MFL

Monet, Monet, Monet...

£40.9 million, to be precise. That's what Monet's 'Le Bassin aux Nympheas' just sold for at Christie's - a record for the artist's work.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was born on the fifth floor of 45 Rue Laffitte, Paris. A year later, Claude's mum went into labour in the lift, and his brother Zoot was born on the second, third and fourth floors. Claude's dad was a greengrocer and his mum was a singer, who would lull the boys to sleep with "Oui, nous n'avons pas de bananes" and "J'ai un luverly bunch de noix de coco." The Monets moved to Le Harvre, Upper Normandy in 1845.

When Claude was 16, he met the painter Eugène Boudin on the beach at Le Harvre. Boudin picked up his hat, returned Claude's frisbee and explained that he was painting "en plein air" - outdoors! Apparently, before the invention of toothpaste-tube-style oil paint around this time, everyone painted indoors (painters had to mix their own paint with linseed oil and pigment powder, which would blow everywhere if you tried to mix it outdoors. So why didn't they mix it indoors and then run outside with it and paint really quickly? I dunno, ask them). Boudin explained other techniques for outdoor painting to young Claude, such as wrapping up warm, taking a thermos and some sandwiches, and practising saying "Oh really, it's nothing" for when people come and look.

Claude took to plein-air painting like an impressionist to lilies, and was soon to be seen out-and-about with his hi-tech French Easel (Easel, incidentally, comes fro the German 'Esel' (donkey) because it carries things, or possibly because it squeaks). In 1861, Claude was sent to Algeria for a seven-year tour with the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry. He found the landscape uninspiring and produced only three canvasses (all lost): "Sand dunes with distant sand", "The same sand dunes later that day" and "Anyone know where I can find some lilies?" When Claude contracted typhoid, his auntie Marie-Jeanne Lecadre offered to get him out of the army, on condition he study art at university and learn to paint properly. Indoors. There's more Monet trivia here.

My father is tramp...he work at the beware.

This was received by a British schoolgirl from her French penfriend, who'd obviously been using a dictionary.... I think she probably meant, "my father is a platelayer, he works at the station". On balance, I prefer the 'tramp' version.

Learning languages should be fun. We British are easily discouraged by our undeserved national reputation for being bad at languages. If you should find your pupils discouraged at any point, or just for the sheer fun of it, it's useful to have ready a selection of some of the English howlers made by Johnny Foreigner...

Sign in a travel agents in Barcelona: Go Away!

Sign in a French swimming pool: Swimming forbidden in the absence of a saviour.

In a Paris hotel elevator: Please leave your values at the front desk.

From a restaurant in France: A sports jacket may be worn to dinner, but no trousers.

On the menu of a French restaurant: - egg - an extract of fowl, peached or sunside up.

Two signs from a Majorcan shop entrance:
- English well talking.
- Here speeching American.

In a Copenhagen airline ticket office: We take your bags and send them in all directions.

In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.

On the menu of a Swiss restaurant: Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.

In an Austrian hotel catering to skiers: Not to perambulate the corridors in the hours of repose in the boots of ascension.

On the menu of a Polish hotel: Salad a firm's own make; limpid red beet soup with cheesy dumplings in the form of a finger; roasted duck let loose; beef rashers beaten up in the country people's fashion.

In a Bucharest hotel lobby: The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.

In a Rome laundry: Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time.

In a Balkan hotel: The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid.

From a restaurant in Vienna: Fried milk, children sandwiches, roast cattle and boiled sheep.

Find more howlers here.
If you have any of your own, please share them!

Factoids II - Calais

Every year, hundreds of thousands of devout English make a spiritual pilgrimage to Calais. They usually return on the same day, with much fuller cars. The first, and greatest booze cruise, which lasted 116 years, was made in 1346 by Edward III. It took Edward 11 months to get into Calais (it's much quicker now) and when he finally did get in, he was in a really bad mood. Edward's first inclination was to massacre all the inhabitants, but after some deep-breathing exercises he'd learnt on his anger-management course, he decided to kill just six prominent citizens. The six Burghers of Calais bravely stepped forward, nooses round their necks (you can see Rodin's sculpture of them in the main square.) Fortunately for the Burghers, Good Queen Philippa persuaded hubby Ed to be lenient, and suggested they both just do a bit of shopping and find somewhere nice to eat instead.

