A Little R & R

After a hard week at the 'office,' Kristine and some of the other teachers decided to walk down to the local coffee shop for some R & R.

From left: Jackie, Sandra, Kristine and Carolina

Jackie and Sandra are Kristine's TAs. Carolina teaches a couple of linguistics classes, including the Field Methods class that I helped with. She comes from Colombia were she used to work with a language group in the middle of guerrilla country. They still don't have a completed New Testament so she is going back for a couple of months after this semester to help out.

In my last post, I talked about training the students to use a digital audio recorder to record the sounds of a language. The next step in the process is to teach them to use a free program called Speech Analyzer to analyze their recordings. Thankfully, I didn't have to try to teach it myself this time. I only needed to help one of the Teacher Assistants, Moses, learn how to teach it. My help was needed because the program and all the documentation is in English. Moses speaks English pretty well but it is not his mother tongue. Here, he is teaching the class:

(Sorry for the lousy photo. I need a better camera!)

Moses was pretty nervous before the class but he did a good job. It is too bad the program and all the materials are only in English. It is a very nice, sophisticated program but it really hampers the students that it is not in Spanish.

God Laughs

This week one of the professors asked me to teach her class how to use a digital audio recorder. "Sure," I said. "No problem." So then she brought me a simple recorder like I have used before and two very sophisticated recorders that I had no idea how to use. I was confronted with unfamiliar terms like "Sample Rate" and "Low Cut." And I had one day to learn how to use these devices and then decide how to teach them to a class of Spanish-speaking graduate students. It was a challenge.

Archie with a student (Rena) to translate. 

Kristine tried to encourage me. "God put you here for such a time as this," she said. "Yes he did," was my reply. "After all the serious business he has in the universe, he decided he needed a good laugh. So here I am!"

There were 24 students in the class.

As it turned out, it went pretty well. The students were very nice to me. Rena did a good job of translating what I said. Students learned how to use these devices to record languages and help those without a written language to develop one.

One of the students came to get my "expert" advice on how to use her own recorder.

Something occurs to me now as I sit before my computer looking at these photos. God isn't laughing at me...he is smiling at me. That thought makes me smile, too.

Krsitine meets with her fellow teachers around our kitchen table to discuss strategy for the semester. From the left is Sandra, Aleida, Jackie and Kristine.

Before leaving Dallas we took Krista and Todd and the grandkids to Red Lobster. Here is Patrick, Collin and Aidan hamming it up with a crab claw that they saved from the meal.