The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C.

This month of April marks the 42nd anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and to mark the occasion and to commemorate his life and work a memorial is being created in Washington DC. Visit this site for more information: http://mlkmemorialnews.org/

Poem of the month

Both my imagination and my memory fail me when I try to think of the perfect poem for the end of March. However, "This is just to say" by William Carlos Williams always seems appropriate. Why not write it on a post-it, stick it on your fridge and start every day with these lines?

Can online games save the world?

According to Jane McGonigal, they can. Take a look at this fascinating TED talk:

Newsround

In Sandvika upper secondary school we have so-called "subject days" where all the lessons of a subject during a week is taught in one day. For example, in English we have five English lessons a week, which means that on Tuesdays I have five English lessons in a row with one of my classes. This is in the afternoon and both my students and I tend to get a little bit tired towards the end of it. Therefore, I try to plan a varied day and include at least some assignments that will get my students (and preferably me) to move around a little bit. Yesterday I tried to combine the cooperative learning strategy "mix and mingle" with a look at the news. One of the competence aims for English in the first year in upper secondary is namely that students are to be able to "present and discuss international news and current events". Also, working with news seems to be something many students enjoy, but I have to admit that I don't get around to it often enough. However, yesterday I started out having my students individually search for a news story in a British online newspaper/ website. They were to pick a site from this web page and when they had chosen a news story, they were to read the article carefully and look up difficult words. After that they were to write a summary of the article of 3-5 sentences. So far this assignment was individual, quiet and not very active. As a next step, though, I asked them to mix and mingle. When I played music, they were supposed to just move around the classroom, and when the music stopped, they were supposed to pair up, greet each other politely and tell each other about the news story they had just read. After a few minutes, the music started playing again and they had to move on to eventually pair up with someone else. I had them pair up three times and while they were sharing their stories I moved around the room and listened in, and my impression was that they actually spoke English. Finally, I ended the assignment with a summing up-round where I walked around asking some of the students to tell me about the piece of news that the other person had just talked about. One advantage of this, if you do mix and mingle activities once in a while so that they get used to it, is that they learn that they have to listen very carefully to what the other person says. At the end of the assignment they are also supposed to have heard about at least three pieces of news and they will have spoken English with at least three other students. In the end, when I asked them if they found the activity useful, they were very positive, so I think I will do this again sometime. For students struggling with their English, cbbc newsround is be a good place to look for news.

Poem of the month

February is almost over, but there is just enough time for me to share my poem of the month. In 2001 I studied English at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. One of my courses was a linguistics course led by professor Gerard Steen. I've always been a bit of a romantic and I think I picked the course because it had love stories in its title. However, it turned out to be very different from what I had expected. The course was mainly about rhetorical structure theory (RST) and all the students took part in a project where we applied this theory to love poetry. I was much more interested in love poetry than linguistics, but the project turned out to be very interesting. One of the poems I worked on was "Come. And be my baby" by Maya Angelou. Almost ten years later I have to admit that I have forgotten most of what I learnt about RST, but I still know this poem by heart:

The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that'll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you're going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we've got a week or two
The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror
And you sit wondering
what you're gonna do.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Plan a vacation in the UK

It's been some busy weeks lately, but most of the time busy is good. One of the topics we have been working on in February is the UK and we decided that a good introduction to the country would be to have the students plan a trip to a British city. The students were divided into groups of three or four and they were each assigned a British city. You can see the instructions they were given here: Plan a vacation to the UK. I think the assignment worked quite well, but if we are going to do this again, I think I will ask them to use a more fun presentation tool than powerpoint. This photo is from flickr: Underground (night version).

MLK-day at the Nobel Peace Center

Today I and one of my classes were fortunate to take part in a special celebration of MLK-day at the Nobel Peace Center here in Oslo. The students worked on group assignments where they were to interview people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the US in the 50s and 60s. These people were of course not actually present, but the students were introduced to their stories in the exhibition "From King to Obama". To prepare for the day, the students had read up on Martin Luther King jr and the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the resources we used for these preparations were this Video: Martin Luther King and this text about Martin Luther King Jr. After learning about the Civil Rights Movement, we listened to representatives from the Red Cross, Democrats abroad and the Anti Racist Center who all spoke about the importance of youth involvement and voluntarism as means of changing the world. Subsequently, the students were invited to take part in a discussion about voluntarism and what they themselves can do to make a change in their hometown, their school and even their world. All in all, I think we all learned new things today. The Nobel Peace Center was really worth the visit and I think my students were exemplary visitors. This photo is from flickr.

Poem of the month

I think the first half of January is the hardest part of the schoolyear for most upper secondary school teachers in Norway. Within a week term grades for all students in all subjects must be ready and a lot of us still have quite a few papers to mark before we cross the finish line. Still, I had to take some time for one of my new year's blog resolutions. My plan is to share one poem every month here on my blog in 2010. January's poem is a very traditional choice, but there are good reasons why this particular poem is read again and again by English students all over the world. I think it is especially suitable right now since at the moment Norway is covered in beautiful snow. Please enjoy Robert Frost's "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening":

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

For information about the poem as well as a video of Frost reciting it, see here: Poetry everywhere

The photo is taken from flickr: when snow arrives out of the blue

What's this?

I just had to share this short video of Jack's discovery of Christmas Town in A Nightmare Before Christmas. Considering other films by Tim Burton, such as Batman and Corpse Bride, I guess he prefers the dark and gloomy aesthetics of Halloween, but I would take shiny happy Christmas town over Halloween any day.

Teaching the Nobel Peace Prize

This week we spent our English lessons working on the Nobel Peace Prize. First we spent some time working on Obama's Nobel Lecture from last Thursday. You can watch the lecture here and read it here. The lecture is of course very complicated and the vocabulary is advanced to say the least. Despite this, however, my students appeared to watch and listen with concentration to the 25 minutes that my colleague had picked for this assignment. In addition, they answered questions about the lecture and I think they did quite well. Having learned about this years' Peace Prize the students worked in groups and prepared short presentations about previous Laureates. Here is a link to the lesson plan: Lesson Plan: The Nobel Peace Prize. The questions about Obama's lecture are made by one of my excellent colleagues at Sandvika upper secondary school. The picture is from flickr: Nobel

Christmas is all around

My colleague Liv Kristin and I have made it a Christmas tradition to watch Love Actually with our English classes before Christmas. This year, it appears as though we are running out of English lessons, but I still have hope that there will be time to share this two hour dose of Christmas spirit with our students. In previous years, they've seemed to enjoy it as much as we do. If you are in the mood for more Christmas clips, visit Liv Kristin's blog.

Not teaching, but drowning...

...in paper work. The pile of papers that need to be corrected and marked is now so enourmous that I feel there is no time for anything else. Still, sometimes you just have to take a (blogging) break. I haven't had much time to prepare lessons recently, but fortunately I have great colleagues that I cooperate with. One of them suggested we use the story "Two Kinds" by Amy Tan while working on the USA and immigration. The story is about a Chinese-American girl who is pressured by a mother who desperately wants her daughter to become a prodigy. It is an interesting story and my impression was that it also engaged our students. You can read and listen to the story here: Two Kinds by Amy Tan (there are also study questions on this page). For resources about culture and society (including the topic immigration) in the USA, see this page: NDLA - Culture and society in the USA The picture is taken from flickr: grownups

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"

Literal videos

Some people had a brilliant idea and made these literal music videos where they replace the original song with a song about what is actually going on in the video. I think this Penny Lane one is hilarious. Perhaps the pupils could try this with a video of their choice...?

Video from youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yJ2yWvGnkI