Dr Carol Chomsky, wife of Noam dies at 78

A great woman who has left a fantastic contribution to the field of language and reading development:LINK

Very sorry indeed to hear this sad news.

Teaching reading to children is an honourable profession.

NYT obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/us/21chomsky-carol.html

Sorry to hear that. Don't know much about Carol, but her husband's a genius.

erigena wrote:

draiocht23 wrote:

Sorry to hear that. Don't know much about Carol, but her husband's a genius.

Her husband has engaged in a reign of academic terror to get his narrow [mod]please consult the rules on posting in the MN Charter - johnfás [/mod] view across. In that he has mimiced the authoritarian regimes he excoriates

see for example "The Search for Mind" (1995, 200, 2003), Chapter 3

Reign of academic terror? Nice to see hyperbolic raving extends to dusty old academia...

erigena wrote:

draiocht23 wrote:

Sorry to hear that. Don't know much about Carol, but her husband's a genius.

Her husband has engaged in a reign of academic terror to get his narrow [mod]please consult the rules on posting in the MN Charter - johnfás [/mod]view across. In that he has mimiced the authoritarian regimes he excoriates

see for example "The Search for Mind" (1995, 200, 2003), Chapter 3

This is the Chomsky that "was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls".^[74] In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".^[75]"? Yeah?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky


I don't know much about his wife's work either but, RIP Carol.

If you detest Noam Chomsky so much that even this week you can't see him and his family as human beings who have lost a wife, mother and grandmother, I think now would be an excellent time to not say anything at all.

tamar wrote:

If you detest Noam Chomsky so much that even this week you can't see him and his family as human beings who have lost a wife, mother and grandmother, I think now would be an excellent time to not say anything at all.

Seconded.

I've just seen this.

If you type

Quote :

chomsky "The Search for Mind"

into Google, this thread tops the list of results.

I've no clue as to whether these allegations are true or not, but I seriously doubt it. Erigena has done a hit and run attack and has provided no substantiation whatsoever for his allegations, not that an obituary is the right place for such an attack anyway.

Noam isn't the type of guy to be launching a suit for defamation, particularly on a site like this, where there is very decent debate to be had. But that doesn't make this right. I suggest that Erigena's slur be removed and he be asked to put it in a new thread with whatever passes for evidence in his mind, where it might be properly dealt with, should it merit it.

It's devastating to lose a wife. It's a sadness for the whole of humanity to lose a brilliance like Carol. This belittles a very decent man and his family's grief and angers those of us who value Carol's many and varied gifts to humanity.

I'm not sure what Carol Chomsky did, but I know people who teach children to read, and it is generally a really good thing.

erigena, from where comes all this rage?

Hermes

Yes the thread is very visible in fact the character who dropped in perhaps did so to moderate this thread. And rightly so.

Noam Chomsky is up for an argument any time I'm sure but this thread isn't about him so perhaps erigena's comments could be made into another thread and if there are any souls here willing to debate on it then fair enough.

An Irish Funeral Prayer
by Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Everything remains as it was.
The old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no sorrow in your tone.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effort
Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.
There is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.
All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting, when we meet again.

thanks for posting that cf

Summary of Carol Chomsky's work from the NYT:

Quote :

