Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Special [spesh-uhl], (adj)

Today is a special day to me. 35 registered students have started my online course. I hope all of them will successfully finish it. I would not like this course to become a case for the "survival of the fittest" as Darwin wrote in his infamous book on evolution "Origin of the Species" (1859).

Did you know that the word "species" and "special" are etymologically connected? "Special" comes from Old French "especial" which comes from the Latin "specialis" (individual, particular) from "species" (appearance, kind, sort) showing that, whereas the word "special" has slowly evolved from "species" over the years, the word "species" itself has kept its original Latin word meaning - a real case of survival of the fittest. But if the "species" stayed so long unchanged, doesn't that prove something against the evolution theory?




The fact that these students are doing my course is special to me because this is the first ever course I have built on Moodle. Every new course I build is an adventure. I learn something new every day. I also learn a lot from online courses I do with other institutions. For example, I did an online course by the University of Oregon on "Webskills in the 21st Century" which was extremely interesting and gave me a lot of ideas for my own online course "Teaching English in the 21st Century". The course was sponsored by the American Embassy. In the spring I will start an additional sponsored Oregon course called "Special Education and Differentiated Instruction in EFL Contexts". Did you notice? Here we have the word "special" again....

"Special Education" is a well-known collocation to teachers. I was therefore quite surprised that it is not considered a "common collocation" in the collocation dictionary of Prowritingaid.com. This dictionary gives collocations such as "special agent", "special occasion", "special interest" and "very special", "something special", "make special" and "nothing special" but "special education" is not mentioned. Apparently they feel that the need for special education is not that common. Maybe they should come and visit an average Israeli classroom...