The French don't have a word for double-entendre. Well, they do, sort of, but it's not double-entendre. Several years after the business with the Burghers, Edward threw a ball in Calais. The extremely attractive Joan of Kent was there, and during a particularly energetic Pavane, her garter slipped down to her ankle. After a few moments of shocked silence, several guests began to giggle in a distinctly smutty way. Gallant Edward stepped forward, slipped the garter back up Joan's leg and said "Honi soit qui mal y pense" (roughly, "You lot have got dirty minds"). After the ball, Joan asked Edward for a double-entendre, so he gave her one.

The Pas-de-Calais region is now mercifully free from innuendo. Composer Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911) was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer and died of exhaustion after years of playing on his organ. Also born in Boulogne were the actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin (1841-1909) who was famous for his outstanding Hamlet, and engineer Frédéric Sauvage (1786-1857) inventor of the first propellor, which had an enormous shaft. The city of Douai, meanwhile was the birthplace of sculptor Jean Boulogne (1529-1608) who was very skilled with his tool, and politician Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802) who  stood as an independent and lost his deposit. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Discover more Calais factoids here.

SALUTON - ĜIS

Many thanks to the Esperantists who commented on last week's Esperanto blog, especially for the links to esperanto.org, esperanto.net and to a film (which includes brief excerpts from Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' and William Shatner's 'Incubus'.)

Learning languages should be fun, and students learn and remember more efficiently when lessons are fun. To this end, here is a Romantic Drama in Esperanto, wot I wrote.

SALUTON - ĜIS (Hello-Goodbye)

Boy: Saluton (Hello)
Girl: Bonan tagon (Good day)
B: Kiel vi nomiĝas? (What is your name?)
G: Mi ne komprenas. (I don't understand)
B: Kiel vi fartas? (How are you?)
G: Ĉu vi parolas la anglan? (Do you speak English?)
B: Kie estas la necesejo? (Where is the toilet?)
G: Ĉu estas iu ĉi tie, kiu parolas la anglan? (Is there someone here who speaks English?)
B: Kie ĉi tiu aŭtobuso iras? (Where does this bus go?)
G: Helpon!  (Help!)

(pauzo)

B: Ĉu mi rajtas uzi vian telefonon? (Can I use your phone?)
G: Lasu min. (Leave me alone.)
B: Ĉu vi ŝatus vidi la urbon? (Would you like to see the city?)
G: Ne tuŝu min! (Don't touch me!)
B: Mi ŝoferos vin tien. (I will drive you there.)
G: Mi telefonos la policejon. (I'll call the police.)
B: Nvolu alporti alian bovlon da rizoj. (Could you bring me another bowl of rice?)
G: Policon! (Police!)    

KURTENO                         

Factoids

No teacher should be without factoids. Factoids are the stuff of life and, more importantly, can be deployed in the classroom at a moment's notice to quell murmurings, wrongfoot the opposition and buy time. Here, for the benefit of French teachers, are some essential factoids about Paris.

Paris' Latin motto is "Fluctuat nec mergitur", which means "Tossed by the waves, she does not sink." This seems a pretty safe bet for a city 184 miles from the nearest sea. Unless, of course, the author of the motto was the 16th century French sage and clairvoyant Nostradamus, who knew something we don't about global warming.

France's patron Saint Denis was beheaded on Martyrs' Hill - Montmartre. Being a Saint, he then picked up his head and walked for two miles, preaching a sermon all the way. Some vicars just don't know when to stop. Denis' headless walk posed a problem for medieval artists. Some had Denis carry his halo in his free hand, while others put the halo where his head used to be. Neither solution looked very dignified. After the Black Death in 1348, the church set up The Fourteen Holy Helpers, a spiritual A-Team for times of plague. Each saint could be appealed to for a different ailment. Appropriately, or in rather poor taste, depending on your point of view, Denis got 'headaches.'

