MFL

The Week before Christmas

No post today - I'm far too busy preparing for The Big Day next week. But I thought you might like this. Sort of puts it all into perspective, doesn't it? Why not show it to your kids?

iShuffle, therefore I am

Still seven books to go, but at least I have managed to produce a Christmas letter for the family tonight, as well as marking the other 14 books, taxi-ing my children to and from Brownies and Choir and worrying about tomorrow's lesson plans. I certainly seem to have to shuffle my multiple tasks around an  ever-decreasing amount of time. But so do we all in this busy profession of being a human and a teacher, so I shouldn't grumble.

Do you want to know how I got through it all today with a smile on my lips? No - no alcohol has passed those lips this evening, before you ask! It's all thanks to something called "Party Shuffle" on my computer. This little function built into iTunes (and its equivalent - Shuffle - on iPods and iPhones etc etc) constantly catches me out and amazes me with what it chooses to play from my music collection. Musically tonight I have travelled from 16th century London church choirs to 21st century Peruvian pan-pipes, indulging in Jeanne Mas, La Oreja de Van Gogh and Listos Book 1 on the way (and aren't the songs fabulously hummable in that book? No wonder my Year 9s love their Spanish lessons so much). As a much better Bard than I once said "If music be the food of love, play on. Let there be surfeit of it..." As long as you can shuffle it along with all your manifold jobs. Then they get done - happily!

Primary modern languages

I welcome the government's announcement today that there will be a "root and branch" overhaul of the primary school curriculum, particularly since it will enshrine the place of modern languages in those schools. It does seem to me to be more root than branch though. Whilst little children will greatly benefit from learning foreign languages and probably hugely enjoy doing so, if my 9 year old daughter's fascination with marking the French and Spanish books I bring home is anything to go by, what happens when she "branches out" or - to over-extend the metaphor - "blossoms" into secondary education? Will there be any secondary MFL teachers left to teach her? I do think the government shot itself in the foot when it removed obligatory foreign languages from the secondary curriculum, but it's surely good news for the primary children and primary foreign language teachers. Perhaps we should all re-train to work in primary schools? Or at least watch and see the good MFL practice in those schools? Certainly any primary lessons I have observed or taught in my time always seem heaps of fun. The children always are so enthusiastic at that age.

Just my two euros' worth...

Silent dreams

I had a dream last night, which I suddenly recalled with vivid clarity when one of the tenors singing behind me today started chattering during the prayers in the Catholic church where I found myself singing this morning.

It went like this:

I was on a course - in a monastery! Not being a monk, I sat down to the provided lunch in the refectory with lots of other non-monks, and desperately wanted to begin a conversation with the chap next to me, garrulous cove that I am. But I became aware of the ponderous silence echoing around the great hall where we were eating. There appeared to be a rule of silence during meals in this oneiric place.

Then the chap next to the chap next to me burst into song! I don't recall the words, but I do recall the Abbot leaning forward from his perch on High Table many miles away and saying "What IS that noise?"

I fled (as you can do in a dream) to the gents, and when I returned, I was astonished to find my table empty. All the other non-monks on the course were now washing floors, cleaning dishes, hanging up dirty cassocks - each person doing some sort of penance for having sat at the table where somebody made a noise, and broke the imposed silence with his song.

I still don't know what this dream means, if it means anything. Any comments from the Freudians out there? But I'm pretty sure that the trigger for it is the book I'm currently reading: The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco. It's a fabulous whodunnit set in a 13th? century Benedictine monastery, where - to put it mildly - the staff seem to have communication problems.

Clearly silence is as important as sound in my twisted mind. But I wonder if the quality of silence is as important as the quality of sound I strive for when I sing or speak a foreign language? Can/do the GCSE Examiners judge a candidate's answers by the type of pauses which sometimes seem to invade the tapes of Speaking Tests? I think we should oblige our candidates to pause, to take breath and to think before launching into their presentations, actually. I'm sure their nervousness would be reduced and their marks would improve if we did. As you can deduce, I've just been administering oral exams at school, as well.

Sleep well and don't have any nightmares...

Silence is golden

Fascinating! Thanks for that comment, Paul (see last post, below). I didn't know that silence is copywritable. It  just goes to prove right what my old choirmaster said when I was a teenager in his parish church choir, hoping to get a choral award to study at Oxbridge: "The most important bit in the music is the rest. It gives the congregation a chance to remember, reflect on and hopefully appreciate what they have just heard."

Last year as part of my postgraduate studies in Literary Theory at Oxford, I found out that an American don, Wolfgang Iser, said much the same thing when researching into novels and fiction: it seems that the novels we remember best are those where the author has left gaps or holes in the narrative to allow the reader's imagination to have a field day.

All of which has tremendous bearing, I think, on what we do in the classroom. Certainly the students pay more attention when I am not talking - in the gaps in my verbal output, I mean - and if they can manage to remain in silence throughout all the playthroughs  of Listening passages, and beyond, it seems the teacher can almost hear their minds whirring as they remember the last thing they heard and work out how to write it down.

How very postmodern and deconstructed this all is. Do you think that is why it is good practice to leave a blank line between paragraphs, as in this post, to allow the reader better to reflect on the content of the previous paragraph? What do you think, all you graphic designers out there?