VARIATION ON AN OLD RHYME by John Mole

VARIATION ON AN OLD RHYME by John Mole

This is the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

These are the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the quarrel that started the fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines on the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the wrong that none can put right
That caused the quarrel that started the fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

These are the nations in all their might
That suffer the wrong that none can put right
That caused the quarrel that started the fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

And this is the song that goes on in spite
Of all the nations in all their might
That  suffer the wrong that none can put right
That causes the quarrels that start every fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines just the same on everyone.

Click here for a recording of John Mole reading this poem.

John Mole is a trained teacher, jazz clarinetist and poet, writing for adults and children. https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/john-mole

 

When Grandad Was a Penguin

In the new picture book When Grandad was a Penguin by Morag Hood, a child”s grandfather accidentally swaps places with a penguin during a visit to the local zoo.

This leads scenes of great comedy as the penguin tries to live in a house, use the toilet, and take tea with the family, who notice that Grandad now talks a lot about fishing, and spends a lot of time in the bathroom.

“He talked a lot about fishing.”

When Grandad was a Penguin – Morag Hood – Pan Macmillan 2018

Daft doodles

All language teachers draw a little, we have to. The Instagram page, Daft Doodles, is by one language teacher who is very good at it, Dave McClure. Enjoy.

Solitude – A.A. Milne

For those moments when you just need to be alone.

I have a house where I go
When there’s too many people,
I have a house where I go
Where no one can be;
I have a house where I go,
Where nobody ever says “No”;
Where no one says anything- so
There is no one but me.

-from Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne Egmont

 

Bookworm: A memoir of childhood reading

Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by British journalist and author Lucy Mangan is an autobiography with a special focus on the books that she read as a child, and is now reading to her own young son. Lucy Mangan grew up in England in the 70’s and 80’s learning to understand the world with the help of Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss, and Enid Blyton, and journeys to Narnia, the places Where The Wild Things Are, and Wonderland. Parents, teachers and librarians will enjoy this book for its enthusiasm for reading, and for the portraits of authors like Eric Carle, Maurice Sendak, and CS Lewis, and of course their writing.

We learn for example that

“the Hungry Caterpillar’s life began when (the author) was using a hole punch on a stack of papers at his home. The little circles made him think of a bookworm and he created a story, using different-sized pages – a familiar device in Germany, where his family had moved when he was six – called A Week with Willi the Worm.”

Mangan tells us that Where the Wild Things Are was inspired by Maurice Sendak’s memory of visits by older relatives who

“couldn’t speak English and grabbed and twisted your face, and they though this was an affectionate thing to do’. He and his siblings formulated the theory that, as their mother’s cooking was so terrible, the relatives could well be planning to eat them instead.”

Bookworm is full of anecdotes like this that not only bring to life the books that Magan rad but their authors too: Roald Dahl, like his character Willi Wonka, loved chocolate and would pass around a red plastic box of Mars and KitKat at the end of every meal: Mary Norton, author of The Borrowers, was very short-sighted and spent her own life “with her nose squashed up to things”; the whole Narnia series stemmed from a picture C.S. Lewis saw as a child of a deer ‘carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood’. He carried this image in his mind for 25 years before starting on the story.

These stories arepowerful ammunition in the battle to encourage more reading, in ourselves let alone others. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Writing Life

In his book on the writing process, Draft No. 4, and his series of articles on the writing process for New Yorker magazine,  journalist and Princeton University writing teacher John McPhee describes: how he once lay on his back on a table for two weeks mentally composing an text before writing it; how he spent 18 months learning to be a journalist by writing short articles with comic headlines for Time Magazine’s ‘Miscellany’ section (example a story about a man who fell asleep riding a bicycle was called “Two Tired”); how he spent months writing 40,000 words on the subject of oranges, and then discarded 85% of it; and how he began to write 1,000 words on a new experimental aircraft and ended up publishing 55,000 over three months.

