice to speak. Even the national examination required the same thing: mastery of written English (Reading and Grammar). My English score for the national examination was 9.–almost perfect.

That’s my story for today.

The way he taught us was different from other teachers. His teaching was focused on reading. Grammar was taught implicitly by means of CLASSIFIED NOTES.

He provided the class with various types of interesting reading texts: poems, stories, biography, and many others. I still remember some texts such as: The Origin of the Word “Salt”, a poem — I forget the title but it begins with “The night has thousands eyes, the day but one …”

Now I think his approach in teaching was inherited from Grammar Translation Method tradition. As I told you, he used THE CLASSIFIED NOTES to teach grammar. The idea of the notes is simple. The students should write examples of certain grammar points found in the reading texts in the classified notes. It was called classified notes because each page in our notebook had a heading–referring to a certan grammar item such as: SIMPLE PRESENT TENSE, SIMPLE PAST TENSE, RELATIVE CLAUSES, CONDITIONAL TYPE 1, etc.

By writing the examples in the correct pages, students learned the grammar.

That’s about my teacher.