A History of the World in 100 Objects

… is a wonderful BBC programme that has only just started and will continue throughout the year. Headed by the British Museum, its intention is to explain the history of humanity through objects. This morning I listened to the podcast about the Olduvai handaxe and was informed, educated and entertained all at the same time! That particular podcast would make a great audio text for class, by the way; it’s full of interesting interdisciplinary aspects and meaty sentences like “Does this chipped stone tool hold the secret of speech?”

On speech and stone: I learned a word this morning that I had probably assumed I knew, but turned out not to. Until today, I’d had no idea that this highly useful tool was called a handaxe. It was very pleasant to learn this, and the new word feels flinty and sharp in my vocabulary.

Civil War in Four Minutes is back up!

Two years ago, I posted a Youtube video that very succinctly tells the story of the American Civil War. It got taken down, but is now back up. Very much worth watching

Scenes in The History Boys

As you’re reading the play, dividing the acts up into scenes might help you to keep track of what’s going on. I’ve compiled a table with scene numbers and titles and corresponding pages. The scene titles are my own and are just given to make the scenes easier to identify. Please copy the scene number into your own text copy.

History Boys Scenes

Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents

Thus goes the famous opening line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the wonderful girls’ classic that far too few people here in Germany know. The Christmas referred to takes place during the American Civil War, and as the four girls’ father is away at war as an army chaplain, besides having lost all his money when trying to help a friend*, the family is really very poor. But don’t worry, there will be presents. And fun. And theatricals. AND a ball, at which Jo meets … no, but read it for yourself.

Two days ago a TV documentary about Louisa May Alcott’s life premiered in the US; although I can’t watch it, I still enjoyed the extensive website they created for the film, with lots of fascinating background and some video clips.

Alcott first become famous for her collection of letters she wrote when she served as a hospital nurse in Washington during the war. Here’s a clip about that time:

And now, while you still have time, make a New Year’s Resolution to read Little Women in 2010, if you haven’t already done so.

It’s been an education. It still is.

This is my answer to a challenge started by a German teacher’s blog, so I guess it will probably not qualify at all, being written in English. But hey, it’s a teachers’ challenge and some of my online homies are participating, so how can I resist?

Great advertising

Sometimes it is just too easy to forget the obvious – when I told my class to send me links to funny commercials, I omitted to mention that they should, of course, be in English. So far, I’ve only received one English one – actually, it was a Danish commercial advertising English courses – but due to profanity I couldn’t link to it from a teacher blog.

So, to give you an idea of what I’m looking for, here’s a wonderful Australian beer commercial that Der Englisch Blog featured sometime earlier this year.

Guinness went on to spoof the original commercial:

So what would you like to dip into the water?

What’s going on in the House of Lords these days?

Let me begin by admitting that I usually don’t think very much about what the House of Lords might be doing. I could probably come up with a few facts about them, such as that

• the peers (known as Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal, which sounds both Biblical and Early Modern to me) no longer have a hereditary right to their seat, but are voted into office
• as of this year, the HoL no longer serves as the court of last resort in Britain.
• they also have a right to veto, or delay, legislation for twelve months.

And so on. To cut it short, the House of Lords  is a leftover from medieval and early modern times that has little real power left.

Why a post on such a quaint institution then? Well, there’s this blog called A Don’s Life by Cambridge professor Mary Beard, and today’s post was about a HoL debate about the lack of foreign language skills in Britain. Mary Beard’s post is a neat summary of the debate and very entertaining in its own right, but I decided to follow her link to the original debate and that kind of made me wish I could sit in the House of Lords.

Listening practice

Learning to speak a language certainly isn’t easy, but learning to listen to it certainly isn’t easy, either. Spoken words just don’t behave in as orderly a fashion as written ones, sometimes running together; real life speakers don’t finish their sentences or use words that aren’t on any of your vocabulary lists; and of course, every language has many different spoken varieties. This is particularly true for English, which not only has countless native varieties but is also used by many people as a bridge between speakers of other native languages.

The best thing you can do is to listen to English in as many varieties as much as possible in order to get your ear and brain used to the experience. Fortunately, much of this practice is a great deal of fun, and also largely free, even if there aren’t native speakers around. Some ideas:

• watch films in English with English subtitles. German subtitles won’t help you understand the English any better, but English subtitles will subtly help your brain to process what it’s hearing. Watching a film this way is really listening practice – in real life, you’d usually see the person you’re talking to, right?
• The same thing goes for funny little videos. Yes, there’s lots of rubbish on Youtube, but there’s also some really good stuff. And it’s even better if it makes you laugh, because enjoyment makes you learn more easily.  Listening to many variations of “Do you know who I am?” is good for your English. Really.
• Finally, there are hundreds of wonderful podcasts out there. If I had to recommend just one for learners, I’d go for the BBC’s Six Minute English. Recorded in various accents, it is a weekly podcast about various topics with a focus on language learning. During the podcasts, the presenters draw your attention to some vocabulary items, idioms and grammatical difficulties; the website also provides additional material. It’s well worth the six minutes!

I’ve written more about podcasts here, here, and here. And I listen to this podcast every day (well, almost) and this one every week. It’s a good justification for expensive mobile listening devices – Christmas is coming up!

Feminists don’t have a sense of humour

Agree or disagree? Whatever you think, watch this video, it’s smart, funny and very accomplished:

Some word explanations (thanks, LDOCE)

• vicious: violent and uncruel; unkind
• funny bone:  the soft part of your elbow that particularly hurts when you hit it
• degradation: an experience or situation that makes you feel ashamed and angry
• rampant: very fast-growing and difficult to control
• objectification: treating a person or idea as a physical object
• lighten up: used to tell someone not to be so serious about something

Dance break!

When classes collide, we’re all going to die!!!

The British class system is very easy to make fun of, but here are two great videos from the Catherine Tate show that I really like.

The first example is from the Aga Saga Woman series, in which Catherine Tate appears as an over-the-top aspiring upper middle class lady who is painfully  and hilariously anxious about the smallest things in life. The worst thing that can happen to her is to have a lowly mechanic or, horror of horrors, an agency nanny from the North come to her house.

Another incarnation of Catherine Tate – perhaps her most famous one – is Lauren Cooper, the chavvish teenager with a working-class background, a attitude and the standard phrase: “Am I bovvered?”

Browse Youtube for more Catherine Tate fun!