To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.

-Joanne Barkan

I just had several hours of old 8mm video digitized (in 1080P!). Some is from Argentina, and as early as 1966 or 1967, and some is from California in the early 1970s. Tonight I put two videos on Vimeo, since they are mentioned in the first letter from my grandfather and part of their contents described in it.

You can watch them here if you like, but fuller descriptions are on Vimeo.

My grandfather comes to the U.S.: Argentina to San Francisco, 1968 from Robert Pollack on Vimeo.

My grandfather comes to the U.S., 1968, Part II from Robert Pollack on Vimeo.

1. If you don’t use DropBox, sign up for a free account. It’s great. If you sign up by following this link, we’ll both get some extra storage space. It’s worth it, even if you’re not trying to add PDFs to iBooks.
2. In your DropBox folder, create a folder for PDF books (or documents of whatever sort). Put your books in there. This is a fine place to store them, since you can keep access to them on your desktop but won’t lose them even if your computer dies.
3. Download the free (and excellent) DropBox app on your iPad or iPhone, and link it to your account.
4. In the DropBox app, navigate to the folder you created in step 2, open a PDF, tap the “send this to another app” icon (it looks like an arrow coming out of a box), and select iBooks.

And you’re done.

A good police dog has not only a large vocabulary but also extraordinary social skills. He understands many forms of human culture and has his being within them. He can be taken to the scene of a liquor-store robbery and asked to search, with the handler trusting that he won’t molest the customers or other police officers or the clerk behind the counter. He knows what belongs and what doesn’t, sharing our community and our xenophobia as well. He can take down a criminal who is attacking his handler on Monday and on Tuesday play with the patients at the children’s hospital. These dogs, then, are glorious, but for anyone familiar with working dogs they are not surprising, any more than your pet dog is surprising in his or her ability to distinguish between your friends and strangers.

But someone might say that a dog’s courtesy with guests is surprising, or that it ought at least to be remarked on that such profound connections between two species can happen at all. (It should be surprising, perhaps, that we can talk, and, of course, some philosophers have been surprised.)

Consider, for example, what happens when you train a wolf, or what happens at least when I train a wolf. The wolf, or coyote, may sit, heel, stay, come when called and so forth. But a wolf doesn’t respect our language, and his behavior can be accounted for pretty well with a stimulus-response model, from our point of view if not from the wolf’s. The wolf may also become fond of me in some fashion or another, but I can’t use him as a guard dog. Not only will he not distinguish particularly between family, criminals and guests, he will not have the courage of a good dog, the courage that springs from the dog’s commitments to the forms and significance of our domestic virtues. The wolf’s xenophobia remains his own. With other wolves he may, of course, be respectful, noble, courageous and courteous. The wolf has wolfish social skills, but he has no human social skills, which is why we say that a wolf is a wild animal. And since human beings have for all practical purposes no wolfish social skills, the wolf regards the human being as a wild animal, and the wolf is correct. He doesn’t trust us, with perfectly good reason.

From Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, by Vicki Hearne. (And I’m reminded somewhat of Wes Anderson’s take on The Fantastic Mr. Fox.)

ProVoc is free software for OS X. If you have a Mac and you need or want to memorize things, I recommend it. It is, basically, smart flashcards, and it is very customizable: quiz yourself from either “side” of the card, make it multiple choice or not, change the number of choices, make a delay before the choices appear, and so on. It will keep track of which cards you consistently get right and which you consistently get wrong, and you can adjust your studies accordingly. It will keep shuffling the cards you get wrong back into the pile until you get them right some given number of times. It’s really excellent. And it will let you print paper flashcards if you really want to.

I stopped bothering with paper flashcards altogether when I discovered iVocabulary for the iPhone. It replicates all of the major functionality of ProVoc in an iPhone app, and it can take all of your data directly from ProVoc. All your flashcards, all the time, in your pocket. Have a minute in line or in a waiting room? Quiz yourself real quick. It’s currently $5.99 on the App Store, and it’s a steal.

