A blog to help secondary school students improve English. You can find mind maps, worksheets, videos and songs as well as some of the project works and activities done by the students.
Hello! My name's Liliana. I'm a teacher of English (Language and Literature) to Italian teenage stu
After having seen a video on Wordsworth's biography and having read a text related to his life and his works, students are asked to close their books and figure out a possible interview to him.
This is the situation- one of the students plays the role of Wordsworth. He is introducing his new collection of poems Lyrical Ballads to a group of people.
His purpose is to give information about the book, while answering the questions asked by the other students.
That speaking activity has proved to be useful to memorize the main points of an author's biography and to improve speaking skills while asking questions.
Thinking over and over an activity that students in a fourth class could do at the beginning of the school year, both to revise some of the grammar structures studied in the previous years and to learn new words and expressions while improving their speaking skill, I've had an idea that has proved to be successful.
Students have been asked to make a conversation in groups of four, using modal verbs and the words that they have learnt, while watching a video on the plot of Romeo and Juliet.
The conversation was about the following situation: the character of the Nurse tries to persuade Juliet to marry Count Paris and she replies saying that she can't and giving her reasons.
While “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” matches
Wordsworth’s description of poetic process in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, he actually composed the poem some years after the success of that
anthology.
In 1802 he spent some time in the English Lake
District. On April 15 he and his sister Dorothy went for a walk near
Ullswater lake. In her journal, Dorothy recounts the experience of seeing the
daffodils:
When we were in the woods beyond
Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that
the lake had floated the seeds ashore & that the little colony had so
sprung up—But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last
under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along
the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils
so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested
their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest
tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with
the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing
ever changing. This wind blew directly over the Lake to them. There was here
& there a little knot & a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they
were so few as not to disturb the simplicity & unity & life of that one
busy highway—We rested again & again. (85)
Quando eravamo nei boschi oltre il parco di Gowbarrow abbiamo visto alcuni narcisi vicino al lato dell'acqua, abbiamo immaginato che il lago avesse fatto galleggiare i semi a riva e che la piccola colonia fosse così sorta —ma mentre procedevamo ce n'erano di più e ancora di più e alla fine sotto i rami degli alberi, abbiamo visto che ce n'era una lunga fascia lungo la riva, circa la larghezza di una strada a pedaggio di campagna.
Non ho mai visto narcisi così belli da crescere tra le pietre muschiose intorno e intorno a loro, alcuni appoggiavano la testa su queste pietre come su un cuscino per la stanchezza e gli altri si lanciavano, barcollavano, ballavano e sembravano davvero ridere con il vento che soffiava su di loro sul lago, sembravano così allegri che guardavano sempre e cambiavano.
Questo vento soffiava direttamente sul lago verso di loro. C'era qua e là un piccolo nodo e qualche ritardatario qualche metro più in alto, ma erano così pochi da non disturbare la semplicità, l'unità e la vita di quella trafficata autostrada—. Ci riposammo ancora e ancora. (85)
Group Performance Activity: "Bring the Daffodils to Life"
Objective
To interpret and perform the poem "Daffodils" in a theatrical and expressive manner that captures its imagery, emotions, and rhythm.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Weird stories
These are the stories created by students (level A 1/2) in a group activity. After each group, made of four students, was given two flashcards representing objects or people having no clear, logical connection, it was asked to make a very short, funny story.
These are the weird, unreal, fantastic, dreamlike stories created by them!
Of course,while reading them, they couldn't stop laughing!
One day a beautiful princess Julia was walking along a
river. Her dream was falling in love with a handsome, fantastic, good boy. That day the princess
wanted to get her feet wet into the river. Suddenly, a witch took a frog to make
an experiment, but the witch’s son killed the frog and for revenge the witch
transformed her son into a frog.The only way to be human again was to get a
magical kiss.
The princess was so depressed that she kissed the frog,
which changed into a prince, and they lived happily ever after……
In the afternoon, Federica comes back home, she goes in her
bedroom, switches on her lamp, opens her bedside table and finds a pair of
socks, which were a present from her grandmother for her birthday and starts to
remember all the best moments with her!!!
