Activity

I sat at one of the computers. Dear Ivan, I typed.

I have been teaching ESL for community service. Instead of “The paper is white,” this guy says “Papel iss blonk.” I understand, because I was there when he invented it. But as far as teaching English goes, I’ve failed. I am now the interpreter…

It turned out that the theory of meaning that would work best for the Martians was a “theory of truth” that gave the truth conditions for every sentence. The solution would look like a series of propositions having the form, “‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” The professor wrote this sent…

[...] I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independe…

We had to act out the beginning of “Nina in Siberia,” explaining our actions and thoughts aloud, using the maximum number of grammatical structures. I hadn’t prepared at all, but felt incredibly, unprecedentedly fluent. “Now I have to talk to Ivan’s father,” I said. “Great. He doesn’t like me. He’s…

We had to act out the beginning of “Nina in Siberia,” explaining our actions and thoughts aloud, using the maximum number of grammatical structures. I hadn’t prepared at all, but felt incredibly, unprecedentedly fluent. “Now I have to talk to Ivan’s father,” I said. “Great. He doesn’t like me. He’s…