Nice one Cyril – Happy holidays Bulgaria

Today is the 24th of May. The day of Bulgarian Education and Culture, and Slavonic Literature. (Bulgarian: Ден на българската просвета и култура и на славянската писменост), a national holiday celebrating Bulgarian culture and literature as well as the alphabet. It is also known as “Alphabet, Culture, and Education Day” (Bulgarian: Ден на азбуката, културата и просвещението).

It’s a day that celebrates the foundation of the Cyrillic Alphabet by two brothers Cyril and Methodius in the 9th Century as a way of making the bible accessible to the Slavic people. These brothers were great educators of their time, and I’m proud to be part of a heritage that still continues to celebrate and value education.

Further reading

Best weather songs

Most evenings I try to avoid the weather forecast, I mean there is no point putting a dampener on the next day before it’s even started, is there?

Now, I really believe that only on a British TV weather forecast would they say something like this;

Well, the bad news for tomorrow is that the rain is coming back, but luckily what I can tell you is that this time it is WARM rain

No kidding. Oh I’m so pleased about that, it’s made my day. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that

Anyway I manged to find some lesson fodder in this little story, which is ‘best weather songs for English lessons’.

Here are five songs that came to mind (that I actually like), by the way the links go to ‘lyric videos on You Tube’.

Why does it always rain on me – Travis

Run – Snow Patrol (ok group name connection this time, but wonderful song)

November Rain – Guns and Roses

Here comes the sun – The Beatles

Wuthering Heights – Kate Bush

Personally, if I were using any of these songs in the classroom I’d probably not butcher them with gap fills. We’d first listen to the song, with the lyrics, let the students hum and sing along. Just enjoy the music. I would then probably draw on the lyrics and the music and ask the learners what kind of images and feelings, the words and music bring to mind. We could talk about associations of weather and feelings and how these are used for effect in both music and film. We might talk about personal and cultural attitudes towards weather. I might see if I could elicit any songs that the students like with references to the weather, in whatever langauge.

Would be great to hear your weather song suggestions and how you might use them in class.

Hope it’s sunny where you are?

Athletic vs Atlético – a question of spelling

Tonight is the big game as Athletic Bilbao take on Atlético Madrid in the final of the Europa league. I’ve been watching Athletic through this tournament and like many aficionados of football have been impressed by the passion of this team from the Basque country. But it is a question of spelling that intrigued me more than anything. This is what I found out from a quick glance at Wikipedia

Football was introduced to Bilbao by two distinct groups of players, both with British connections; British steel and shipyard workers and Basque students returning from schools in Britain. In the late 19th century Bilbao was a leading port of an important industrial area with iron mines and shipyards nearby. It was the driving force of the Spanish economy and as a result attracted many migrant workers. Among them were miners from the north-east of England, and shipyard workers from Southampton, Portsmouth and Sunderland. The British workers brought with them (as to so many other parts of the world) the game of football. In the early 1890s these workers came together and formed Bilbao Football Club. Meanwhile, sons of the Basque educated classes had made the opposite journey and went to Britain to complete their studies in civil engineering and commerce. While in the United Kingdom these students developed an interest in football and on their return to Bilbao they began to arrange games with British workers. In 1898 students belonging to the Gymnasium Zamacois founded the Athletic Club, using the English spelling.

So much history in the spelling of a word, and identity too.

May the 4th be with you

It seems a bit of a coincidence that only a few hours ago I wrote a post on the importance of stories. Having just clicked ‘publish’, I went to pick up my son from school who greeted me with ‘May the 4th be with you’. Now for you geeks out there, this won’t need explaining. It’s a pun on ‘May the force be with you’ from Star Wars, and that’s why today is ‘International Star Wars Day’. According to Wikipedia, the origins of the pun itself lie in a newspaper headline response to Margaret Thatcher’s May 4th victory in 1979. I think the original Star Wars movie came out around that time (but could be way off the mark here).

It was only 6 months ago, when my son and I were walking down our street. A couple of children were having a jumble sale in their front garden, selling off old toys and dvds etc. On their makeshift stall I spotted an unopened box set trilogy set of Star Wars videos (the first three films, which means parts 4, 5 and 6 of the story). I asked how much, £3 came the reply. What a bargain!

Since then my son has been absorbed by the story, he reads books on the saga and fights light saber duels with his younger sister.

Great stories, and happy children.

May the 4th be with you!

