African Literature Week in Oslo

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from our fabulous school librarian Ingrid. She told me about the upcoming African Literature Week here in Oslo. I was so excited to hear that Nigerian authoress Chimamanda N. Adichie would be visiting and I am really looking forward to hearing her talk tomorrow evening. Right now I am reading her latest book, The Thing Around Your Neck. It is a collection of stories, some from Nigeria and others about life for Nigerian immigrants in the USA. I am really enjoying the read and I have already found two or three stories that I think would be suitable for my English class. In fact, I hope to have a lesson with my class about Adichie and her country in the near future. I occasionally catch myself thinking and talking about Africa as if it was one country and this is a bad habit that I am trying to lose. Before I discovered this great authoress I did not even know that Nigeria is the most populated country in Africa (embarrassing). Now I am eager to learn more about this complex country and I hope Adichie's stories will have the same effect on at least some of my students. The image is of an Igbo (one of many peoples in Nigeria) mask and taken from flickr: "Mask"

An invitation for President Obama

Shortly after Obama announced that he himself would come to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, some of the teachers at Sandvika upper secondary decided to invite Obama to our school. It may be a shot in the dark, but we have too keep dreaming. Here you can read the invitation from our principal and the encouraging answer from the American Embassy in Oslo: Invitation to visit Sandvika High School in Norway Attached to the invitation was an etherpad document where our students have posted suggestions about how the President can spend the prize money. Photo from flickr: A vision for America

Politics in the USA

One of the competence aims in our curriculum plan is that our students in the first year of upper secondary are supposed to learn how to "discuss social conditions and values in various cultures in English-speaking countries". When we study the USA and American values we try to include at least the basics of American politics. This topic is in itself fairly complicated, obviously, but I think the text "Thirteen questions about American politics" (from the website www.tracks1hs.cappelendamm.no) presents the key facts and principles in a very student-friendly way (question 10 is outdated and left out in a later version, but apart from that the text is good). On this page you can listen to the text, do exercises and read a shorter version: Twelve questions about politics. Photo from flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/46274125@N00/172657516

"The danger of the single story"

I am quite simply in awe of Nigerian authoress Chimamanda Adichie after listening to her TED talk about "The danger of the single story". When I studied postcolonial literature I read (for example in Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin's West Indian Literature and the Australian Comparison) about schoolchildren in British colonies whose only alternative was Anglo-centred and Anglo-dominated curricula. Adichie gives a personal account of this when she speaks about the consequences of the fact that the only literature available to her when growing up in Nigeria was American and British children's books. She goes on to remind us of our stereotypes and how they are reinforced by the constant repetition of the single story. This is really worth watching:

Learning online

Today Sandvika vgs hosted a conference about learning with ICT and internet resources (see information in Norwegian here). I think it is essential for teachers to once in a while take a break from the classroom, meet other teachers and simply be inspired. Conferences, courses and seminars also make us reflect on the work we do and in an ideal world we return to our classrooms as better teachers. Will Richardson's talk about "Tools of the read/write web in schools" was one of the many interesting contributions. One of his main points was that the internet already is an important learning community for many children and teenagers. However, this learning happens outside of the classroom and kids choose themselves to find and use information about the things that they care about. A lot of the time kids don't even realize that they gain a lot of valuable and sometimes invaluable knowledge in the process. One of the main challenges for us teachers in the future will be to take part in and influence the learning community that already exists online. Right now children and teenagers are probably better at this than we are. Richardson used this video as an excellent example of how kids use the web to learn:

Linking words and phrases

My students have handed in their first papers and I have just started correcting them. Consequently my head is exploding with tips for my students about how they can improve their written language. This year like last year, a lot of my students have good vocabulary and grammar, but one thing that most of them need to work on is how to link the sentences and paragraphs of their texts together. If they could manage to use sentence connectors and linking words and phrases more effectively, their writing would become so much better. The always so useful Exploring English website has some exercises in English where students can practice using conjunctions and linking adverbials: conjunctions and linking adverbials, linking adverbials and sorting linking adverbials. Here are some more useful links on this topic: linking words and phrases and sentence connectors
Image from flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10166396@N07/3212971857

Reading strategies

Telling pupils to read a text is often an inadequate instruction if you would like them to really understand and learn about the content of the text. One of my colleagues found this eleven-point plan that can help pupils approach a text for the first time: Reading to understand a text and build your vocabulary. It can probably be used on most texts, but I think it is particularly useful when approaching somewhat complicated texts with a lot of information. Photo from flickr: "Day 79 - Focu+s"