What college did/do you attend? Major?

Hey, I'm thinking about doing my B.Ed too. I'm thinking about starting in January at the Uiversity of Maine - Presque Isle. Its only a year and half compared to 2 years here in NS.
What would you teach, elementary or secondary?
I'm crazy, I think I would actually like to teach junior high!

I had an interview at the Maritime Musuem of the Atlantic last week and it went very poorly!

I would teach high school without a doubt. I couldn't imagine teaching junior high kids, they'd drive me insane!

If you do your B.Ed in Maine you should know that it's not a very well recognized program in NS for some strange reason. Canadian schools seem to want their teachers to have been taught in Canada.

Kara, did you know I lived in Caribou for a year? Quite an experience.

Kara, bummer about the interview. What happened?

Mike,
I had never heard of U of M until a friend of mine decided to go there. Her father used to be our principal and is now quite high up in the school board. So I figured if its good enough for her, it will be good for me. When I was talking to the school itself, they said theres a certain clause in effect. NS wants their teachers to take 2 year education degrees, but if you graduated from high school in 1999 or before, you can do a shorter degree. U of M's degree is only 2 semesters at the university and one semester practice teaching, which you can do at home. And they have rolling admission, which is good for slackers like me who can't decide what to do.

Grgranny,
Caribou!!! What were you doing there?

RealtorGal,
Where to begin with my bad interview.
I had sent in a resume a few months ago but didn't hear back. So they called last week and said they had so many people apply for the original job, that they couldn't bring me in for an interview, but they had another position available and was wondering if I could come down. So I said sure, not really knowing what it was about. I get there, on my birthday no less, and they tell me more about the position. It turns out they wanted me, not for my lovely history degree, but for my cashier experience. They wanted someone to ring in tickets...for 7.50 an hour. YUCK!
The interview itself went fine until the end when they started asking questions like, "What were the two boats that collided during the Halifax explosion?" and "How do you get to Peggy's cove from here?|" Well, I suck at remembering details about history and am even worse at directions. So that was it for that, haven't heard back from them. It was just as well, for 7.50 an hour it wouldn't be worth it for me to commute 45 minutes into the city. So the hunt continues.

Kara, My hussband was an engineer for Boeing and some dumb bunny in the air force forgot to unplug something when he took off he drug the whole front end of the airplane and really did a number on it. So, my husband went in place of 3 engineers to work on it at the airbase. They furnished us house trailers. Some were in Limestone. Ours was on the top of the hill next to the airport. After we left they were going to enlarge the airport and there would be no more trailer court. We went all over eastern Canada, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. Do you know Mike? He told me they really messed up Peggy's cove with all the commercial junk. I also understand they closed the airbase so don't know what in the world the community is doing now. Be careful when you're driving. There's a lot of drunks on the road up there. Especially the snowmobiles.

Hi Granny!!

I haven't been to Peggy's Cove in a couple of years. I would imagine that it's a little better since all of the hoopla has died down from the Swiss Air crash a few years back. I hope so since it's such a nice spot.

But my real interest is old newspapers. I love to research how newspapers reflected and influenced the past. I don't know why, but reading old newspapers through microfilm fascinates me. -- Kara

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Kara, have you ever thought about trying to get a job as an archivist? My neice in Seattle does that. She has an undergraduate degree in English (with Norwegian as her minor), and a masters degree in library science. Libraries public and private, historical societies, etc., etc., all hire archivists and research librarians. It helps to have computer skills.

Mathman

Mathman, thats a good idea. I think I will look into it. One of my professors mentioned it to me last spring, but I was so anti-school then, I didn't really listen.

Grgranny, although its not very far away, I have only been to Peggy's Cove once. And dumb me, it was on the year anniversary of the SwissAir crash. Its funny but with my family the tourist attractions of our own home are the things we've never seen. Both my parents haven't been to Peggy's Cove and we've just recently seen the Tidal Bore. I guess the tidal bore is a big thing with tourists, but to me it just looked like a wave of water that came up the Bay of Fundy really, really fast.

That tidal bore is one of the many things we saw. You're right that it doesn't seem all that spectacular. I don't remember where the place is that made it seem like you were going backwards or something. It was on a small hill. Try and get something to eat on a Sunday in New B. !!! Nothing is open on Sundays in eastern Canada. Might have been able to get gas but that's about it.

Sunday shopping is a bit better now. In New Brunswick all the malls are open on Sundays from August to January. Here in NS, for 6 weeks before Christmas the stores are open on Sunday. And most restaurants are open on Sunday here and in NB.

Mathman's Question 1

Doris, here is something that I always wanted to know. Is ancient Greek about the same as modern Greek, or is it much different? Would a twenty-first century Greek citizen be able to pick up Plato in the original and read it, or would it be like an English-speaking person trying to read Beowulf?

I am curious about this because when the Rosetta tone was discovered, and one of the languages was Greek, this immediately broke the code of Egypian hieroglyphics. So people must have had no problem with the Greek. Or was it just professional scholars who could read it by that time.

