STATIONS, PRISONS AND COLLEGES

I had in  mind a group of unmotivated teenagers who could not care the least about English but who were very keen on soccer on an international level. Following up from that came the idea of adding world-famous railway stations, prisons and universities.

Whereabouts will you find the following stations:

 

ATOCHA

SANS

MARÍA ZAMBRANO

GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL

HAUPTBANHOF

PADDINGTON

UNION STATION

CHATELET-LES HALLES

PENN STATION

SHINJUKU STATION

 

AND WHERE WILL YOU FIND THE FOLLOWING PENITENTIARIES?:

HERRERA DE LA MANCHA

ALBOLOTE

ALCATRAZ

ALHAURÍN

HOLLOWAY

ROBBEN ISLAND

DEVIL´S ISLAND

SAN QUENTIN STATE PRISON

VLADIMIR CENTRAL PRISON

LA SANTE 

AND THE FOLLOWING UNIVERSITIES?:

UPO

HARVARD

BERKELEY

UCLA

MIT

CAMBRIDGE

OXFORD

UMASS v. UMA

ST.ANDREWS

GRANADA v. GRENADA

 

 

 

AIRPORTS, SOCCER STADIUMS AND HOSPITALS

WHERE IN THE WORLD WILL YOU FIND THE FOLLOWING AIRPORTS?:

 

PABLO RUIZ PICASSO

EDWARD O´HARE

JFK

HEATHROW

SAN PABLO

EL PRATS

ADOLFO SUÁREZ BARAJAS

CHARLES DE GAULLE

ARLANDAS

SCHIPOL

HANEDA

LOS RODEOS

TAMBO

GUARARAPES

CHANGI

SOEKARNO-HATTA

SUVARNA BHUMI

ATATURK

GUANGZHOU

KUALA LUMPUR

SONDIKA

HARTSFIELD-JACKSON

FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL

FEANKFURT

WHICH FOOTBALL TEAMS PLAY AT THESE STADIUMS?

VILLA PARK

CELTIC PARK

STAMFORD BRIDGE

ANFIELD

OLD TRAFFORD

ST. JAMES´PARK

CITY GROUND

HILLSBOROUGH

WHITE HART LANE

HAMPDEN PARK

SAN MAMÉS

ANOETA

VICENTE CALDERÓN

LA ROMAREDA

LA ROSALEDA

CAMP NOU

MARACANÁ

ESTADIO DA LUZ

ESTADIO AZTECA

ALLIANZ ARENA

LA BOMBONERA

SAN SIRO

JALISCO

MESTALLA

SAPPORO DOME

PARQUE DE LOS PRÍNCIPES

ESTADIO DO DRAGAO

SÁNCHEZ PIZJUAN

WHERE WILL YOU FIND THESE HOSPITALS?

12 OCTUBRE

VIRGEN DE LAS NIEVES

MOUNT SINAI

ST. MARY´S

SAINT THOMAS´

CENTRE MEDIC

MAYO CLINIC

JOHN HOPKINS´

HOSPITAL CLÍNICO UNIVERSITARIO

SAN JUAN DE DIOS

DALI, GANDHI, GAUDI

Just a month ago, I was teaching a group of Bachillerato students and they happened to know nothing about either DALI, GANDHI or GAUDI. However, they are very knowledgeable about Messi, Pizzi or Ancelotti.Students are not to blame for their ignorance. After all, by using their latest technologies they can be acquainted with the above personalities at the click of a button in no time at all.Under the latest pedagogical trend,CLIL or whatever it´s called, -(just the brain child of some fly-by-night politician turned teacher trying to re-discover the wheel as if we had not had content and communication as a priority in our teaching tasks)- the three personalities above would make an excellent didactic unit as they are cross-curricular and go beyond the ordinary curriculum into our daily lives. Bearing these reflections in mind I devised a simple T/F questionnaire to acquaint the students with these three extraordinary characters:

Arrange them in chronological order and find out which important world events they lived through: Historical context.

