Last night I was thinking about dentists (a friend had a wisdom tooth out) and that got me thinking about the local anesthetic dentists use, and I started to wonder about something odd. Well, I think it's odd, anyway. Maybe you don't. Maybe you can answer this question for me.
You know how, when the dentist gives you an injection and half your face is numb, it feels like the numb half of your face has swelled to gigantic proportions? And when you look in the mirror it's quite surprising to see that actually your face is a normal size?
Well, that's what I started to wonder about. I think it's odd, and illogical. How does I can't feel my right cheek translate in our brains to therefore my right cheek is enormous?
I could understand it if the part of your face you couldn't feel seemed smaller than usual. But ... bigger? That doesn't make sense, at least to me.
WHY?
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- Badaunt
- I'm from NZ, and now live in Japan, teaching English to reluctant university students. Email me: badaunt at gmail.com
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Links for language teachers
I have noticed that I get a lot of hits from people searching "present simple" and "ESL," and assume that this is language teachers looking for ideas or lesson plans. The following links are good places to start.
ESL Lounge Here you will find lesson plans organised by level. A fantastically useful site for busy teachers, and easy to navigate.
British Council Here lesson plans are organized by topic. There are more teaching activities in the 'downloads' section.
The Internet TESL Journal
They have not updated this page for a while, but there is still a lot you might find useful.
Humanising Language Teaching
This is an online journal, good for ideas, inspiration, and especially good towards the end of semester when you're feeling not quite human.
Dave's ESL Cafe
Almost too much to wade through, but a very useful resource. Lots of links to other sources.
Karin's ESL PartyLand
This is a page specifically dealing with teaching simple present and present progressive. I have not tried any of these, but there are a lot of ideas here, and they look good. At the very least you will be inspired.
Good luck!
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6 comments:
This is too hard for me to think about before my second cup of coffee!
See? If it made sense, you wouldn't need coffee to think about it!
Eddie, it makes NO sense, but I know what you mean because I've been there. In prep for gum surgery years ago (on the upper left quadrant of my
teeth) the dentist gave me 22 novocaine shots in that short space of maybe 3". Can you imagine how big my jaw felt???
I'm not crazy, I just got mixed up about whose post this is. Sorry.
OK, I'll bite (!): I think that because the body no longer has a sense of where (parts of) it is, it imagines itself to be bigger than it is just to be sure to not bump into anything or get too close to some predatory animal's jaws. That sort of thing.
I think it's like how it is with people with phantom limbs. The limbs are not there anymore, but they feel it anyway. Sometimes the non-existing limb hurts, sometimes they feel the wind, sometimes they feel swollen... I guess it's the way the brain tries to compensate for what it thinks should be there but cannot receive any signals from.
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