Mr Knight's Group - Holiday Fun!

For those of you who missed Wednesday's lesson:
a) You missed out.
b) We finished Othello, so it's up to you to read to the end. Once you've read it, watch this video to get a sense of the dramatic staging:



c) Your homework (due Tuesday 20th April) for the holidays is:

1. Complete the reading logs (sheet available at O:\Students\ENGLISH\Mr Knight\Year 12) for all scenes to the end of the play.
2. Set an exam question:

• Choose a passage of 30-40 lines which you think includes particularly interesting representations of speech.
• Pose a question, in the style of this exam example (Othello question on page 13), which you think is relevant to the section you have chosen and would make candidates consider the passage in a worthwhile context.
• Prepare a mark scheme, in the style of page 18 of this example, listing possible points for candidates to consider.
• Be prepared to discuss your question in our first lesson after the break.

I'm sure I don't need to remind you that you should also be doing your own independent revision - especially those of you who will be retaking ELLA1 on 27th May and need to refamiliarize themselves with Things Fall Apart and Streetcar...

With all that to do, I know you'll have a whale of a time and so I bid you all a happy holiday.

Essay Skills Extension - the final countdown!

The last in my series of Essay Skills Extension classes will take place not this Thursday, as previously advertised, but on MONDAY (29th) after school in S07. Tell all your friends...

Oh, and if there are any requests for music to set tasks to, post a comment here.

Team Talking

Good to see those fantastic videos from Mr Stanley's group - excellent speech representations all round. As well as almost inducing me to actually write LOL, the Capello skits also reminded me of Dara O'Briain's column from the Guardian when news of the bugging of the dressing rooms broke.

Here it is, complete with a slightly less realistic representation of spontaneous speech at the end. Enjoy and note particularly the way he plays with the playscript format but without mentioning character names in order to enhance the comic effect...

Spot the Difference!!

Capello's Team Talk

Fabio Capello has clearly expressed his dissatisfaction at the conduct of certain members of the England squad... here's what he had to say as captured live on candid camera!!















Post your thoughts/ attempts to transcribe the clips...

Members of my class are expected to transcribe their one of the performances in its entirity as well as writing an overview of its C.A.P. (in 250 words) which is due in Thursday's lesson.

Extension for Essay Excellence!

Do your conclusions lack coherence? Do your quotes stick out like a sore thumb? Do you find planning a pain?

Well, why not try MR KNIGHT'S ESSAY SKILLS EXTENSION?!
That's right folks: starting from tomorrow, Thursday 4th March, I will be running an afterschool extension class focussing on ESSAY SKILLS. I will be focussing particularly on ELLA2B and how we can write essays analysing representations of speech in literature, but these classes (which should hopefully be quite light hearted as we're all in need of a bit of a laugh at the end of the day) will be helpful for every essay you ever write thanks to the emphasis on skills ahead of content.

The classes will take place every Thursday after school and run from 3:15-4:15pm. They will be held in Room S07 (First Floor in New Sixth Form Building) and are OPEN TO EVERYONE on the course. So come along, bring a friend, and prepare to pick up some MAD SKILLS (as I believe the young people say)!

Tech-knowledge-y for Teaching Othello

I'm currently away for two weeks but that doesn't stop me doing a bit of teaching on Othello, thanks to the twin wonders of my own carefully crafted worksheets and the miraculous internet. Not only can I keep in touch thanks to this beautiful blog, but there are also a fair few resources available online to help with the study.

For starters, there are plenty of online versions of the entire text of the play. A good place to start would be this version I found on Project Gutenberg (a fantastic site featuring thousands of online texts for free, provided they are out of copyright). This is especially helpful as you can search for all the occurences of a particular word (such as "black") and see all the different contexts it is used in and which characters use it.

But hey, somebody's already beaten us to that as there's also this concordance for all of Shakespeare's works (though you can search by individual play and even by character as well). A concordance counts up and brings together all usages of individual words in a particular piece of writing and is a great way to look at which words are important in a particular character's idiolect.

Finally, there's also Sparknotes' No Fear Shakespeare series which provides a "modern translation" of the entire play which you can look at side by side with the original. Now, this is great for understanding what the hell is going on in the play if you're struggling with a particularly knotty bit of Shakespearean language, but it is far from perfect and does not give an accurate presentation of how the characters really speak to each other, which, after all is what we should be focussing on for ELLA2. However, carefully considering these shortcomings could be an excellent way to start thinking specifically about representations of speech. If the translation doesn't give the full force of Shakespeare's original, what is it exactly about the original that has such power?

On a slightly different note, I thought this article from today's Guardian might be of interest either for our thoughts about Achebe or just for general interest considering the terrible recent developments in Nigeria.

That's all for now, and I look forward to some enlightened Othello discussion when I return.