This morning I read a delightful academic paper, with an even more delightful backstory. The lead author, Sabine Little, is a professor at the University of Sheffield, specializing in “Languages Education,” especially multilingualism. Her native language is German. So when the Littles had a child, they naturally decided to raise him to be bilingual, with Sabine speaking German, and Toby’s father his native English. When Toby was 4, however, he asked his mother to stop speaking German to him. Then, when he was 6, he asked her to resume, as he had realized he wanted to learn German. He also asked if they could “do research together.”
I imagine that at the age of 6, Toby’s idea of “research” was that it was something potentially worth his attention because he knew it was important to Sabine. As a mother, I know how it feels when your child decides to try something because they see you doing it, although my own memories along these lines were much less consequential. I’m thinking of when my younger son was 2 or 3 and wanted to try some of the foods he saw me eating. His initial reactions to red salsa were pretty amusing, but in the end favorable; his conclusions about romaine lettuce went the other direction. Nevertheless, I was flattered.
Toby and Sabine, however, were making a much larger commitment. As they explain in the paper, “Through a joint research diary, we regularly and rigorously chronicled both language-related conversations and our emotions linked to the process of bringing back the heritage language.” Over two and a half years, that research diary ended up at 83 typed pages, or 25,450 words. And, “Since Toby had proposed the study himself, his desire to be involved in all Continue reading
Way back in the day, my Grandpa Ben was a big fan of 
One thing that isn’t a story is a description of sensations and impressions. It could be the wildflowers you saw on your walk through the woods, a strange cloud in the sky, the interesting melody that’s stuck in your head, the happiness you felt when your extra-shy kitten reached with his extra-big paws to grab at your hand. None of those are stories. This distinction points out a key difference between people with moderately advanced dementia and people with healthier brains, by the way: Once you’ve got dementia, your brain still has plenty of input of what’s going on around you – you still see and hear things – but you tend to lose your ability to connect your impressions coherently, which includes being able to tell a full-scale story about them.
The Meta-Narrator 