I should also note that MT was not merely poor at meta-teaching how to use his eponymous ‘Method’ itself; He was actively secretive about it.
I believe the reason he claimed was something like fear of the establishment stealing it and claiming credit? That doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. Was that the ‘real’ reason, or a rationalization for some traumatic after-effect of his war experience, or what? Not really a question I’d expect a high chance of success or high returns on answering.
I assumed an active failure on MT’s side because of comments like these (comment 10) by Cainntear, who is much more knowledgeable about MT than me. Quote:
[The new course design] is not the same method, although it looks deceptively like it.
It’s not a matter of Thomas being a magician, but I think Splog’s use of the word “tricks” is more relevant than even he realises.
I suggest that Thomas had a core method, and that he augments that with a couple of tricks, most notably mnemonics and cognates. Sadly, the subsequent teachers (and therefore most likely Thomas himself, given that he explicitly taught Goodman how to teach) appear to have mistaken the tricks for the method.
For one thing, in the Russian, Japanese and Polish courses, you’ll hear more mnemonics in the first CD or 2 than you will hear in any of Thomas’s own courses. It’s not their fault—Thomas did speak about mnemonics as being a core part of his method on the TV documentary The Language Master. The particular mnemonic he used there was for the French faire: to make or to do. “It’s a fair thing to do,” he said. But it is easily demonstrated that this was demonstrably unnecessary: I don’t recall ever hearing him use an equivalent mnemonic in any of his other courses, but he still managed to teach tun, fare and hacer without problems.
Yeah, and all of what Cainntear was talking about later in that post with “teach confusable things separately” is covered in Chapter 10 of ToI, “Introducing coordinate members to a set”.
[And yes, there’s a typo in the table on the first page. Awareness of abstract feature “C” rules out example 6. It doesn’t have to wait until feature “(D)” is brought to attention.]
I really think both the places where MT follows DI principles, and the places where he fails, should jump out to anyone familiar with both.
Which makes me wonder about how familiar Solity was with ToI, because I don’t remember his exploration of the samenesses and differences as very good. How much of that recollection is due to my lack of familiarity at the time, I’m not sure, but I don’t think all of it. Don’t think I’m gonna reread it any time soon, though.
I should also note that MT was not merely poor at meta-teaching how to use his eponymous ‘Method’ itself; He was actively secretive about it.
I believe the reason he claimed was something like fear of the establishment stealing it and claiming credit? That doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. Was that the ‘real’ reason, or a rationalization for some traumatic after-effect of his war experience, or what? Not really a question I’d expect a high chance of success or high returns on answering.
I assumed an active failure on MT’s side because of comments like these (comment 10) by Cainntear, who is much more knowledgeable about MT than me. Quote:
Yeah, and all of what Cainntear was talking about later in that post with “teach confusable things separately” is covered in Chapter 10 of ToI, “Introducing coordinate members to a set”.
[And yes, there’s a typo in the table on the first page. Awareness of abstract feature “C” rules out example 6. It doesn’t have to wait until feature “(D)” is brought to attention.]
I really think both the places where MT follows DI principles, and the places where he fails, should jump out to anyone familiar with both.
Which makes me wonder about how familiar Solity was with ToI, because I don’t remember his exploration of the samenesses and differences as very good. How much of that recollection is due to my lack of familiarity at the time, I’m not sure, but I don’t think all of it. Don’t think I’m gonna reread it any time soon, though.