Carol Chomsky, a linguist and education specialist whose work helped illuminate the ways in which language comes to children, died on Friday at her home in Lexington, Mass. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, her sister-in-law Judith Brown Chomsky said.
A nationally recognized authority on the acquisition of spoken and written language, Professor Chomsky was on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1972 until her retirement in 1997. In retirement, she was a frequent traveling companion of her husband, the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, as he delivered his public lectures.
Carol Chomsky was perhaps best known for her book, “The Acquisition of Syntax in Children From 5 to 10” (M.I.T. Press), which was considered a landmark study in the field when it appeared in 1969. In it, she investigated children’s tacit, developing awareness of the grammatical structure of their native language, and their ability to use that awareness to extract meaning from increasingly complex sentences over time.
Young children, Professor Chomsky found, could distinguish no difference in meaning between superficially similar sentences like “John promised Bill to shovel the driveway” and “John told Bill to shovel the driveway” — they could not discern who did the shoveling in each case. Older children, she found, could do so automatically, without having been formally taught.
Where earlier investigators had concluded that the acquisition of syntax — the grammatical structure of sentences — is complete by the time a child is 5, Professor Chomsky demonstrated that when it came to syntactically complex constructions, at least, acquisition is far from finished at that age.
Professor Chomsky’s later research focused on children’s acquisition of the written word. In the late 1970s, she developed a technique for helping struggling readers attain greater fluency. She had the students silently read a passage while a tape recording of the passage played along. The process was repeated until the student could read the text fluently, without the tape. The technique, known as repeated reading, has been widely used in classrooms ever since.
Still later, Professor Chomsky turned her attention to educational technology, creating software that develops reading-comprehension skills.
Carol Doris Schatz was born in Philadelphia on July 1, 1930. She married Noam Chomsky, whom she had known since childhood, in 1949. In 1951, she earned a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania.
In the 1960s, faced with the possibility that her husband would be jailed for his activities in opposition to the Vietnam War, Carol Chomsky resumed her education: a doctorate would be useful should she need to become the sole family breadwinner. Though that prospect did not materialize, she earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard in 1968.
Besides her husband, the Institute Professor and emeritus professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Chomsky is survived by their three children, Aviva Chomsky, a professor of Latin American history at Salem State College in Salem, Mass.; Diane Chomsky of Mexico City; and Harry Chomsky, of Albany, Calif.; a brother, J. Leonard Schatz of Burlington, Mass.; and five grandchildren.
In a 2001 interview with The Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, Carol Chomsky contrasted her brand of linguistics — practical, experimental, hands-on — with her husband’s abstract, quasi-mathematical approach:
“It’s a very different sort of ‘linguistics’ from Noam’s pursuits,” she said. “I always have to laugh when people talk about how interesting our dinner-table conversation must be since we’re in the same field.”

Hey - there is quite a habit on
this site of deleting entries with utterly non-libellous material so
I am going to have to go over a few revisits;

1. 
   This is nothing to do with Carol
   chomsky
   
2. 
   Noam is a notorious academic
   bully. Do a web search
   
3. 
   Google “search for Mind”
   -127,000 hits, of which the first 6 and 8 of the first 10 are the
   book, which criticises him on p 114 (and praises him elsewhere).
   Likewise, the same author in another book (151)praises his single
   political contribution (IMO); his refusal to pay taxes for the
   Vietnam war
   
   
   We don't decide these issues with
   votes, but by debate, which Ireland desperately needs. If this site
   continues to revise the historical record for non-libellous
   material, starting with this, I will stop posting.
   

draiocht23 wrote:

erigena wrote:

draiocht23 wrote:

Sorry to hear that. Don't know much about Carol, but her husband's a genius.

Her husband has engaged in a reign of academic terror to get his narrow [mod]please consult the rules on posting in the MN Charter - johnfás [/mod] view across. In that he has mimiced the authoritarian regimes he excoriates

see for example "The Search for Mind" (1995, 200, 2003), Chapter 3

Reign of academic terror? Nice to see hyperbolic raving extends to dusty old academia...

erigena, the topic of this thread is Carol Chomsky. You are persisting in posting matters here that you say are nothring to do with Carol Chomsky. If you want to discuss Noam Chomsky you are welcome to start a thread.

cactus flower wrote:

erigena, the topic of this thread is Carol Chomsky. You are persisting in posting matters here that you say are nothring to do with Carol Chomsky. If you want to discuss Noam Chomsky you are welcome to start a thread.

Quite so! It's not as if there wasnt a perfectly serviceable thread already available (i.e. Chomsky's 80th birthday thread).

Carol Chomsky was a person in her own right erigena!