eu-teaching

The Dutch school is ready to start a new Etwinning project, so I have chosen 3rd ESO-British to start communication with Lucía -the Spanish teacher- and the Dutch students.

Some of them might have the chance to meet their Dutch penfriends in October 2012, and most of us will share some English and Spanish using IT and this blog.

Welcome to our readers in Stedelijk College!.

¡Bienvenidos todos a esta nueva actividad!

Our project: "Some traditions in our countries-Tradiciones en nuestros países". School year 2011-12.

Mª Eugenia Matía. IES Alonso Berruguete. Palencia.Spain.

Lucía González. Stedelijk College. Eindhoven. The Netherlands.

Our students went to Eindhoven on exchange to visit a bilingual school: the experience was fantastic since they spoke in English, learned about Dutch artists and history and enjoyed all of it, specially the cycling.

We want to share this activity with you and make you conscious how important it is to practise the real language everywhere. Hope to go back soon!

May and October 2010. Am, Bert, Pablo and myself.

Welcome to a new school year!

We are looking forward to listening to your opinions.

Meanwhile keep reading before the exams start. Good luck!

Although we read some books in English, this time nobody wrote in our blog... but we´ll keep trying to improve it with our students´reports.

Despido con alegría a estos jóvenes lectores... Quizás aprendieron que además de su afición a la música, al deporte y a la amistad, el libro puede ser el amigo que nunca les defraudará . Dedicarán mucho tiempo a la lectura (a sus apuntes, a Internet, a la prensa...) y probablemente algo de su escaso tiempo juvenil al libro entre sus manos. Pero saben que allí, -en el libro- , se encierran sentido y sensibilidad para su futura vida.

Y al despedir a este buen grupo de alumnos, es inevitable evocar en mi homenaje particular, a D. Miguel Delibes y a Dª Casilda Ordóñez, sabios maestros, que ya -para siempre- visitarán otros parajes meseteños.

¡Hasta siempre! Junio 2010

During 2009 students took part in the project "Aprender con el periódico" with the help of the language assistants. They brought real newspapers from US and we had the opportunity to browse and analyse them during English lessons. So the lessons were very interesting: there were some serious economic newspapers which were difficult to understand because of the technical vocabulary, and there was one called "The Onion" extremely ironic and fun (so Diane said!). Since it was Election Year we also learned a lot of Presidential Elections and Obama´s life... and finally came the worst part of it: hard work. Mª Eugenia and Diane made us create our own newspapers. We had to choose news from recent papers in English and present them to the class. We practised some translation, a lot of reading, writing and speaking and covered all the sections: national, international, sports, economy, entertainment and social life. We also did some team work with the Swedish students on exchange and our newspapers have been hanging on the bulletin board with thumbtacks all the year along.

What else can we say? We enjoyed the activity since it was cool and a good opportunity to work and learn in a different way. (1º Bachillerato students)

Pensaba yo que encontar otros siete magniíficos lectores era tarea fácil. Aquí están en la foto los poquitos que se enrolaron en la tarea de ampliar este blog... Aún así, mereció la pena insistir y ver sus comentarios publicados.... porque los libros son de obligada recomendación, y porque si aún no los has leído ¿ a qué esperas?.

Recuerda que no importa tanto la lengua en que leas o escribas (francés, inglés, español) como el hecho de sentir curiosidad por saber qué historias cuentan, y cómo en tu imaginación crecen. No renuncies a leer por el placer de estar contigo mismo y así acercarte a la inteligencia de quienes escribieron tales historias.

Leímos estos siete magníficos en español, inglés o francés y aunque no pudimos ver todas las versiones cinematográficas, os invitamos a completar nuestros comentarios, a leer en verano y a ver algún DVD en la lengua original.

El bosque animado (España)

Reunion (Germany)

Around the World in Eighty Days (G. Britain)

The name of the Rose (Italy)

The Girl with an Earring (Holland)

Les Trois Mousquetaires (France)

Pride and Prejudice (England)

Quiero finalmente, dar las gracias a los alumnos: Alba, Noemí, Mariano, Miguel Quijada y Miguel Pérez, así como despedir a nuestro profesor Will Clark quien nos deja para proseguir sus estudios universitarios.

¡Recordaremos tu nombre literario y tu presencia en clase! You are the best!. ¡Hasta siempre!

... y si queréis seguir leyendo, aquí os espero. See you next year!

Around the World in Eighty Days (1873, Jules Verne)

This book recounts the adventures of Phileas Fogg, a rich man who makes a bet with his friends in the Reform Club; he thinks he can go around the world in just eighty days.

With his faithful manservant Jean Passepartout, whom he has just contracted, Phileas embarks on the adventure. The whole time he is being secretly followed by inspector Fix, a detective investigating a robbery at the Bank of England, as he believes Fogg is the criminal he’s looking for. Fix will do whatever he can to stop Phileas Fogg and Passepartout on their hazardous trip.They even meet Mrs. Aouda, the young widow of an old Indian Prince, who must be buried with her dead husband according to Sutee tradition. Once she is rescued, she completes the rest of the adventure with her rescuers.

Do you want to know if he eventually won the bet? If so, I really recommend that you read it. You will enjoy it, as I did, and find out that the world is bigger than you expect.

Alba Peribáñez (3º ESO)

The name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

Fray Guillermo de Baskerville arrives at an Abbey in Italy to investigate the death of a monk. He arrives with Adso, his servant. While they are investigating, more people die. The victims all have something in common: they all have their mouths and hands stained with ink, so he guesses that they died because of the ink.

Eventually Fray Guillermo finds a library where the monks keep the church’s forbidden books, and a book written in Latin about many sins and forbidden themes for the church, and apparently monks die when they read it.