The mouse birthday
Once upon a time there was a family who had a mouse as a
pet. Today it’s his birthday andhis
family is making a cake for him, actually a cheese cake. After the celebrations, the mouse, called Tommy, tries to drink some tea but the tea is too hot
and he
falls off inside. After that, the family realizes he is dead!!!
One morning in spring, Tom wakes up and gets up. His mum
calls him for breakfast. Tom enters the kitchen and sits at the table. Tom takes
a cup of tea and under it he finds a
mouse and he starts screaming…he’s really scared.
One day I bought a bus ticket, but after that I realized I had
run out of money, so I decided to get some money from the bank. While I was
coming back to the bus station a stranger in a black coat hit me and our bags
fell off the ground, then we picked them up.
Only ten minutes later, I realized that we had exchanged our
bags and mine was full of money!
I want to leave my footprints on the sand of time Know there was something that, something that I left behind When I leave this world, I'll leave no regrets Leave something to remember, so they won't forget
I was here, I lived, I loved, I was here I did, I've done, everything that I wanted And it was more than I thought it would be I will leave my mark, soul, everyone will know, I was here
I wanna say I lived each day, until I died You know that I, been something in, somebody's life The hearts I have touched Will be the proof that I leave That I made a difference And this world will see
I was here, I lived, I loved, I was here I did, I've done, everything that I wanted And it was more than I thought it would be I will leave my mark so everyone will know
I was here, I lived, I loved, I was here I did, I've done, everything that I wanted And it was more than I thought it would be I will leave my mark so everyone will know, I was here
I just want them to know That I gave my all, did my best Brought someone some happiness Left this world a little better just because, I was here
I was here, I lived, I loved, I was here I did, I've done, everything that I wanted And it was more than I thought it would be I wanna leave my mark so everyone will know
I was here, I lived, I loved, I was here I did, I've done I was here, I lived, I loved, I was here I did, I've done, I was here
ELIOT⇨His poetic mission is to create a new symbolic system , based upon both significant fragments of the old and a fusion between western traditions with those of other cultures
⇓ a MODERNIST POET ↓ Why did he choose Modernism? ⇓
He justified his modernism as follows:
MODERN CIVILIZATION is characterized by COMPLEXITY→ What is the origin of that COMPLEXITY?
It is due to the fragmentation of the western cultural, mythological and religious tradition, caused by the process of
industrialization,
mass production
and consumerism
Modern man is alienated (he's empty morally and spiritually)
There is no longer a shared code of values
The poet must represent that complexity in language, as well. ⇊ Such representation leads to DIFFICULTPOETRY ↳ The poet must become " MORE ALLUSIVE", " MORE INDIRECT" to express that complexity ⇩ Unfortunately for the ordinary reader that means a kind of poetry characterized by OBSCURITY
He was an innovator.
He experimented a new kind of poetry
(innovator like Picasso, Joyce)
He didn’t like Romantic poetry with its cult of
the poetic personality ( the idea that poetry should be subjective)- Art isn’t
the result of the individual genius. Art
is created out of tradition. In TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT (1919)
He wrote ‘ no poet , no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead
poets and artists….’
He revalued the importance of tradition, since
past and present coexist and the past is an active part of the present
He also rejected the idea that poetry should just
deal with nature or natural elements.
He highlighted the importance of “unpoetic”
things and situations (e.g.coffee-spoons, an etherized patient)
The nature of modern society needs an OBJECTIVE and IMPERSONAL art.
Poetry should represent the complexities and fragmentation of
modern society. Our world is totally broken with no shared ethical beliefs, characterized
by a massive process of industrialization, whose main effects are mass
production and consumerism. Man himself is morally and spiritually DEAD.
The present is marked by futility and sterility (sense of emptiness, corruption,
lack of communication, meaninglessness of life, no shared moral values)
As a result, poetry will be complex as well. It
must not be “easy”, but difficult and intricate.
