REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

The precious gift of time

The moment to spend with a husband who loves me, or a sick friend, or a delicious new grandchild is here and now. Not some time later. And yes, now is the time to do that work in the community I've always said I wanted to do.

The nation learned this lesson all at once that horrible day in September 2001. The pictures stay with us — the fires and falling debris and, most hauntingly, the faces. Look how young so many of them were, people who thought there would be much more time, a lot of "later" when they could do all the things they really wanted to do. I grieve for their families — especially for those, like me, who haven't found any trace of the people they loved. But I grieve even more for the people who died that day. They couldn't know what we know now about the precious gift of time. 

Cokie Roberts, political commentator for ABC News, senior news analyst for NPR News

Here you'll find teaching and learning resources about 9/11.

BACK TO SCHOOL

I  wish you good luck on your first day at school tomorrow!

I wish you all the best! Reach your goals, keep smiling, never give up! Believe in yourself, believe in your quality, and never doubt in what you can achieve! 

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.  ~ Kahlil Gibran

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. ~ Thomas Carruthers

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.  ~ John Cotton Dana

THE VOW

Based on a true story, The Vow is a 2012 romantic movie starring Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams.

A car accident puts Paige in a coma, and when she wakes up with severe memory loss, her husband Leo works to win her heart again.

Here you can read an article about this touching movie. 

SEPTEMBER, 1918

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;

The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

Under a tree in the park,

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,

Were carefully gathering red berries

To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,

Then I shall take out this afternoon

And turn it in my fingers,

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

To-day I can only gather it

And put it into my lunch-box,

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavour to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

September, 1918 by the Modernist poet Amy Lowell is a very enlightening poem. It gives a sense of hope and imagination. It was how the writer wanted to see the world in the year 1918, during the World War I. Amy Lowell was painting a picture of how the world should have been compared to the way it really was.

Here  you can find a detailed analysis of this poem.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

Amy Lowell 

SEAMUS HEANEY

  

Yesterday Seamus Heaney, the Nobel prize-winning Northern Irish poet,  died in hospital in  Dublin  after a short illness.

Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht  Jimmy Deenihan said Mr Heaney  "was a huge figure internationally, just a great ambassador for literature obviously but also for Ireland".  

Here you can read the whole article.

SINGING ALONG WITH CRAIG DAVID

Craig Ashley David  is an English singer-songwriter who rose to fame in 1999 featuring on the single Re-Rewind by Artful Dodger. David's debut album, Born to Do It, was released on 14 August 2000, after which he has since released five further studio albums and worked with a variety of artists such as  Kano and Sting.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

Love's Labour's Lost  is one of  Shakespeare's romance comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s, making it contemporaneous with Romeo and Juliet and  A Midsummer Night's Dream. It  was first published in 1598. The title page states that the play was "Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere," which has suggested to some scholars a revision of an earlier version. The play next appeared in print in the First Folio in 1623. The earliest recorded performance of the play occurred at Christmas time in 1597 at Court before Queen Elizabeth.

Love's Labour's Lost  is one of those plays which seem difficult on the page (all dense wordplay, leaping from one literary level to another), but work marvellously on stage. It was one of Shakespeare's first attempts to blend romantic comedy with farce and to import the style of each into the other.  The play concerns the subject of love, includes lots of rhetoric and witty exchanges by the characters, and has a happy ending, although it does not end with a marriage.

REPORTED SPEECH

Reported speech refers to a sentence reporting what someone has said.  It is almost always used in spoken English.
In reported speech the tenses, word-order and pronouns may be different from those in the original sentence.

If simple present, present perfect or the future is used in the reporting verb (i.e. says) the tense is retained. Look at these example sentences:

For example:

He says the test is difficult.

She has said that she watches TV every day.

William will say that he comes to school every day.

If the reporting verb (i.e. said) is in the past, the reported clause will be in a past form. This form is usually one step back into the past from the original. Look at these example sentences:

For example:

He said the test was difficult.

She said she watched TV every day.

Jack said he came to school every day.

DISCOVERING REGENCY ENGLAND

"In her novels, Jane Austen brilliantly portrayed the lives of the middle and upper classes, but barely mentioned the cast of characters who constituted the bulk of the population," Roy and Lesley Adkins write in their book, Jane Austen's England.
The authors offer a detailed analysis of early 19^th-century England, producing an  enlightening textbook of the life of both rich privileged and poor ordinary people who were the background in all of Jane Austen's books.

Without a doubt  Jane Austen wrote superb stories of the middle and upper class society set during the Regency  (here you can find an overview of that period), yet this book depicts the world which surrounded her during forty-one years of life. With the aid of diaries, newspaper articles, legal documents, memoirs and histories, it describes Jane Austen and her life,  but what's more it concentrates on the everyday lives of the middle and lower classes, who comprised three-quarters of the British population, including the great novelist herself.

Here you can read a newspaper article about Roy and Lesley Adkins' book. 

OTHELLO

I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak

Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe. 

Othello, Act V, scene ii

Here you can find a detailed analysis of Othello, one of Shakespeare's great tragedies. Written around 1603, the play tells the story of a powerful general of the Venetian army, Othello, whose life and marriage are ruined by a manipulative, deceitful, and envious soldier, Iago.
Othello is perhaps the most famous literary exploration of the corruptive powers of jealousy and suspicion.  At the same time, it is among the earliest literary works dealing with race and racism. Othello, heroic even if eventually flawed, is the most important black protagonist in early Western literature. Othello faces persistent racism from other characters, in particular when he marries Desdemona, a privileged white woman whose father disapproves of the union.

THE ROYAL BABY

At 4.24 pm on July 22 a baby was born in London. But not just any baby! This baby boy is a prince and will probably one day be the King of England. 

Here you can read an article about Prince William, his beautiful wife Kate Middleton and their son George Alexander Louis.  And don't forget to do the exercises!

HAMLET

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?"

Hamlet, Act V, Scene i

Here you can find a thorough analysis of  Shakespeare's most famous tragedy.

IN SEARCH OF SHAKESPEARE'S DARK LADY

Here you can read an interesting and informative article about Shakespeare's "dark lady", the seductive and elusive woman who inspired some of his most famous sonnets.

OLIVER TWIST

Oliver Twist is perhaps Charles Dickens’s most famous novel. It first appeared in instalments in 1837 and was later published as a book. The novel fictionalises the economic insecurity and humiliation the novelist  himself experienced when he was a boy.

The novel was the first of the author’s works to realistically depict the impoverished London underworld and to illustrate his belief that poverty leads to crime.

The name Twist, given to the protagonist by accident, represents the disgraceful reversals (=changes) of fortune that he will experience. Oliver Twist is a poor orphan who is brought up in a workhouse in a heartless way,  he is underfed and receives no education.  He is later sold to an undertaker (=funeral director)  as an apprentice, but the cruelty of his new master forces him to run away to London.  There he falls into the hands of a nasty gang of young pickpockets led by Fagin, an old Jew who is one of Dickens’s best characterizations.  They force Oliver to help them in their criminal activities. The boy is temporarily rescued by Mr Brownlow, a benevolent gentleman.  Then Oliver is kidnapped by the gang.  After many incidents,  the gang is  eventually caught by the police.  Mr Brownlow adopts Oliver and shows kindness and affection towards him.

AUGUST