Well...
I had to speak Spanish the next morning which changed my mind again.
I had my usual, stumbling Spanish conversation. This time I paid a lot of attention to what was making me stumble. Usually I would start a sentence and then have the wrong word from the wrong language pop into my head. I was speaking Spanish, but about every 10th word I would start to say would be Tagalog, or sometimes even Samoan or French. If I would hesitate and look for the next word, sometimes I would get the wrong langauge again. In other words, I suffer a lot from interference between my L2 my L3 and my L4... I think that many people who learn multiple languages as an adult may have this problem.
Well, what to do? Study Icelandic? Maybe...
But it might be fun to try to fix it, or at least improve it. Who knows, maybe I can help somebody else with the same problem.
One thing I noticed with my big deck made up of Irish, Norse, and Old English cards was that the initial problems I was having with interference got less and less as I practiced with the deck, with the cards from all three languages mixed up. This suggests that a deck with French and Spanish, and preferably my other languages mixed up might start to improve my ability to separate my languages.
Maybe.
I didn't really notice any problems getting the grammar mixed up. The problems seemed at the point where I was pulling words out of my brain to slide them into the sentence structure I was saying. So, for today at least, I made a big deck of mixed languages from the
http://www.lexique.org/?page_id=250 site. Put them into English->L2 cards that were clearly labeled with the language each card came from. I did a hundred of them, which I found miserably hard. I need to do this for a while to see if it does anything.
In addition to this. I read French for an hour, the first 20 minutes doing intensive reading and the last 40 minutes reading at full speed with a tts voice pushing me along... I'm going to try Spanish tomorrow.
Maybe this will bring a good result.
My wife is waiting out the results of a covid test. She is not very sick, and she is vaccinated, but how is she supposed to go to school and teach 150 kids, half of whom are not vaccinated, with a minor cold in an era of delta variant. I find it hard to be worried about it too much, but I suppose I should. We are all vaccinated.
(rant)
We'll see what happens. I don't know how we can keep schools closed any more, but I don't know how you can responsibly keep them open in the face of normal allergies, colds, and sniffles. How do we do this? As usual, the experts have told teachers, just follow these guidelines and you'll be safe and your students will be safe. This is nonsense, of course. They don't know. "Oh, we have to keep schools open. It is bad for the children to do distance learning. This is a scientific result." This is based on studying students the year before covid versus the year of covid. Of course students were less stressed when their parents had jobs, and could pay the rent.
"Oh, results from England and Ireland show that you can keep a school open safely under covid" What about delta. up to 1000 times more virus?
Experts, you really don't have any data.
We are doing the experiment now.
There is also an undercurrent in the "keep the schools open" expert argument that seems to imply that teachers are lazy, which just makes me want to slap somebody.
Can you imagine how everyone would react if a teacher went to school with what she thought was a minor cold and made a bunch of kids sick. Or killed somebody's grandfather. Or killed a kid.
One can whine about why parents don't have their children vaccinate who are eligible, but we (actually they, I'm retired) have to teach whomever shows up. Of course the school district claims that there isn't really any extra leave for teachers needed, but does that mean we are supposed to risk killing students? My wife sees 150 students a day, and that's a lot of dice to roll. As a teacher, you are responsible for other people's kids, so there isn't any room for taking chances with their health. Half of her sick leave will be done before the test gets back. We know that student lives and health are more important than anything else, so we will eat whatever problems we have and argue with the school board.
At least we have a mask mandate in our state, but some families are knucklehads.
(/rant)
I know that my family and I have been very lucky in this pandemic. I have seen the pictures of my students standing next to the graves of parents who were killed by covid.
I don't trust anybody who makes policy about schools, and who has any priority other than student and teacher health and safety. But what are they supposed to do? How much pain and death is acceptable? How can we close schools again? What about the next variant?
I don't have any answers, just questions. And a great deal of foreboding. I hope I"m overly concerned.
My daughter is vaccinated, but in public school.
And before I whine too much, what about the Philippines with our extended family that is mostly unvaccinated? And Africa? And the poorer parts of Latin America? And, well, poor people everywhere.
This war isn't over. Covid doesn't care if people are tired. We need fewer politicians and "scientists" who feel they have to tell people what they want to hear. We need to learn how to live with this thing. We need not to be afraid, but also, not to pretend that all the danger is gone.