The poet’s task is to put together this broken
world by creating a new SYMBOLIC SYSTEM
He advocates the use of the MYTHICAL METHOD. In ULYSSES, ORDER AND MYTH(1923) he says
that Joyce was trying to find ‘ a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a
shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility, and anarchy which
is contemporary history…..instead of narrative method, we may now use the
mythical method’
He was under the influence of Imagism, whose leading artist EZRA POUND he greatly admired. For him
the new poetry needed a new poetic
language in order to convey a more fluid, uneven and less patterned kind of
reality. From Ezra Pound he took the idea of using clear , precise images,
using the minimum number of words
(In a Station of the Metro By Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.)
He takes significant fragments about the Western
past and he merges them with those of other cultures.
He juxtaposes past and present in the belief
that the present draws its substance from the living past
The past is marked by fertility-the mythical past is characterized by legends and myths
which contained a sense of moral and spiritual unity
He uses
a lot of association of images, religious allusions, references to literary
works, cultural sources, ancient rituals, mythical events, quotations
His images are fragmented and sometimes
repeated–they want to reproduce the chaos of modern civilization
Especially in the first phase he discarded all
traditional metres, using either free verse or a combination of different poetic
styles, rhythms and metres ( the ode, the quatrain, free verse….)
He claims the importance of the so-called OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE. He wrote that
‘the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
objective correlative, in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events, shall be the formula of that particular emotion…..’ ,in other words
his emotions should be represented through something- a landscape, a season, a particular mythical
figure, so that the reader may correlate it or them with particular emotions
THE WASTE LAND
Here he investigates the problem of human
condition and tries to find some meaning in life.
There’s no plot in this long poem. It’s not a
narrative poem.
It’s neither dramatic nor lyrical
There ‘s a sequence of images, apparently
unconnected, but linked to each other by the technique of association of ideas
Sources
The Golden
Bough by James Frazer. He provided
information about primitive myths and fertility rites and sacrificial rituals to grant the
continuing cycle of the seasons
The Bible, especially the death and resurrection
of Christ
The legend of the Arthurian fisher king and The
quest for the holy grail. In a kingdom called
the Waste Land, the ruler, the Fisher king, has been sexually maimed and, as a
consequence, the country lies under a terrible curse, all sources dry up and
the whole land becomes sterile. Water lacks everywhere. The curse can only be
lifted by the arrival of a stranger , who, however, must know the meaning of
the Grail symbols. The stranger arrives and starts on his quest for the Holy
Grail, but in the end he fails. Eliot considers our modern world as a Waste
Land as much as the Fisher king’s kingdom
Sanskrit writings
Elizabethan quotations
Metaphysical poetry, especially John Donne
The symbolists, especially
Baudelaire and Verlaine
Dante's Divina Commedia
Quotations from philosophy, religion, human
thought
THEMES
The meaningful link with the past. The past is
a mythical past and a historical past. The past often merges with the present
and makes it look even more squalid and lifeless
The emptiness and sterility of modern life
The sterility is natural, social and spiritual.
The land is dry, rocky, polluted, unfruitful
People find it difficult to communicate and are
unable to love
People no longer believe in religious values and in Christ
So only through rain, love and faith will our
modern waste land be saved and restored to fertility
A difficult poem -Why?
The lack of explicit links between the episodes
described
The language used
The presence of sentences and quotations from
other languages
The Burial of the Dead
The first part is
about the coming of spring in a sterile land.
The title is referred to a funeral
service in the Anglican rite called “The Order of the Burial of the Dead”.
We usually think of spring as
a time of love, re-birth and regeneration.
Here the poet refers to the starting lines of the General Prologue
taken from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where spring is seen as the start of a
new life.
However, in these lines the speaker says that instead
of spring being the best time of year, "Winter kept us warm, covering /
Earth in forgetful snow" (5-6). Existing is painful, so generating
new life is cruel. Winter is good, because it covers the
earth and keeps what is underneath warm.The verb “Covering” suggests the
concealment of truth. Therefore, winter is hidding the truth,
which is underneath. The speaker suggests that society doesn’t
want the truth to be revealed, people like winter.“ Mixing memory and
desire” suggests that even any act of remembrance and desire is seen as painful. The
juxtaposition of the nouns "Memory" and "desire" also makes
the reader understand an additional feature of Eliot's literature:
past("memory") and future(desire") co-exist together in one
dimension, along with the present.
This description of winter contradicts traditional
views about winter. Here it turns to be positive. It allows men to live in
peace and forgetful.