When literacy meets literature, the classroom wins

In the last post we discussed the different images and words that the terms Literacy and Literature conjured up for you. The findings so far are very interesting indeed…and THANKS so much for this

Literacy – languages, letters, consonants and vowels, writing, alphabet, syllables, literate, illiterate, chalk, black boards, handwriting books, spelling, pronunciation, grammar, reading, writing, understanding, spelling, comprehension, pronunciation, ability, well-read, underprivileged/ lower working class, unemployed, on benefit, angry, rude, jobcentre, hopeless, illiterate, Skills for Life Literacy Programme, phonics, systems, power, control, need, class, letters, words, science, decoding

Literature – poems/poetry (x 2), novels (x 2), short-long stories, fictions, non-fictions, literature review, romanticism, realism, folklore, culture, reading, writing, classics, plays, descriptions, manuals, manuscripts, guides, privileged, posh, undergraduate/graduate, better off, Shakespeare, educated, art, beauty, emotion, craft, joy/rage, enjoyment, pleasure

We can read a lot from these words, some points I think…

1. literacy is associated with ‘low culture’ while literature with ‘high culture’ – for comparisons of this idea compare and contrast e.g., tabloid / broadsheet newspapers, reproduced print / original artwork, Wikipedia / peer-reviewed journals and so on
2. literacy is associated with the ‘badly educated’ in contrast to literature which is linked to the ‘well-educated’
3. literacy carries negative connotations of control and poverty while literature points to positive associations of pleasure
4. literacy is a skill (the ability to read and write), while literature is an art, an individual and cultural means of expression
5. literacy is more generally associated with school or adult education classrooms while literature with higher education and outside classroom spaces

What happens when literacy meets literature in the school or adult education classroom? The answer to that one is that classrooms win, meaning…

…that whatever texts are brought into the classroom (whether they count as literature or not – a discussion for another day by the way), are reduced to classroom texts. The stories, the poems, the novels, the plays, the music, the nursery rhymes, become vehicles for an educational agenda which goes something like this…

a story becomes a reading comprehension

writing becomes a spelling test

a rhyme or poem  becomes a phonics exercise

a play becomes an argument-based essay

and so on…

I think we need new spaces in education that allow for students to engage with texts of one form or another whether stories, poems, music, art, mathematics and so on that don’t end up reducing their true value and transformative potential. What do you think?

Literacy and Literature

I’ve been thinking recently about two words and how they are understood differently and why. Moreover, I’m thinking about the implications the connotation of the two words has for education and society as a whole. So I was wondering if you could help me with a post I’m writing about this topic by carrying out the following (fun?) little activity, and then leaving your answer as a comment.

a bit of teacher-talk, sorry

You see the word LITERACY

now close your eyes and what images come to mind?

On a piece of paper, write down a list of words (as many as you want) to describe what you see and think of

now do the same again, but this time the word is LITERATURE

Please could you now write your words for each in the comments section and of course any comments of your own on this task, and what you think about the difference between the two words.

Thanks for your help.

Richard

Blogging in ESOL

My interest in Blogging started in the ESOL* classroom with young adult students who had for one reason or another been denied access to school as children. Consequently these teenage learners were having to learn not only a new langauge but also to read and write, probably for the first time.

Frankly speaking, I didn’t like what was going on in the classroom, and my interest in the use of digital technologies started in reaction to what I was seeing. The learners had exams at the end of the year, which they had to pass if they wanted to continue in the college.  These exams were all writing based,  so my job was really to get them over these major hurdles by hook or by crook. I knew how important passing the exams was for the learners,  not only in allowing them to progress, but also to access employment, gain citizenship and at the very least to take some sense of pride in their work. Most of the set assessment tasks were pretty ridiculous and totally disconnected from the lives of the students, having to teach them ‘how to write postcards’ was the final straw for me.

As this was going on though, I recognised that many of the students were quite happy using computers and technologies such as mobile phones. I was struck by the contrast between their perceived ‘inability’ to read and write  while at the same time managing Internet tasks with relative ease. All this turned my understanding of literacy upside down. What I did get from this was the connectedness between their use of digital media and technologies with their everyday lives and that through the use of new media they were able to find a voice that had remained silenced in the paper-based classroom environment.

The first step was to start a class blog with this group of students. I set it up and gave the students posting rights. We learned together how to use the blogging platform. We used the blog for classroom projects on food, music, sport and so on. All the things that teenagers are interested in. Most of the time I was the learner in these classes, I found out so much about them, they stopped being students and became people in my eyes. That’s the thing about blogging, people blog about what they are interested in, what they care about. If we use blogging in classrooms, or other forms of social media, it should never be for its own sake but to connect the outside lives of the learners to classroom learning.

And now you see why I resented having to teach them how to write postcards – how absurd!

It’s this connectivity between blogging and people’s lives that has really been the inspiration in my move to set up Babble. There is something really fascinating about how people are experiencing this ‘new’ social media and the way they are relating their life experiences, passions and interests. This is what I want to find out more about on Babble.

*ESOL – English for Speakers of Other Languages, these are adult learners of English living in the UK who have come from other countries around the world