And in case anybody out there wants to use my Sanskrit materials:

The following files are viewable with ProVoc or iVocabulary, and they follow the order of introduction in Beginning Sanskrit: A Practical Course Based on Graded Reading and Exercises, second edition, by Dermot Killingley.

First, all of the vocabulary, with Sanskrit in Devanagari.

Second, I created a transliterated version (IAST) for use with iVocabulary, since the implementation of Devanagari on the iPhone—which renders the characters beautifully—is just flawed enough to be maddening. I hope Apple fixes it soon. (I also put up a test page to check quickly if a system is making this mistake or not.)

Lastly, I made one just with the Devanagari characters (no words) as a sample, which might be useful to anyone just learning the script.

I do emphatically recommend the software regardless of what you’re studying.

UPDATE: New versions of iOS have fully implemented Devanagari, which is now rendered as it should be. If your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch is messing up Devanagari, do an OS upgrade through iTunes. I’ll leave the transliterated file here in case anybody has further use of it, but it’s no longer necessary as it was.

I’m sure different teachers have different takes on this, but I pretty much always welcome any parent involvement that is not just hostility. Any degree of involvement other than that, in my experience, pays immediate and often profound dividends in at least the performance of that parent’s child.

There are different ways to be involved, and which are best depends on the particular teacher, the particular parent, the particular student, and sometimes the particular school and district. Being known helps. Just dropping in after school and introducing yourself and giving an email address, along with the expression of willingness to do anything else if the teacher ever has any ideas or suggestions. If all my students had parents who did that, my job would be much easier and all of my students would learn a lot more.

As for things like books and classroom resources, that depends a lot on where you are. Sometimes school or district-level policies make things harder for direct donations or non-approved components of curricula, and sometimes it’s pretty much all up to the teacher. Some teachers actually have such a mess of mediocre resources it’s hard to figure out what would be helpful and what wouldn’t, and unsolicited additions just end up sitting on a shelf or in a closet. Donorschoose.org is a great resource for this, and you could ask the teacher if they know of it and if they’ve ever used it, and let them know to tell you if they ever put a project up because you’ll be happy to donate.

Sometimes things like volunteering with after-school clubs or tutoring can be very nice, but sometimes awful, depending on personalities and relevant knowledge and so on—also sometimes districts have difficult policies with this, since having volunteers in contact with kids is a potential liability for them, and they usually require some sort of background check and so on. Being involved with any PTA or similar organization is helpful, too, especially if you make it clear you’re advocating for the teachers.

But with all of these things, it really comes down to the particular teacher and particular parent. So I’d just recommend putting yourself out there— give an introduction, several kinds of contact info (different teachers prefer different kinds), make yourself very easy to get ahold of, and make it clear that you’re up for helping in any way they might want it. Just don’t make it seem like you’re making any demands or expecting them to do any more work than they’re already doing. If they’re super busy and stressed out, they may not ever come up with any way for you to help; but just making yourself available can be nice, and having even that level of relationship will probably benefit your kid(s).

He sent several letters throughout March, informing his family of his progress; the first was written 42 years ago today. Below are scans of his typewritten pages (in Spanish), and a translation beneath.

I plan to post the rest in the coming weeks. It would be nice if I could post each on the anniversary of its writing, but with my teaching schedule they probably won’t be on time. At least the first will be:

San Francisco
March 14th, 1968

Dear all:

Here is the news you expected.

The following are to receive copies of this letter:
1) Copy 1 – Tere, Jorgito, Muni, Sandi and Javier [note: this is my grandmother, father, uncle, aunt, and great-uncle]
2) Copy 2 – Peter, Don Pedro, Chocha, Julia Elena, Pedrito and Patricia [note: this is my grandmother's family]

What follows is the narration of the events since I left my house at 7:00 on Monday, March 11th.

