lauren cottrell wrote @ Monday, September 29, 2008 at 8:28 pm

Hey Troy, Craig and I are home and recouping as well. What a treat to meet you, touch base with old friends and put faces with people who have until now been merely a name on a book. I plan to spend some time organizing my notes and recalling impressions and conversations and then come back and enter some of them here. I am hoping that others will do the same, it will be wonderful to experience the conference through others in this way. Craig says happy shredding. Onward Ho

  Craig Preston wrote @ Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 6:22 am

Hi Troy,
This is my effort to stay in touch. As many of the old dogs at the conference noted, we tend to work in isolation by circumstance, not by design.
It’s good to get out, meet new folks, make new connections. I’m entering a phase where my students are younger than my three kids (a metal guitarist, a hairdresser in Hollywood, and a new mom-ethnomusicologist). As you know I had the good fortune to train under Jeffrey Hopkins at UVa from 1978-1982. We worked incredibly hard (thanks, Jeffrey!), but we played hard too. Hey, we are Wahoos. The day at my desk today is not that different from then. As I type this I’m listening to a Darkstar from Feb 2, 1969. I’m just as happy to talk about life in the Phil Zone as I am to talk about where the verb is. Epistemologists come in all cultural flavors, and I’m an old Deadhead.
Students and teaching methods come in all flavors too. I’m the right guy to study with for some students, but certainly not all students. As Alex Berzin and Hopkins emphasized again and again, the development of memory is key. We memorized philosophical definitions in Tibetan daily, debated their meaning within our limitations, and thus carried around with us lots to think about specifically. My teaching methods are a logical extension of where I came from. My students memorize short paradigm sentences as keys to unlock the large units found within the sorts of sentences found in commentarial texts. In this way pedagogically I am the opposite pole from the “intuitive” camp. Just as I’m a Deadhead rather than (fill in whatever here, maybe anything from the 80s), I naturally gravitate to a rule-based system to decode Tibetan sentences. I think it was implicit in our collective conversation that this is not a substitute from long work with native speakers. It is merely one developmental stage that is useful for some translators in training. As Hopkins said at his retirement speech, “Do what you can do.” This is what I do. If anyone finds it appealing, get up with me.
Now, as a point of shameless self-promotion, Volume Two of my box-laden approach to exploring the marvels of Tibetan sentences will be published by Snow Lion real soon now. I’ve presented Jay-dzun-ba’s short (maybe 20 sides) Presentation of Tenets for students interested in getting a foothold in the tenets genre. Its more of the same, so if you liked volume one, this will appeal to you. It is a better book in many ways, proof positive that this old dog can learn new tricks.
–Stay cool, Craig