The point of these anecdotes is that writing, even for experts like McPhee is hard work, and the result is not always what was planned. In his article ‘Writing by Omission’ McPhee asks in particular how a writer  can come refine, and shorten, his work to a powerful core. The answer is to be brutal: McPhee quotes the renaissance sculptor Michelangelo: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” to cut away the stone and find the beauty inside it. We do this because ‘Less is More’, as Ernest Hemingway observed, saying that “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

References – The Writing Life – McPhee’s articles on writing for the New Yorker

Happy 200th birthday Frankenstein

“My name is Victor Frankenstein.”

Boris Karloff

2018 is the 200th birthday of the world’s most famous monster, Frankenstein. The book by Mary Shelley was first published in 1818, but even in the early years the story was better known as a stage play than a book. And when cinema picked up the monstrous baby he became one of its best-known stars.

The story, like the monster itself, has been pulled apart and rebuilt. The famous cry of “It’s alive!!” was not in Mary Shelley’s book, but was added by the theatre. Mary Shelley herself re-wrote the story in later editions, to make it softer and to give Dr Frankenstein more regret at what he had done. “…..now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” 

Adaptations of the story for learners of English as a foreign language include:

• Level 3: Frankenstein Book & M-ROM Pack from Pearson English Active Readers

But is Frankenstein appropriate for the classroom? The film director Guillermo Del Toro describes it as a perfect story for teenagers: “You don’t belong. You were brought to this world by people that don’t care for you and you are thrown into a world of pain and suffering, and tears and hunger. It’s an amazing book written by a teenage girl. It’s mind-blowing.” (quote from this fantastic BBC article on Frankenstein, which has the full story with clips from film and TV including the Henry Brothers’ favourites – The Munsters

The Munsters

 

 

 

Cornucopia – Turkish history, culture, art

We thought it was time to include a plug for Cornucopia, a wonderful resource for discovering so much that is excellent in Turkey.

This twice-yearly magazine on art and culture is augmented with a website with articles, an online store for back-issues and Cornucopia’s book publishing. This week on the website for example you could read about:

• Artists –  like part-time Istanbul resident Mike Berg, who has a new exhibition at Galeri Nev
• Exhibitions in Istanbul, Ankara, and elsewhere  – including the Ai Weiwei porcelain exhibition at the Sabanci Museum ai-weiwei-porcelain, which has been extended to April 15th, the Leonardo da Vinci Expo at Uniq in Maslak until April 7th, and a review of an exhbition in Dubai by Turkish artist Hale Tanger.
• Books  – such as The Palace Lady’s Summerhouse and other inside stories from a vanishing Turkey which is a collection of articles for Cornucopia by Patricia Daunt, long-term resident and wife of the former British ambassador. Daunt writes about the wooden houses on the Bosphorus shore and other splendid buildings of Turkey.
• Neighbourhoods such as the Üsküdar district of Selimiye, where Florence Nightingale nursed soldiers from the Crimean War.

There are articles about restaurants such as the Turkish restaurant Zara in Hampstead, London, film festivals, cinemas, textiles, more exhibitions, more artists, more photographers, and much more art and culture of all kinds, while visitors to Turkey, and enthusiastic residents like ourselves, can plan their days with Cornucopia’s Cultural Guide and their What’s On guide.

All this information is kept fresh in the the Cornucopia blog, and  constantly updated on the Cornucopia Twitter feed.

We hope you read and enjoy this great resource.

 

Real werewolf stories

The full moon was Saturday night but it will be pretty large for a few more days. Time perhaps for some werewolf stories.

These 8 stories go back hundreds of years and are myths of people that were really believed to be practice lycanthropy (the word for being a werewolf).

These stories are slightly adapted for the EFL classroom from http://www.viralnova.com/werewolves/  See below for a teaching idea and some vocabulary.

1. 1521 in Poligny, France, a man was walking alone when he was attacked by a wolf, but was able to wound the creature considerably. Stumbling further down the road, he noticed a man nursing a wound similar to the one he had just inflicted on the beast. The man was Michel Vurden, who after being questioned by authorities, admitted to having made a deal with a devil for the ability to become a wolf. He even named two other werewolves, Philibert Montot and Pierre Bourgot, as his accomplices in murder and cannibalism that were plaguing the region. No honor amongst wolves, I guess.