Monday the 11th–

I traveled to Santiago on Aerolineas Argentinas. Departure at 8:15, I arrived at Mendoza at 9:00 and found Peter and exchanged packages. I departed at 9:30 and arrived at Santiago at the same time but my watch said 10:30. The crossing of the mountain range is something worth seeing; luckily I filmed it and hope that it has been captured well in the movie. Santiago is an important city and of much movement, but it is not lovely and I did not much like what I was able to see. I walked a lot, changed pesos for escudos (5000 pesos for 94 escudos).  I spent about 50 escudos and kept the rest and I don’t know what to do with them in the U.S.  I had lunch at 11:30 under the strange look of the waitress because it was very early, but I was guided by two clocks that told me it was later: my watch with the Argentine time and my stomach. I walked a bit more along Alameda and Avenida O’Higgins and, tired and hot, I went into a theater with air conditioning and saw the movie “Los Farsantes” [The Fakers], quite good; I left the theater and continued walking until 7:00 in the evening (6:00 in Chilean time), drank mote con huesillos (mote and not mate), a drink made with peach juice and a cereal or something like that, and bought a book: Birth Control, a very instructive subject, and I went to Aeropuerto Pudahuel (a new airport in Santiago for domestic use but being used temporarily for international flights), the same where I had arrived in the morning (this machine doesn’t have ñ) ["mañana" just having been spelled "manana"]. I waited while I read the book. My luggage weighed 30 kilos, so I paid for the excess weight between Córdoba and Santiago (they allow 20 kilos) and none from Santiago to San Francisco. Aerolineas Peruanas allows one or two excess kilos but you have to be careful because from Santiago they charge 5.14 dollars per kilo (or about 1700 pesos). One man had 11 kilos in excess (bottles of wine) and they wanted to charge him 57 dollars (18,000 pesos!).

He sent them as freight, payable at destination, insuring them for 100 dollars, hoping that they would break and thus to collect rather than pay, and he was lucky: three bottles broke! We departed at 9:00 Santiago time (10:00 by the Argentine clock) in a Convair 990 A Fan Jet with beautiful Peruvian stewardesses dressed in the typical uniform and very nice; they served dinner and later we landed in Lima, where they have a stunning airport, modern, gigantic, and automated, with walls of polarized glass, bathrooms with chrome, revolving luggage checker, etc., a real anticipation of what I later saw in the USA. This airport was built, as the one in Chile, with funds from the Alliance for Progress.

Our plane continued on from Lima to Miama via Panama, and we changed planes for another, also a Convair 990 A Fan Jet (they announced it so many times that I already knew it from memory) that went via Guayaquil, then Mexico and to Los Angeles. From Lima to Guayaquil I slept a bit though I felt sick with a bad headache and was very tired; I asked the stewardess for an aspirin and with this it got a little better. We arrived at Guayaquil at 2:30 (4:30 by my watch), I got off the plane and four Argentines reunited in the hall of the airport: myself, newly off to settle; another, who worked for Johnson Waxes and on a business trip; and two others, settled in Los Angeles, one a machinist, the other a jeweler (this was the one with the wine bottles), both very happy with life in the U.S., and telling me a lot of propaganda for Los Angeles and disparaging San Francisco. They said that in L.A. there are many more opportunities and a better climate such that you can go in the water at the beach all year round, and that in S.F. it is cold and it rains a lot (this appears to be true; I will tell you shortly). It was remarked that the Ecuadorian Indians are barely civilized, and, all of sudden, I felt lost in the world, thinking that I was there, in Guayaquil, a short distance from this people in a remote part of the Earth. But later we departed, for Mexico, a long leg of the trip, and I continued sleeping, more comfortable since I alone occupied a place with three seats and I discovered that the arm-rests were removable, and it suited me very well also using the three pillows. We arrived at Mexico at 5:00 in the morning (Mexican time) (8:00 by my watch). The airport is nice and important, but not very modern. We departed from Mexico at 6:00 and the sun was already starting to rise, so I didn’t sleep, and I entertained myself looking at the land from 10,000 meters up. On each leg of the trip the stewardesses gave explanations on the use of the life-jackets and the oxygen masks. Additionally, on each leg the authorities of each country ask for all the documentation so you have to have them handy since all the formalities are done in a hurry, even when you have to wait a while until the plane departs.