The cultural level of the monks was not very high, and they subjugated the village for their own benefit.

Personal opinion:

The descriptions are really amazing, and I really enjoyed the description of the Abbey, although I think there were too many descriptions.

The theme was really interesting, and described from an interesting point of view.

Miguel Pérez Polanco (4º ESO)

El bosque animado (1943, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez)

Mi propósito para esta reseña es sencillo. Simplemente, pretendo alabar El Bosque Animado, y presentarlo al lector como la pequeña joya que es. Como estudiante de literatura, no podría honradamente intentar hacer una crítica; mi conocimiento de la literatura e historia española es demasiado escaso como para pretender hacer una crítica. Lo que sí puedo hacer, sin embargo, es reconocer el valor de la obra para cualquier aficionado a los libros y el lenguaje, y espero poder convencer a alguien del gran valor de este conjunto idiosincrático de relatos.
Empezaré con un cliché. Este libro tiene de todo. Se hallará en él lo que se busca, ya sea filosofía, tragedia, o simple capricho. Fernández Flórez nos ofrece un mundo más o menos completo, que dispone de todas las vicisitudes de la vida: lo alto del amor y el abismo de la muerte, todo envuelto en la hermosa pero despiadada capa verde de la naturaleza. Dentro del “Cecebre wencesleño” se topa con una panoplia de personajes únicos y encantadores, gente, (y animales y plantas) que representan sus papeles según sus propios destinos, llevando a cabo sus vidas tras dieciséis pequeñas viñetas que detallan, por ejemplo, la intrusión de un arrogante y frío poste de teléfono en el tradicional cantar del viento, o el orgullo absurdo del "Pueblo Pardo" de las moscas.
Este mundo, manejado por la destreza considerable de su autor, engancha desde las primeras palabras, y ofrece al lector una vista nítida de la Galicia rural de hace casi un siglo. Sin comentarios pedantes, ni tratados complejos, reúne la gran sabiduría de un estudiante ilustre de la humanidad, y lo enlaza (¿o amarra?)) a su tierra y a su pueblo de una forma tan inextricable que casi no se pueden distinguir lo uno de lo otro. Yo, leyendo este libro, pensaba vislumbrar la sagacidad de la propia fragua mientras sonreía o sufría con sus habitantes.
Finalmente, la prosa ingeniosa de Flórez completa la emoción que este libro ejercita sobre el lector. Es lo que la prosa debe de ser: digna y propia de las historias que cuenta, en este caso, repleto de metáforas naturales, lenguaje y fraseología levemente galega, y con un ritmo lo suficientemente fluido para enlazar las pequeñas brechas entre las varias estancias.

Will Clark , junio 2008.

Girl with A Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier)

The novel is set in Delft in the mid-17^th century. It is a story based upon historical figures, principally upon the painter Vermeer, and narrated, in the first person, by an imagined character, Griet, taken from one of Vermeer’s paintings.

Griet comes from a poor, protestant family. At sixteen, she is the eldest of three children. Her parents cannot work because her mother is unemployed and her father is blind. Her younger brother works in a factory and his is the family’s only income. Since they need more money and Griet can work, her parents send her to work as a servant for Vermeer, a man who painted pictures for an acquaintance of her father.

Vermeer lives with a very strange family. There are four daughters; a baby; Catalina, his wife; Maria Thins, his mother-in-law; and Taneke, the servant. Vermmer is very reclusive. He spends all day painting in his studio at home. When Griet arrives at Vermmer’s home she notices the family members’ different personalities, above all the differences between Vermmer and his wife. Vermmer has a very special friendship with Maria Thins, and a colder, more distant relationship with Catalina. For example, the only one who is allowed to go into his studio is his mother-in-law. When he then contracts Griet to clean his studio, Catalina feels a little jealous, so her relationship with Griet is troubled from the start.

The novel doesn’t have a strong plot. It centres around the development of the (very awkward) relationship between Griet and Vermeer. This relationship, like nearly all those in the novel, is characterized by a permanent, increasing tension resulting from the closeness of the relationship between the painter and his servant. Fundamentally, this is a story of a relationship that doesn’t fit in the society in which it is set.

Vermeer increasingly confides in Griet over the course of the novel. Vermeer first hires Griet to clean the studio, because he doesn’t have confidence in Tanneke or his clumsy wife to do it. Early on, Vermeer doesn’t appear much in the story, but he appears with increasing frequency as his confidence in Griet increases. Unlike Catharine or Tanneke, Griet tries to understand his work and he recognizes that she learns and understands. At some point, though, the work that Griet does for Vermeer must become secret because Catharine doesn’t like for her husband to confide in a servant more than in her. Griet and Vermmer’s feelings toward one another aren’t love, but by the end of the novel they come to feel a very close confidence.

Via the development of this relationship, Chevalier creates a very unique atmosphere. Since she focuses on an illicit relationship between a servant and master, she can generate tension between Griet and almost every other character in the story. Since the story is written in the first person, from Griet’s perspective, the reader never loses contact with the tension created by Griet’s singularly awkward position.

It is through this tension that Chevalier portrays the society that surrounds Griet. The reader only has access to the world around Griet through her thoughts, impressions, and feelings about the people around her. What this creates is a very detailed picture of a very small section of 17^th century Dutch society. Readers interested in 17^th century Dutch society will find this book’s scope to be narrow, but it’s focus intense.

Personally, I liked it very much because despite the book moving rather slowly, it is continually interesting. I would recommend this novel to anyone, be they interested in the period or not; aside from being useful in offering a unique perspective historically, it is fundamentally a great story.

Miguel Pérez – author and William Clark - editor