He uses some verbs in the ing form: “Breeding”
“Mixing” “Stirring” “Feeding”. They haveconnotations of growing and
birth, maybe a kind of rebirth of humanity.The words are hidden at the end
of the line suggesting there is hope for rebirth, but it is only hinted at the
ends of the lines.
The speakers are two.( I ,
we “ us” )
The second part is about the degradation of life in
the city. Here there are some references to time “ Under the
brown fog of a winter dawn”, “ a dead sound on the final stroke of 9” and some
references to place “ over London bridge, up the hill and down
King William Street ....Saint Mary Woolnoth”and to the inhabitants of
the city” A crowd, so many.....Sighs, short and infrequent, each man fixed
his eyes before his feet flowed up....” and other characters “One
I knew”.
“Unreal City" symbolizes London city, this is also an allusion
taken from Baudelaire’s poem in which this phrase refers to Paris
The speaker remembers watching a crowd flowing over
London Bridge like zombies, and says he "had not thought death had undone
so many" (Ch’io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta, Canto
3). Here, Eliot is definitely talking about the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno and
is comparing modern life to living in hell.
The people in this scene are also
sighing and staring (more Inferno allusions
from Canto 4) only at the ground in front of their feet. They seem completely
unsatisfied with their undead lives. The city is crowded but at
the same time, the people are isolated.
Those people are probably office
workers in the City. They are marked by the inability of communicating and
they live a situation of death within life. Death is everywhere and society is
destroyed, there is a reference to the First World War and to the
collapse of Europe that it brought.
Stetson is a character the speaker sees
by Saint Mary Woolnoth. He already knows him. They have probably fought
together in the First Punic War, which according to Eliot’s idea of history,
seems to reflect the recent past of the First World War. In other
words, the main idea is that all wars are equal because history is the
repetition of the same events.Stetson
may be a veteran of the Great War.
The speaker asks him if the "corpse [he] planted
last year in [his] garden" has begun to sprout"
Normally, we think of burying the dead in order to get
them out of sight. But this speaker is so weird that he thinks planting a body
in the ground is like planting a seed that's supposed to grow. The speaker then
gives Stetson some advice about keeping the dog and the frost away from
where the corpse is planted. What does it mean?
Here we can find a comparison between the modern
rituals of office workers with their daily “rituals” and ancient fertility
rites. In the past, images of the gods were buried in the ground or thrown into water to ensure the coming of a new spring. Here, the image refers both to the routine of gardening and to the new man that may be born from the death of the old one. Also, the idea of the sprouting corpse seems a grotesque parody of
Brooke’s image of the soldier being buried in a foreign country (in The
Soldier), where through his death he’ll help make England greater and
nobler.
The speaker also mentions a landmark street in London,
and notes how a church bell (of a real church—St Mary
Woolnoth) lets out a "dead sound on the final stroke of
nine" There the poet again associates religion and death.
The beginning of work in the City (final stroke of
nine), the beginning of work in the morning is bounded to death (a
dead sound of the final stroke), life in contemporary society is
similar to death according to the speaker.
In the final lines he's alluding to John
Webster's The White
Devil, which contains the same lines. However, the
word wolf is replaced by dog and the word foe by friend. The Dog is
written in capital letters because it may be the guardian of the dead, it
avoids re birth or coming back to life.
The Dog is the friend of men but
man tends to stop him before he digs: he is the friend
of men because he permits nature, a corpse, knowledge to surface but the
winter snow keeps men warm and they do not want it to be removed by the corpse,
tubers, knowledge.
His final words are from Fleurs du Malby Charles
Baudelaire, a poem published in 1857. The reader is called “mon
semblable,mon frere”…the reader shares the poet’s same destiny. In other
words, the speaker personally blames the reader, himself, and
almost everybody for what's happened.
Modern man is spiritually hollow and barren; he is just like a robot that follows the
pre-assigned tasks. He wakes up early in the morning, changes his dress,
has his breakfast, goes to office, …he follows the same routine.
Modern man lives in a Waste land, although he has gained progress in
science and materialistic culture, yet he has no values, he is spiritually
dead.