All the terrain is mountainous from Mexico to Los Angeles and before arriving you travel over the Gulf of California, or rather over the water with the coast of Mexico to the right and the coast of Baja California to the left, and at a certain point you see the depth of the Gulf and the mouth of the Colorado River (the famous one, that in its course forms the Grand Canyon). Finally at 8:30 in the morning (Pacific Time in the U.S.) (1:30 in the afternoon on the 12th, by my watch) I arrived, at last, on North American soil, and disembarked as an immigrant. Before getting off the plane I filmed the airport and the landing (I forgot to say before that in Guayaquil I paid 7.40 dollars (they accepted U.S. money) for an 8mm, color, daylight movie roll for the camera) In the U.S.A. it’s worth 3 dollars. In Argentina, 6.50. I also changed pesos for dollars in Guayaquil, at a rate of 400 pesos per dollar.

In Los Angeles I presented my visa, an immigration officer attended to me very kindly and gave me advice and instructions on things to do since I am settling here, and even shook my hand and wished me good luck. The customs officer asked me if I was bringing meat, vegetables or fruit or new things as gifts, I told him no, and he barely looked at my bags and let me pass. But the flight should have arrived at 7:00 (local time) and arrived at 8:30, and we missed the planned connection that was for Western Airlines to San Francisco. So they put us on a United Airlines flight that departed at 9:15. To get there, inside the Los Angeles Airport, which is enormously big, from the departure gates of the planes of one company to the other (each company has an entire building, separate, its own, with several departure corridors that lead to the different planes and that adjust like bellows to the plane’s door) you have to take a little bus that covers all the companies and carries the passengers (note! each ticket costs US $0.25 = 90 pesos). A beautiful final trip to San Francisco in a Boeing 707 Jet and we arrived at 10:30 Pacific Time (3:20 Argentine time!) I did not find anybody there (Fred Belcher was waiting for me and didn’t see me, nor I him), so I found out at the counter what was the cheapest hotel in downtown San Francisco, and they told me that it was one that had partially burned a short time ago, and that, if I had no problem I should go there, the cheapest that they have, U.S. $8 per day to sleep (note! approximately 3,000 pesos per person). They told me that a taxi to the city would cost me 8 dollars (3,000 pesos) so I asked if the bus carries luggage and they said yes, and I went by bus.

The ticket cost U.S. $1.10 (about $400), it was 15 miles (24 kilometers) from the airport to downtown and it drops you at the bus terminal, two blocks from the hotel that I had reserved: the Franciscan. One believes that in the U.S. everything is modern, but no. The Franciscan Hotel is some 50 years old, with old doors with thick frames and an air of general antiquity, even when it is well maintained, with wall-to-wall carpets, abundant and very warm water, television in the bedroom, telephone, private bathroom, etc. The bathroom was hilarious: the pipe for the shower was not in the wall but ran from the end of the bath to above, suspended by some iron rails, and with the 50 years you can imagine that it was a little crooked and had lost its elegance; plus it measured 1.64 meters while I measure 1.65 and each time I bathed, I stuck the tip of the shower-head a centimeter inside my head.

