Catalyst

Your sentences are halting and gnarly; your pronunciation is often off-register; you don't hear when I ask questions; the holes in your knowledge are huge. All of this is okay. It's my job to help people with just these things.

But what I don't understand is how over the last week I have found myself presenting to you aspects of my most recent thinking on syntax (and the teaching of it) and, in the process, actually advancing some ideas on the topic.

It's not my usual practice get into structural theory with students at your level, but somehow, your questions got me doing just that, and not to your confusion, I think, judging by the pertinence of your questions along the way.

Delighted, of course, with the rush of new ideas and lines of inquiry, I still am not sure how it happened. Were you catalyst or provocateur?

Perhaps I had left these ideas in an 'unstable configuration' and your initial question about how to organize your sentences shook them into a formulation which suggested new ways of viewing the question.

Maybe, because I've been reading a book about cosmology and physics written as an intellectual memoir, I was already primed to think large and differently.

Perhaps your seriousness, indeed solemnity, and evident intelligence (independent,of course,of your fluency or mastery of the language) gave me that feeling of audience receptivity that stimulates ideas.

It could be that I couldn't see another, or better, way to get at the heart of the coherence problem that your sentences present so clearly--as do the sentences of so many other students.

What about if I was just tired of crabbed micro topics and just wanted to turn my mind to something macro.

Perhaps I felt I was giving you a gift that you would find meaningful later when you'd reached a higher level.

Then there's the possibility that as active Platonic entities these notions wanted out now! Ha! A Marvel comic book image of muscled mental objects moving mightily down from their mountain eyrie.

In fact, these 'insights' are really just small tweakings that improve fit, or fresh formulations that could possibly flower. Yet my wonder and gratitude at their emergence is very real. My projects are small, maybe trivial, but so much better than no projects at all.

If I were to tell you this, you'd probably either not particularly care, or say it was 'perfect' but what's next? Perhaps for the third time, you'll ask a question that rouses some hibernating 'thought in progress' to lumber forth, famished and ready to feed.