OK here's the main news. I retired altogether from ESL/EFL about three years ago. I moved to the mountains of New Mexico, where for a couple of years, I became a substitute teacher in Alamogordo, a small town not too far away. Then I retired from that too. My children are still in school but we've moved back into the mountains (just before the coronavirus) and we are just trying to survive without going into town too much. Because my wife and I are in our sixties we consider ourselves vulnerable and want our children to enjoy their teen years but with as little risk as possible. Fortunately they've come to see this tiny town (Cloudcroft NM) as the height of urban variety. But our luck may not hold out forever.
This brings up the question of what to do with this site, which I have always used to make my presentations and demonstrate both the goods and bads of technological interference in the writing process. We the people are now doing all our writing with technology by our side, with the red and green lines doing subtle correction at our side, and autocorrect just jumping in and changing our writing at will. I'll be the first to say, sometimes it's good and sometimes bad. I don't know if I'm done speaking on the subject.
I do get invited to TESOLs to make the same presentation, and I am honored to see those invitations. It's like there's a recognition out there that people need to learn how to deal with what I've called "the elephant in the room." Let's face it, people are not going to stop using spell-check/grammar-check, and if you disable it you are setting up a false writing condition, because they'll have it almost everywhere they choose to write. It's like teaching writing by having them carve their initials into a tree. You can go Luddite on them but it's not necessarily teaching them all the skills they'll need to navigate in the environments they'll write in.
Enough of that...I'll only say, my verbosity has been curtailed by retirement (even coming back to this page feels like work sometimes), and, I feel like there is still work to do, things happening out there. So I'm not quite ready to just say, it's all over. Maybe it's not. Bear with me.
