The Death of Imagination

I've been thinking a lot about teaching linguistics and the difference between students who are willing to go *to* the material (stretch their understandings and redefine their worldviews to incorporate new perspectives and information) and the students who succeed in "understanding" the material by bringing it to them (translating the terms, evidence and examples into comfortably familiar frameworks). What you say here (besides generally being stuff I agree with, except the shot at pomo theory :-) ) resonates with that a lot-- if you fall into the latter category, technical terms are needlessly obscuring concepts that are equally clear in other language. It's only if you've done the work redefining your internal mental models that the new language seems necessary. So thank you! Hopefully this will help me to get a little closer to reaching the students with that tendency.