But, although ancient, it was clean and pleasant and it was right in downtown San Francisco on Geary Street. When I stepped off the bus it started to rain (although the pilot of the plane had announced beautiful weather for San Francisco and it was true at landing) and, loaded with bags, I had to ask a porter to carry the bags to the hotel (two blocks = US $1 = 400 pesos, at the current rate of peso for dollar in the U.S.). Until then, as you can see, I managed alone, without help. From the hotel I called the Belcher house but the number I had written down was wrong and the place I called told me they didn’t know him. Then I called Rafael, a person to person call, and Dora answered and they asked her for Rafael, who by chance was home, although for a problem of earache, and I spoke with him and he didn’t want to believe that it was me and that I was here. He came for me promptly with the car and took me to his house, but on the road we stopped to eat something (it was 2:00 in the afternoon) and then we went to Burlingame, which, I didn’t know then, is past the airport, so that had I known I would have saved the trip downtown and back, but in any case I was already checked in at the hotel. I saw Dora and the kids, all very well, Rafaelito had gone alone to school and came later, Cecilita very cute and also Maria Dolores and Juan Francisco and I even noticed Alejandro was much improved. Rafael, very well, told me that he had written not so long ago, and Dora the same. All are doing magnificently and they have a beautiful house in a good residential neighborhood on the outskirts of San Francisco, on the Peninsula. While I was there, it was pouring rain all afternoon, without stopping a moment. Dora bought some excellent steaks and made a very good dinner, and Rafael brought me back downtown in the car and it kept raining. Having arrived at the hotel, I went to bed and slept soundly, terribly tired, while it rained all night. All this happened on Tuesday the 12th.

Wednesday the 13th I woke up, and I left by myself to the bus station, found out where to take the bus for Oakland, and there is one that goes directly to Kaiser Center crossing the Bay Bridge (a bridge of 8 kilometers, suspended, that crosses San Francisco Bay, and which has two levels, each level having one way of traffic, back and forth), on one side of which is San Francisco and on the other, Oakland. $0.50 ticket (200 pesos). Once I had arrived at Kaiser Center, a very beautiful building, modern, extraordinary, on the banks of an artificial lake, Lake Merritt, I went to the 25th floor to see Ernie Jones (for those who don’t know who he is, he was my boss in Córdoba and later the big boss from Buenos Aires) but he had gone on a trip. On that floor Irene Belcher saw me, but I didn’t know that she was there and I went down to the 13th floor where I looked for and found Robert Salazar, who was very happy to see me and told me that Irene had called to see if he had news of me since Fred had looked at the airport the previous day without finding me, and he supposed that I hadn’t traveled. So Salazar called Irene right away and we went to the cafeteria of the Kaiser Center building, a marvelous place (out of a movie), with enormous picture windows overlooking the lake, a great modern room, and we sat there and talked a bit and had coffee that Salazar bought. From there I looked for John Burns and he saw me immediately, very happy that I had come and right then he called Ivan Strayer and John Crncich (I met all of them last June in Buenos Aires) and invited us to lunch at a restaurant outside, and of course he paid, to the great happiness of my fearful pocket. I told them that I was looking for work and that I had come to settle in the U.S., and he immediately put me in touch with the head of personnel for Kaiser Industries and I filled out an application (although later the problem arose of a clause in the contract of sale of Ika from Kaiser to Renault, which prohibited Kaiser from hiring people from Ika without previous agreement with Renault). In addition, he called long-distance to Phoenix, Arizona, where Ernie Jones was, and told him of my arrival and that I was looking for work, and I have an interview with Ernie tomorrow, Friday, at 9:00. I also have interviews with two executive hiring agencies. In the meantime I returned to talk with Irene and was in Gutierrez’s office, her boss who was absent since he had gone to Guatemala (how they travel!), and we were chatting and she offered that I go to their house in order not to pay for a hotel, since Patricia’s room was empty because Pat is working in a “lodge” in the mountains. So I accepted and left the hotel and Fred came to get me with the car and it rained quite a bit again. In the afternoon it was very nice and from the window of Gutierrez’s office you could see the park and Lake Merritt and the mountains, all very pretty, but by nightfall the weather had gotten bad again and we arrived with Fred at their house in heavy rain.