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Mathman, I can't speak for what a 21st century Greek person can read or not. But when I could actually read ancient Greek, I couldn't do much with modern Greek newspapers. It is likely that modern Greek students learn Plato, but whether it is easier for them than Beowolf is for us, I don't know.


In fact, ancient Greek is an interesting course, because there were many dialects. They teach you Grimm's law to help you sort out the differences. Yes this is the Brothers Grimm as in fairy tales:


Pi beta phi
Kappa Gamma Chi
Tau Delta Theta

If you don't recognize a word, you know that dialectic changes tend to occur according to Grimm's law.

For example, consider the Latin and German words for brother:

Frater Bruder

Your law says that an f (ph) may morph to a B (and it did)
Your law says that a T may morph to a d (and it did)

Note that vowels slide around a lot. (And even in our supposedly standardized world, the vowels of a Kennedy and the vowels of a Carter are not too close!)

The version of ancient Greek sung by Homer is enough different from the version of ancient Greek written by Plato that you have to buy 2 different dictionaries for the courses. To point this up, Homer had and used the digamma (essentially a W/V) and Plato didn't. Even the alphabet was different! And that isn't the only difference, obviously.

The Spartans had a different enough dialect that when an Athenian was writing a comedy about Spartans, he deliberately did the dialect, which British translaters generally translate the Spartans as having a Scotch accent.

As to the Rosetta stone, it was translated by a language prodigy named Champolion, a Frenchman. The demotic Greek was a form of ancient Greek well known and well studied by scholars all over, as it came from an era where many many manuscripts had survived. Whether demotic Greek was readable by a 21st century Greek person, again, I can't say. 20 years ago, I could read it. Certainly the British were fervent studiers of ancient Greek in the era that the Rosetta stone was found. Every school boy knew the stuff.

I don't know if that really answers the question, but I hope it helps.

Doris

Also, question number two How do we know how Latin (I mean the Latin of Julius Caesar) was pronounced 2000 years ago? It is somewhat different from "Church Latin," which is the only living representative of the language. Was there a time in the past where the two versions split or drifted apart, and if so, how do we know what the old version sounded like?

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Mathman, What Roman Latin sounded like to Roman speakers was a topic of much debate when I was in school, and there were many different opinions. Furthermore the Germans had a radically different idea of what it sounded like than Americans.

Some of the evidences come from poetry (which if you don't read it write, is not euphonious). I don't remember as much about this one.

Doris

Thanks for the info, Doris P. Especially Grimm's Law. Pretty cool.

Speaking of Greek pronunciation, when I go to mathematics meetings I can always tell what part of the country the speakers are from by how they pronounce the Greek letters that commonly occur in various formulas and equations. Letters like "phi" and "psi," for instance. People from the east coast say "fee" and "see," while westerners says "fie" and "sigh."

I speculate that the reason is that easterners (those dilettantes!) try to pronounce Greek the way they think the Greeks do (sort of like ordering in French in a French restaurant). But westerners (think John Wayne) say, forget those sissy Greeks, I'm going to pronounce it the AMERICAN way!

Mathman

Wow, this is GREAT stuff! Everybody is so damn interesting!

So there really is a Madonna University. Cool.

RG#1--A Wesleyan Rgal. No wonder you know your Carver so well.

Kara--I second Mathman's suggestion of going for being an archivist. Sounds like it's in your blood. Carl Jung and then a bunch of psychologists after him designed some very simple tests to determine what sort of career or job you're best suited towards. There are a bunch of websites that have these aptitude tests, but most of them charge money. If you do a google.com search under "jung aptitude tests" it lists a bunch of sites. If you can find a free one, might be fun. I love research too. I could sit at the medical library for days and do research. I got paid for it for a while and it was great.

Me: University of Utah, BFA, modern dance, '77, minor in English. I started out as a communications major meaning to go into journalism. In high school I edited the regular school newspaper and a subersive underground newspaper at the same time. My mother let us use her copy machine at work (this was 1974, years before Kinko's). Of course the school administration hated "The Lion's Dung" (we were the Alhambra Lions, which makes no sense -- lions in Spain?) and went crazy trying to figure out who was behind it. The last person the suspected was that nice girl who edited the "Scimitar," the regular newspaper. Sure was fun. Wish I'd kept copies. Anyway, changed to dance after my first quarter because the journalism dept. at the UofU sucked. Journalism in all of Utah sucked. Idiot Rgirl picked the UofU over Northwestern, where I had financial aid and a scholarship, because although both had journalism and dance departments (I figured I'd take seriously and keep dancing for fun), Utah was still cheaper plus it was closer to Arizona. Plus if I went to Northwestern, I'd be close to all my parents' relatives and that scared me. So instead I go to Salt Lake City and end up living about six blocks away from serial killer Ted Bundy.