Who is speaking? Write DA, GAN or GAU after each sentence:

"I was shot dead"

"I lived in New York"

"I lived in South Africa"

"I was nicknamed God´s architect"

"I remained single all my life"

"I made sculptures and produced over 1500 paintings"

"I was killed in a tram accident"

"I had blond  hair and blue eyes"

"I had four children"

"I was a modernist"

" I played football"

"I wore glasses"

"I was a writer"

"I wrote to russian writer Leo Tolstoi"

"I used fasting as a political device"

"I married at 13"

"My wife´s name was Gala"

" I studied in England"

"My mother died of breast cancer"

"My older brother died before I was born"

WRITE    T/ F:

 

Ghandi opposed "purdah" or child marriage.

Gaudi was a barrister.

Ghandi was against Britain´s imperialism.

Dali was for non violent civil disobedience.

Ghandi worked as an ambulance driver.

Gaudi was shot dead.

Ghandi committed himself to temperance, chastity and vegetarianism.

Dali had four children.

Ghandi defended the civil rights movement in South Africa.

Gaudi drew plans.

 

Do as above regarding:

H.G. WELLS - GEORGE ORWELL - ORSON WELLS

GABRIEL MIRÓ  - JOAN MIRÓ

MONET- MANET

HAITI - TAHITI

NEIL,LOUIS & LANCE  ARMSTRONG

MARTIN LUTHER - MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr.

GEORGE ELIOT  -  T.S. ELIOT

LOPE DE RUEDA  -  SALVADOR RUEDA

THOMAS MORE - GEORGE MOORE - ROGER MOORE-

HENRY MOORE

F. SCHILLER - F. SCHLEGEL 

G.W.F. HEGEL -F. ENGELS -M. HEIDEGGER- G.F. HANDEL

 

 

 

Regrets, regrets, regrets...

Life is an inextinguishable crop of regrets, according to Joseph Conrad.
Unfortunately, as we grow older it becomes sadly true.

 A rerun of the the most logged pre-death comments. 

 

Regret having worked too hard. 

Regret having believed the nonsense.

Regret not having said so. (Peter Trainin)

Regret not having studied hard enough

Regret not having seized all my opportunities

Regret having eaten or drunk so much

Regret not having spoken my mind

Regret not having given up smoking

Regret  not having travelled the world

Rewrite the sentences above starting with either:

 

I should (not) have ......

or I wish I had (not).....

or If only I had (not)

Add three more from your own personal situation.

 

Ex: I should not have wasted my time playing computer games,etc...

MEMORY and Memories

Memory plays an invaluable part in learning foreign languages as it is one of the most important human faculties. It can be defined as the process in which information is coded, stored and retrieved.
Memory, however, is more than just the ability to recall and we know very little about how the mind remembers things and how and why it forgets other things.

          THE VARIETIES OF MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES

Memory can be divided into several different types:

Episodic memory: The memory for past episodes and events in one´s life.

Factual memory: The memory for facts, such as that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492.

Semantic memory: The memory for meaning: the average person remembers several hundred thousand words and meanings.

Iconic memory: the memory for visual information as when you are watching a new film.

Echoic memory: the memory for sounds, the one which stores your auditory information

Topographic memory: the ability to orient yourself in space

Sensory memory: we can even remember the smell of some tasty dish, or thousands of different people´s faces.

Photographic memory:visual memory

Instinctive memory: the newborn baby "remembers" to suck at its mother´s breast.

Collective memory: According to Carl Jung we share collective race memories as archetypal symbols.

Procedural or skills memory: Our skills involve memory: from driving a car to walking..

Haptic memory: a database for touch stimuli

Past-life memory:Some people appear to be able to "remember" events from before their birth.

Declarative memory, etc..

There is hardly a moment in our lives when memory is not playing a crucial role, and the more we understand how it functions, the more we can help ourselves at work, at home, in play and in study.

From The Brain Book by Peter Russell 

                               Our  Cultural memory 

                     Our law of historical memory
                Selective memory 

                                Curating memory

·         Globalised memory

·         Marginalised memories

·         Memory and affect

·         Memory and anti-colonial struggle

·         Memory and class

·         Memory as gender/sexual politics

·         New technologies and memory

·         Racialised memory

·         Religion and cultural memory

·         Space, place and memory

·         Theoretical approaches to cultural and collective memory

 

                                 A MEMORY EXPERIMENT

Read through the following list of words just once. Do not study them, just read each to yourselves in 60 seconds:

water, life, dog, line, home, mouse

field, balls,rabbit, apple,sheep, head

bone, year, goat,Maharishi, hill, owl

oar, donkey, shape,crop, wind, pig

tool, cow, door, stone, flower, cat.