2. Giles Garnier was a lonely hermit living in a cottage outside of Dole, France, in the 16th century. But when he got married, the stresses of providing for his family made him desperate. He had to figure out a way to get more food. So, he found a potion that allowed him to turn into a wolf as he wished. Around this time, children began disappearing. It didn’t take long for the townspeople to point fingers at the former hermit. During his trial he pleaded guilty to “crimes of lycanthropy” and he was burned to death.

3. In 1589, Peter Stumpp admitted to being a serial killer, murdering fourteen children and two pregnant women from the town of Bedburg, Germany. After being tortured while strapped to a wagon wheel, he confessed to something else —that the devil had given him a magic belt that allowed him to turn into a wolf when he wore it. The townspeople removed his head and placed it on a freshly killed wolf’s body. That’s what they thought of people who engage in lycanthropy.

The trial of Peter Stumpp

4. In 1598, a local tailor from Chalons, France, was charged with so many horrible atrocities that the court insisted all the documents from the trial be destroyed. Among the charges, the tailor was accused of tempting children into his home, only to slit their throats and eat them. When they resisted his attempts to get them into the house he would turn into a wolf and hunt them down in the night. The charges weren’t without evidence—barrels of bones and blood were found in deep cellars beneath his home.

5. When the town of Gascony, France was terrorized by vicious attacks and disappearances inflicted upon their children in 1603, one teenager admitted it was he who did these things, while in wolf form. Jean Grenier, a local 14-year-old, admitted to feasting upon the flesh of the  children. He claimed a strange man gave him a magical wolf skin that could transform him. Every night, he and a pack of nine werewolves would terrorize the surrounding towns. He boastfully admitted to having eaten three or four children. Given his age, instead of being sentenced to death, he was locked up in a local monastery for healing.

6. Nobody knows how this got out of hand, but in 1640, the town of Greifswald, Germany, was overrun by a whole pack of werewolves. After many attempts to battle the wolves with normal bullets, a group of students decided on a try a different technique. They melted down all the silver in the town and used it to create shinier bullets. This experiment worked and so they stumbled upon the (alleged) werewolves’ one weakness.

7. In 1685, the town of Ansbach, Germany, was terrorized by a wolf. When it was killed the creature was found to be the mayor of Ansbach himself, whom everyone thought had died a few weeks before. After the wolf was killed, it was dressed in the mayor’s clothing and hung by his neck. (They just wanted to be sure, I guess.)

8. When a man named Theiss was tried for lycanthropy in Jurgenburg, Livonia, in 1692 he pleaded guilty, but also claimed that werewolves aren’t inherently bad. In fact, he said that his kind have been in a long war against witches to save the country, and possibly the world.

He told the court that the reason crops sometimes wouldn’t grow in Jurgenburg was because the witches had taken the grain down to Hell. Huge battles occurred as the werewolves tried to stop the grain being taken.

The court eventually sentenced him ten lashes with a whip for sounding like a crazy person

 

The classroom task could be:

Give a story each to groups or pairs of students – they read and retell to each other. The group decides which is the most believable, most unbelievable, most disgusting, scariest.

Vocabulary for pre- teaching – Court, plead, grain, mayor, torture, hermit

Enjoy.

We hope you don’t have nightmares!!!

 

 

Is there such a thing as correct English anyway?

Sam Leith is fond of the quotation “When you go fishing, you bait the hook with what the fish likes, not with what you like.”

In his new book Write to the Point, Leith begins by jumping into a controversial topic. What is correct English? How terrible is it to occasionally split an infinitive? Or to start a sentence with a conjunction? To answer this Leith goes to the golden rule of communication – keep the audience in mind. Choose your words, and the grammar you use to hold them together, according to the situation, according to your reader or listener. Decide if you need to be formal or informal, and vary your “correctness” accordingly. Bait your hook for the fish you are trying to catch.

And follow rule two – Keep it simple.

Leith’s book provides a guide and a reference tool for writers. There are sections on parts of speech, punctuation, sentence construction, and the usage of contested vocabulary, but this is not just a catalogue of rules but a readable book with a mission to help us bring our texts to life.

 Please follow this link for very well-written, memorable advice by Sam Leith on writing in general and on wrting specific types of text including love letters and writing for digital media: e-mails and blogs like this one.

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