Now I have Patricia’s room in the apartment they rent in Mount Diablo–Lafayette. Lafayette is one town of the very many that form the conglomerate of people of San Francisco, Oakland and surroundings. The distances here are very big and there are very few buses as everybody has a car, but the joke is on whoever doesn’t have one; the cost of some things like transportation is prohibitive, and for example, to go over the bridges and cross the bay you have to pay “toll” of US $0.25 each time that a car crosses (100 pesos) and parking costs US $0.50 per hour (200 pesos). Yesterday I ate two hotdogs and a Coca Cola and spent one dollar (400 pesos). A good salary, in dollars, should not be less than US $800, in order to be profitable and to live reasonably well, but it is not easy to get such a salary. Healthcare is very expensive even when you can get insurance with affordable premiums; but what is incredible is the lack of domestic service, which is decidedly impossible to get here for a middle-class family, only millionaires can afford this luxury.

Rafael told me that in the next year he and Dora and the kids are thinking of returning to Argentina since, although they are okay here, Dora is tired of dealing with the five kids and expects the sixth (did I not tell you?) and can’t do it all alone, even though Cecilita already helps her with the littlest kids. The helpful automatic home appliances do exist, but it costs to buy them and not everyone has them, plus you have to make them run, fill them, supply them, maintain them, etc. Tere, if you want to come you should bear in mind that you will have to manage taking care of the kids. Plus I don’t see that it is very easy to get a good job if I don’t get the one at Kaiser, at least in the beginning. This country is wonderful but it also has its problems and you have to think about it well. Okay, no more, hugs and until the next time.

UPDATE: The video footage mentioned in this letter has been posted here.

Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll quote from Teachers Have It Easy: the big sacrifices and small salaries of America’s teachers (Daniel Moulthrop, Nínive Clements Calegari, Dave Eggers). The rest of the book is mostly like this excerpt: brief testimony from teachers, with chapter introductions and interstitial commentary from the editors.

Julia Normand, 65, English—Goldenview Middle School,
Anchorage, Alaska

When I was working at a law firm as a computer-support person, my typical day amounted to coming to my desk with a cup of coffee and a roll. I’d sit down and go through messages, drinking my coffee. I’d greet my co-workers when they came in; I’d make a phone call to set up a meeting and plan my day. If I had to go to the bathroom, I just got up and went. I was in charge of my own body, my own life, and my own schedule. I had certain things to get done, and if it took longer than a day, I got paid overtime for it. It was a high-pressure job in many ways, but not in terms of having thirty people needing your attention immediately and knowing that legally, I’m required to be in the room. As a teacher, if I step out of the room to go to the bathroom and something happens, legally, I’m responsible.

It’s just such a different thing. You feel like a person when you’re working at another job, and you don’t feel like a person when you’re teaching. It feels like being a train. Somebody switches it on, and it’s moving and you had better keep running. You don’t have the option to make a personal choice like “I think I’ll put this off until tomorrow.” There are thirty people, and they need things. You go with it all day.

I guess the equivalent might be if thirty people called me at the same time to tell me their computers crashed. But that’s just impossible. The network could go down and thirty people could call, but there’d be five or six of us in the IT department who would go troubleshoot it and one person would man the phones and say to people, “This is probably what we think is happening, it’ll probably be about fifteen minutes, we’ll let you know.” You work at high speed on it, but it’s not thirty people standing over you wanting immediate attention.

---

Teachers are required by law to stay within their classrooms. They are responsible for anything that happens when a student is in their charge. This is a reasonable requirement, yet because there aren’t reasonable breaks in school schedules, teachers often lack the basic liberties most occupations take for granted.

Few other professionals see thirty or more clients at once, all with different needs, some of whom may be determined to work counter to your goals. The combination of these factors can be stressful, to say the least—especially when there is no possibility, for hours on end, of respite.

pp. 116–118

Most people seem to think that only (2) is the full-time job of teaching, and that (1) and (3) are mere periphery requirements. These people are wrong. I could easily fill a full 40+ hour week doing any one of them, and realistically I spend 20–30+ hours weekly on each, sometimes skimping on one (generally (3), or parts of it) for a week or two and then spending a maddening weekend or taking a sick-day (or both) to catch up.

