Video: Mockingbird don't sing

For my second videopost, I picked a short fragment out of the film 'Mockingbird don't sing'

It's an American indie film released in 2001, and is based on a true story.
Katie, the main character, was imprisoned in her room from the age of 1, until she was released when she was 13 years old. Being in social isolation during her whole life, she has little or no experience in human care, social behaviour and language.
In the film, we follow the process where Doctors and professors try to help her to get into society again.

Obviously, I can't post the whole film because of copyright reasons, but I think the following scene is quite interesting to link to the course material.
We see how Katie is eating with 2 doctors, and suddenly another woman appears and gives Katie a little present. The doctors are surprised to see that the woman knows what Katie wants. The woman states that Katie made it clear to her, although not with words.
It's a good example to see that even someone who doesn't know the correct language, still finds ways to express himself. Learning the language itself is a process that follows by doing other things.

Certainly check the whole film out. It's quite nice and differs from the usual Hollywood crap that gets thrown at us.
IMDB: Mockingbird Don't Sing

A post about proper lingo and de use o' accents!

Yous see, wire telegraph is a kind o' a dead, dead long moggy. yous pull 'is tail in nicked york and 'is barnet is meow'n in los angeles. do yous cotton ed this? and didgie operates exactly de same way: yous send signals e'yer, dee receive dem thuz. de only difference is dat thuz is nah moggy.

The quote above here, try to read it out loud. Sounds stupid, eh?
Did you understand what you were saying? Is it perhaps written by a little kid who doesn't know the language very well? A person who didn't speak English tried to write this?

What you were reading is a quote by Albert Einstein, arguably on of the most intelligent persons ever, but it's translated to Scouse, one of the strongest British dialects from the Merseyside area. While it may sound stupid at first, the content isn't altered in any way.
We tend to think people who speak with a strong accent are often dumb and stupid, but I don't agree at all with this and I thought the discussion we had about this in classroom last week was very interesting.

During my last internship, I was in a class and one of the students was a foreigner, who moved to Belgium a couple of years ago. Already on the first time when I came to observe the class, their teacher came to me and said this guy, I'm gonna call him Marc in this post, was really dumb, and required a lot of attention. But during the lessons, I noticed the teacher was very punctual on language, and often refused to listen to answers by students if they didn't express themselves in proper Dutch.
Marc never asked to give any answers, and was very quiet in the classroom. It looked like he didn't know what he was doing. Also, his written answers on a test were often very short and lacked any details.
During the lessons I had to give in that group myself, I planned some tasks which they had to do in small groups, and guess what!!? Marc was very active and he contributed a lot to the group he was working with. I observed him and his group a lot and, although lots of the things he said contained grammatical errors, the contents of the things he said were very useful for his group. At the same time, some other members of his group helped him out expressing what he said in proper Dutch.
After this lesson, I had a little chat with the teacher and said I thought Marc did really well and was a good student. She didn't knew what to answer...

This example leans closely to the contents of the text about Lee we saw last week, and I think it also shows that we shouldn't judge someone purely based on his ability to express himself in a specific language. The contents are the main part, the rest will follow.

Oh yeah, by the way. The translation of the quote at the beginning of this post is the following:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

Acceptance!

During the Easter holiday, I spent two weeks in Canada. A delayed flight and a huge jet-lag prevented me to attend the class the following Monday. So instead of writing about the contents of that class, Ms. Kelly asked me to write something about those two weeks, linked to the course obviously.

A few weeks before, we had some discussions in the classroom about Merkel saying the multicultural society has failed. Canada is the contrary and universally known as one of the most multicultural, successful, societies. But why?

The country counts a very high number of immigrants and people of different ethnic origins. With the most recent census, approximately 32% of the citizens said their ethnic origin is Canadian. That's only a third of the total population! Also worth mentioning is that Canada houses around 10 percent of the refugees worldwide. With these numbers, we can state that even a born and bred Canadian is a minority in his own country.

As a result of this, people seem to accept diversity, and even see it as a typical thing for their country. Also the government is very pluralistic, with one of it's most important realizations being the Multiculturality Act (1988), a law which is aimed to preserve and enhance the multiculturality within the country.

While I was there, I was traveling alone. Just booked my flight-tickets, hitchhiked a bit under 1500km and slept were I ended up each night, all low-budget. I know many people don't like this idea of traveling alone, but I can only recommend it. If you ever have the chance, give it a try. Traveling alone is one of the most social things you can do because you're forced to get in contact with other persons instead of just hanging out with the people you already know, and it makes the experience quite intense.
By doing that, I had the chance to meet and speak with a lot of people. It also confirmed some of the points I wrote in the previous paragraph.
More than half of the people I've met there claimed they had a different origin then Canadian. But when asked if they knew a lot of other persons with the same origin, almost everyone claimed they only knew a handful of those people. This is a big difference with how it's here I think. I didn't witness a lot of real ghettoization. Here, I often get the feeling that immigrants like to stay around people from the same country. Why? I'm not sure, but I often think it's because that is the place where they feel accepted.
In Canada, and other countries that share the pluralist way of life, the general acceptance towards differences, not only ethnically but also on subcultures, hobbies,
 and activities, opinions,... , makes people feel a lot less stressed and pressurized I think. There was a huge "live and let live" mentality which made people do what they enjoy, not what society thinks they should enjoy.

Traveling here was a very interesting experience and the biggest difference with all other countries I've been to was that I couldn't find anyone who disliked living there. It's the first time I saw that while traveling. The biggest complains I heard were that the winters can be quite long, or that taxes can be quite high, quickly followed by stating that they still think it's worth it because people get a lot in return for these taxes.
I guess the general acceptance towards others is a key factor in people being happy, because everyone spends less time getting annoyed by others or on the other hand worrying that they could possibly annoy anyone else. That's something we can learn from...