Dr. Susan Brockman shares that she is teaching a College Now Introduction to Linguistics course this term (and hopefully again in the Spring), which is being run through BMCC's College Now Program and the BMCC Linguistics and Critical Thinking Department. (Dr. Brockman is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at CUNY.) About 22 students this term has been meeting with Dr. Brockman once a week on Thursdays for about 2-1/12 hours, and making their way through a college-level syllabus in "Introduction to Linguistics."
The course was pitched by the Linguistics community in the NYC area (mostly from Stonybrook University and CUNY) to Latin teachers to try to get an AP Linguistics course running across the US. Dr. Brockman started running the NACLO (North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad) competition at Stuyvesant in 2016, and has been sponsoring it ever since; with students achieving entrance into the Invitational Round every year they’ve participated.
Currently, only a few High Schools in the US have courses which introduce students to the really amazingly diverse and fascinating field of Linguistics. There is some rising interest because of the communication issues raised by robotics, AI, and Computational Linguistics, but most high school students have no idea what the field is until they reach college.
Dr. Brockman shares that professional Linguists in the NYC area are more than happy to help out, and there has been one guest lecturer so far, Professor Hagedorn from the CUNY Graduate Center, who gave an amazing class on the technical aspects of Phonetics (the study of the sounds of all human languages--how they're made, what they are, how to represent and understand them) last week, and students were really excited to be hearing from an expert. (photos courtesy of Dr. Brockman)
