LANGUAGE TRIP 1st BATXILLERAT (4): OUR LAST DAY IN GALWAY

 In our last day in Galway, we learned some more things about this nice city, thanks to a guided historical tour through its most significant places: Eyre Square, Latin Quarter, Spanish Arch, the river Corib, and Salthill.








 We also discovered the simbology of the Claddagh Rings, and the story told around them.

 A statue of Oscar Wilde sitting in a bank in the Shop Street brought us to remember that Ireland is a country of poets and writers, like Samuel Beckett or James Joyce, among many others.










By visiting the river, the docks, and the Spanish Arch, we learned how important was the trade with Spanish and Italian ships for the Irish economy during de 14th and 15th century.

 
 Finally, we realized that music is everywhere in Ireland, in every single corner.


The Irish: very cheerful and friendly people!

LANGUAGE TRIP 1st BATXILLERAT (3): THE CLIFFS OF MOHER

Today we visited the stunning Cliffs of Moher, where some famous films have been shot like Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince or Ryans Daughter.







Believe it or not, we were lucky to have some patches of sun, although the wind was blowing really hard.












We marvelled at the lovely Irish landscape, there and during the trip: cottages, sheep, pasture lands, castles, towers, the Atlantic coastline, the little harbours,...










The Cliffs stand 214 m above the sea level and stretch for 8 kilometres along the Atlantic. From there, we could see the Aran Islands and Galway Bay.

LEARNING ENGLISH WITH SLEEPY HOLLOW

10 out of 10. This is the mark our 3rd-ESO students gave the actors in the company Clever Pants who performed an interactive, hilarious adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in Teatre Ateneu today.

Both students and teachers enjoyed every minute of the play. We watched excellent acting, listened to perfectly-pitched English and roared with laughter throughout the play. Clever Pants, you rule!!!

FUN PLAYS

Yesterday morning some of our students attended the performance of a play by English Theatre Company - ETC. Our 1st and 2nd ESO students had a really great time watching Just Good Friends, a play about friendship, dreams and misunderstandings, and our 1st and 2nd Batxillerat students just loved Me TV, a satirical look at mindless media. 

Both plays were pitched at the right level of English for our students, and, as is always the case with ETC plays, they were extremely funny. The best part of it all was when our students stepped onto the stage to perform with the actors. They simply loved that, and the audience did too!

Once more, we would like to thank ETC for sharing such enjoyable moments with us.

Discussion in class

Today we had to observe the class of other teachers in CES School. My mission today is to observe Gerry's class.
It was an advanced group, with high interests and habilities for debate and discussion, Gerry has made it possible with authentic material from a webpage: idebate.org.
idebate is done by the International Debate Education Association (IDEA). As they say in their own webpage, the association gives young people a voice through education, debate and by raising their awareness about worldwide issues. The webpage is a compliation of different blogs, sorted by debate subjects. 
Gerry has taken some texts from the web page, about the military institution. The students had to sort them depending on the agreement or disagreement with the military coups (skim reading). Then, in a most precise reading, they had to find some informations in the texts.
The next step is the debate in small groups, by presenting some questions, as a preparation for the debate in the large group.
The language focus at the end is dedicated to the idioms, with an exercice on wich students have to gess the meaning from the context.

Books and Authentic Material

We have talked in class about the advantages and disadvantages of the course book, in contrast with the "realia", the authentic material.

The course book can be a useful material to practice some grammar or lexic aspects on the last step of the language focus. But to start talking and building sense around the language, the authentic material is more motivating.

In addition, the course book is the same for all students, so, as they have the same information, there are no information gaps to fill, and no information to share.

Authentic material could be a set of material objects, pictures, videos, or ...  also books! We can talk about real books in the real world. We talked about James Joyce because Stuart showed us a book of James Joyce. He told us that he was dead, and we started to talk in the past tense.

Real books of real authors in real libraries 

There where I live, the Trinity College, is surrounded by books, real books. There are so many, that they don't seem real. Isn't the old library like a magical and fictive place?

How many books may be there?



Who wrote them?



When were they written?

What are they about?



Who did the magical work of sorting, ordering and puting them in those infinite shelves?

Did the students read some of them?




In which books were they more interested?




What did they learn about them?







One of those students might be the philosopher George Berkeley (1687-1753), who was a student and scholar of Trinity College and one of its senior academicsis widely regarded as Ireland's greatest philosopher and among the world's top philosophers. His most influential philosophical thesis, "Immaterialism," has, since the eighteenth century, attracted considerable attention in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics.
The main influences on his early work are generally regarded to be John Locke and Nicolas Malebranche, and in later life he was influenced by writers in the Platonist tradition. He had considerable influence on the works of many important philosopers including David Hume and John Stuart Mill.


There is a library next to the old one, that is named after him: the Berkeley libary.

It is in this one where now the students read and study in the present tense, in the present continuous, in a very different way as Berkeley and his colleges did, about very different subjects, but, I'm sure, with the same emotional and theorethical problems and questions.

A last question: Why did  Arnaldo Pomodoro make this sculpture called 'Sphere with Sphere' (1982) to illustrate the entracnce of the library?