Anyway, changed to dance because the dance dept. at the UofU was then and still is considered one of the best university dance departments in the country. I figured I'd never get a job with any of it, but I'd have fun for a couple of years and then get serious. So what happens? I get a one in a million paying job performing with the modern dance company Repertory Dance Theatre. After five years of dancing and touring to almost every state in the country (that was fun) I wrecked my back and so went back to the UofU because the state paid my tuition and got an MS in sports medicine.

I also took a bunch of night courses from a wonderful musicologist. He'd have us compare Beethoven's Op. 111 with The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" or sometimes Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto" with Barry Manilow singing "I Made it Through the Rain." The latter really upset some people.

Also took night courses in art and art history. Those were heaven.

I was hired just as I finished all my coursework by a company that made rehab and training equipment in Long Island, NY. It was a very strange screwed up place to work. After two years I only worked there part-time (so I could keep the health insurance) and spent the rest of my time as a subcontractor for physical therapy clinics, pain clinics, and sports medicine clinics. Also edited a journal, "Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance."

The last place I went to "school" I call the University of Lish. It was a private class in writing prose fiction. It was taught by former "Esquire" and Knopf editor Gordon Lish. We met for six hours, from 6pm to 12am and later once a week. Lish talked the whole time and every once in a while he'd let somebody read a sentence. If you got through that sentence you could read two, but that rarely happened during your first year or two. People who had been in the class longer would sometimes read whole stories, but this was usually at the request of Lish for them to read a particular story. Lish would say anything to you. Anyfreakin'thing. Nothing was forbidden. Best writing class in the world, I think. So I say I have a PhD in Lish, but it doesn't mean diddley to anybody but me. I learned never to start the first sentence of a story with a preposition, how to use assonance and alliteration, and, if I work my guts out and the gods are with me, how to write the truth.

In answer to the other thread about whether or not you use your degrees -- yes, absolutely, every one of them, every day. Learning is the coolest. Love it, love it, love it.
Rgirl

With this, I begin my story.

Wow, indeed, Rgirl. You've done a lot of neat stuff.

Yes, there certainly is a Madonna University in the Western suburbs of Detroit, not too far from Shep Goldberg's office -- I pass by the University frequently -- and a fine one it is, too. It is best known as a college of education, but also grants liberal arts degrees. Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone is from Bay City, not all that far away.

I once applied for a part-time teaching (i.e., moonlighting) job there, way back when it was Madonna College. One of the questions on the application was, are you (a) married, (b) single, or (c) engaged. I asked the Dean why they cared if someone was engaged or not, and she said that if an applicant is an engaged single woman, that counts against her because they figure she will be getting married soon and leave the teaching profession. (This was a long time ago, needless to say.)

Lions are HUGE in Alhambra! Here is a poster of the Alhambra Court of Lions.

http://www.webshots.com/g/poster/20/25920_poster.html

They are all over the flags of various old nation-states, such as Castille. I think lions migrated across the land bridge from Morocco...no, wait, those were Siberian woolly mammoths migrating to Alaska -- never mind.

MM

Speaking of Greek pronunciation, when I go to mathematics meetings I can always tell what part of the country the speakers are from by how they pronounce the Greek letters that commonly occur in various formulas and equations. Letters like "phi" and "psi," for instance. People from the east coast say "fee" and "see," while westerners says "fie" and "sigh."

I speculate that the reason is that easterners (those dilettantes!) try to pronounce Greek the way they think the Greeks do (sort of like ordering in French in a French restaurant). But westerners (think John Wayne) say, forget those sissy Greeks, I'm going to pronounce it the AMERICAN way!

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Mathman,
The way they teach you in Greek class is indeed phi=fee and
psi = psee. (the p sound is in there) But they also teach you pi=pee.

Do those dilettante easteners say the area of a circle as

Pee Are Squared??

In fact, this is why in math class, despite going to Eastern UVM, I said phi and sigh. I couldn't bear to say pi as pee, and wanted to be consistent more than correct on some of the letters.

By the way, on Greek pronounciation again: back all those years ago, one of the biggest Greek papers published outside of Greece was published in Brooklyn. If you recall, back in the days of Plato, Greek had lost the v/w sound. By the 20th century, beta was pronounced as having kind of a V sound. So in order to phonetically spell Brooklyn in the Greek alphabet, the paper started the word not Beta Rho, but Mu Pi Rho (sort of
MPRooklin).

Dpp

BS in Physics and math from Clarkson University

MS in Meteorology and Oceanography from Texas A&M University.

Worked at a met for the past 26 years. But spent the first 7 years after graduating building houses. This has been a real money saver as I have been able to do all the renovation work on the house we bought, everything from rebuilding the garage to gutting the interior of the house, putting down new wood floors and putting in a new kitchen.

I have a B.A. in History and a Masters in Library Science, both from the University of South Carolina.

Katherine, do you now work in a library? I would imagine that library science has evolved quite a bit over the past decade.

Figureskates, in what capacity do (or did) you work as a met? How old was the house you renovated? BTW, I love the Lexington/Concord area. (I grew up in Brookline.)