I would gladly do any one of these jobs—I think I would even enjoy doing any one of them—or alternate between them from semester to semester or year to year. Ideally, if I were doing only one of them and two others were doing the other two, we would work in very close collaboration.

But giving each of the three the attention it ought to get is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, and this is one of the reasons I will not be able to keep doing this job forever.

In our (the Roman) alphabet, the order of the letters roughly follows that of the Greek alphabet, which itself follows that of the Semitic alphabets. Thus, a-b-c from alpha-beta-gamma from aleph-bet-gimel. But in all of them, this order is to all appearances arbitrary. Not so in India.

All of the consonants in Devanagari, as in most (or is it all?) of the other Indian scripts, are divided into five groups called sthānas—which literally means “standing,” or “position”—according to the place of articulation in the mouth, and the sthānas are themselves arranged according to distance from the throat.

Thus, the first group is articulated nearest the throat: the ka-sthāna.
The second is forward slightly: the ca-sthāna (“ca” being pronounced as what in English we would write “cha”).
The third is not necessarily further from the throat, but uses a further-forward part of the tongue: the ṭa-sthāna. (This is the “retroflex” sthāna, pronounced with the tip of the tongue straight up in the palate. It’s the stereotypical feature of Indian speech mocked in fake Indian accents.)
The fourth is at the teeth: the ta-sthāna.
The fifth is at the lips: the pa-sthāna.

Now, within each sthāna the letters are arranged according to prayatna (literally, “effort”). These begin with the unvoiced, unaspirated consonant, so the first letter in the pa-sthāna is “pa.” Next is the unvoiced but aspirated form, so the second letter in the pa-sthāna is “pha” (pronounced the same as “pa,” but with more breath). Next is the voiced and unaspirated: “ba.” Then the voiced and aspirated: “bha.” Then the nasal: “ma.” This pattern is repeated for all of the sthānas.

Some of these distinctions can be hard for English-speakers to hear and produce, since we pay less deliberate attention to them. For instance, we do have aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but we don’t distinguish them in writing, and most of us are usually unaware of the difference though we hear people who get them wrong as somehow vaguely foreign-sounding. The “p” in “pot” is aspirated; the “p” in “spot” is unaspirated. If you’re a native speaker, you’ll put more breath into the former, though you might not realize it, and you’ll think people sound non-native when they get it wrong.

It also looks like we don’t have so many nasals in English; but we have more than you might think, and just use “n” as a generic nasal-marker. For instance, people sometimes refer to “dropping” the letter “g” from words ending in “ing”; but nothing is being dropped, only replaced. “Talking” ends in a nasal of the ka-sthāna (a “velar nasal”); “talkin” ends in a nasal of of the ta-sthāna (a “dental nasal”). The place of articulation of the sound has changed, but neither form has more sounds than the other. You might say we’re using “ng” to indicate a single sound, which would be indicated with a single letter in Devanagari.

So the consonants in Devanagari are arranged like so:

k — kh — g — gh — ṅ
c — ch — j — jh — ñ
ṭ — ṭh — ḍ — ḍh — ṇ
t — th — d — dh — n
p — ph — b — bh — m

Each row is a different place in your mouth; and then within each row, all of the letters are pronounced with your mouth in the same position, but changing the manner of enunciation. So with your mouth in the position for the “k,” add breath to get “kh,” add voice to get “g,” add breath and voice to get “gh,” and make it nasal to get “ṅ” (which is the “ng” in our “-ing” words).

(The vowels and other letters come before the consonants, and are similarly—though perhaps less obviously—arranged according to manner of enunciation.)

One consequence of this ordering is that, whereas when looking up a word in an English dictionary I find myself singing the alphabet song in my head, when looking up words in Sanskrit I find myself moving my tongue through the different positions in my mouth.

When I first learned this, it seemed like something Tolkien would have used for Elvish. And it’s the main reason I think Devanagari is awesome.