Now, find yourselves a pencil or a pen and write as many of the words as you can remember, in whatever order they come to you.

You are unlikely to have recalled the whole list of 30 words. You are more likely to have recalled: water, life, flower and cat than year and wind. The increased probability of recalling the first two or three items is called the primacy effect; and that of recalling the last few items is called the recency effect. The Von Restorff effect is the tendency to remember outstanding elements in a list: in our list above Maharishi. You might have also recalled the two words positioned on either side of Maharishi...

from Fast Forward 3 Classbook by Marion Geddes O.U.P.

Share your mnemonics ability. Guess what the following will refer to: CORMUNOAPONVI,HOMES; FANBOY,etc.. 

From the seven sins of memory by Daniel Schacter I´ve learned they are:The sin of transience,of absent-mindedness,of blocking,of misattribution, of suggestibility,of bias and of persistence...(They could be virtues after all to keep ourselves alive)

Double negative: Yes to No No

The double negative is considered substandard as it does not do" nothing" good for the English language. It is just a repetition of the negative for emphasis or when there is no intention of having the two negatives cancel each other out. Shakespeare used it quite often as it was common in Old English and Medieval English. George Orwell criticized the"not un..."habit in writers and journalists.


TRANSFORM THE TWO NEGATIVES INTO JUST ONE:

He cannot make friends with nobody

I haven´t never got the time to sit down any more

They didn´t have no apples

I never saw nobody

They didn´t know nothing

I hadn´t never been so tired

I could not travel nowhere

I am not going to buy no car

She didn´t have no motorbike

His clothing wouldn´t be no protection from the rain

 

Inspiration from Eats, Shites & Leaves by A. Parody


Be straightforward; say the following phrases in a more direct manner Avoid the typically English understatement : Litotes:

The thought of death will be not unwelcome. B. Russell
She is not unappealing.
not unstable
not unimportant
It´s not an unjustifiable assumption that
I´m not indifferent
leave no stone unturned
not unsurprisingly
not unemotionally
not untrue
not unlike

Let´s quote  George Orwell: " One can cure oneself of the "not un formation "by memorizing this:
A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field  .Politics and the English language . Collected Essays

   

A love / hate letter to a place you love/ hate

This is just a variation of the traditional letter to the person you admire most. Instead of addressing the message to a famous person we write to the city, town or village of our dreams.

 

My dearest village

 

I´ve been thinking long and hard before writing this letter...

I find it difficult to write down everything you have given me..

There´s so much I would like to say to you: you are the air that I breathe.

In fact, I cannot imagine my life without you: I´d never leave you as when I´m

away for just a few days or weeks I suffer from my peculiar town sickness:

 all my thoughts go back to you obsessively: This is the place of my dreams, heaven on earth, my oneiric promised land, where, once dead, I would like to periodically return to.

I have enjoyed the spring sunrises, the autumn sunsets, the sounds, the light, the smells of every single fiesta every month, the orange blossom, the almond blossom... Our scenery is constantly changing following the pattern of the seasons but there is one thing that remains constant:

my love for you.

I can still remember the very first time I came to this precious place, opened my eyes and was dazzled by the light at the Balcony, the bluest sea I had ever seen and the wild beauty of your twenty unspoilt beaches and coves... I believe  I´m the luckiest person in the world for living in this most wonderful place called .... NERJA.

Know that no matter how far I am, you will be in my heart wherever I go.

You are my inspiration in life and my dream paradise.

In short, I love you with all that I am, all that I was and all that I ever will be.

Yours forever

XXX

JMCC

 

Try to identify the cliches in the sentences above.

Write one composition along the same lines: My dear Paris; Madrid, my beloved city; Dearest New York; My darling Frigiliana; Dear Málaga;etc..

Try to recall the 20 coves or beaches mentioned in the text from Cantarriján to Calaceite.