The Basilica of Saint Denis was founded on the spot where Denis finally shut up and dropped down dead. It became the burial site of almost all the French monarchs, including Pippin the Fearsome,  Charles the Bald, Louis VII and Catherine de Medici. During the Revolution, all the royal tombs were opened and the bones were thrown higgledy-piggledy into a nearby pit. In 1815,  France decided to try monarchy again and the poor kings (and queens) were dug up again. However, due to the higgledy-piggledy nature of their second burial, the bones couldn't be identified.

The new king Louis XVIII was anxious not to create a Pippin VII or a Catherine the Bald, for fear it would bring the Monarchy into disrepute, so it was decided to re-bury all the remains, still higgledy-piggledy in the St Denis Basilica. They're still there today, still mixed-up, and finally enjoying some P & Q.

You can find more Parisian trivia here.

Jeux de rôle ou drôles de jeux?

Hello everyone. I'm back! Sorry for my long absence - I've been working through my midlife crisis and the stress of teaching, report writing etc. etc, and I have been really helped through it all by reading Richard's excellent posts, particularly on the use of humour in class and using strange languages. Just this morning though, I was given the chance to stand in for one of my English colleagues and "do something fun and creative" with 18 boys who have not gone on the Year's Geography trip today. Stimulated by this challenge, I trawled my knowledge of drama techniques in language lessons, and came up with the following document: Jeux_de rôle_ou_Drôles_de_Jeux?.pdf

We had brilliant fun in class doing this exercise; the boys became really creative, and my only regret was that we didn't have time to set their performances to music. But I heartily recommend using drama techniques like these in languages lessons, if only to raise the teacher's spirits! Music + humour + drama = a recipe for fun and successful lessons, I think.

Men such as me know no fear!

Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?

Do you speak Esperanto? I don't, but a 1996 survey estimated that between 100,000 and 2 million people speak it fluently. It was further estimated that between 200 and 2000 people worldwide speak Esperanto as their "native" language (though "native" here is problematic, because Esperanto is not indigenous to anywhere, so the 200-2,000 "native" speakers are probably just the unfortunate offspring of pushy linguist parents!)

Esperanto is a "constructed international auxiliary language" and was invented in 1887 by the Polish eye specialist Dr Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof. Zamenhof wrote under the pseudonym Doktor Esperanto, which means "the doctor who hopes," and the hope was that the nations of the world could banish misunderstandings and strife if they all spoke the same language. A utopian dream indeed.

Several idealogue leaders have initially espoused Esperanto, only to drop it when they realised the implications of universal understanding. The fledgeling Soviet Union approved a Soviet Esperanto Association until 1937, when Stalin denounced Esperanto as "the language of spies" and had Esperantists executed. The use of Esperanto remained illegal in the USSR until 1956.

In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini urged Muslims to learn Esperanto to promote understanding between the faiths. He then discovered in 1981 that the followers of the Bahá'í Faith had had the same idea, and banned the language. Oh, make your mind up!

On a lighter note, William Shatner spoke Esperanto in the 1965 horror B-movie 'Incubus,'  whilst in 1967, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa briefly established the world's first Esperanto-speaking nation. He built a 400m² oil-rig-style platform eleven miles off Rimini in the Adriatic Sea and declared the autonomous republic of Rose Island. Rosa was to be President and the language, Esperanto. The Italian government responded by hiring a small boat and sending two policemen and a tax inspector.

There's a very good overview and introduction to Esperanto in Wikipedia which contains some useful everyday phrases:
"o falis el la sranko" (something fell out of the cupboard)
" Homoj tiaj kiel mi ne konadas timon" (Men such as me know no fear!)

Later on, there is what appears to be a dialogue from a romantic drama:
A: Estas bela tago (It is a nice day)
B: Mi amas vin (I love you)
A: Ĝis (Goodbye)
B: Unu bieron, mi petas (One beer, please)

Find out more at The Esperanto Association of Britain (Esperanto-Asocio de Britio)

Pimp My Thesis

I replied to an online small ad the other day, which read:
"Proofreader Wanted for Student Essay"
Why not, I thought. As long as it's broadly Arts, I should be ok. The student emailed back:
"Dear Richard
Thank you for replying. The essay I want you to write can be on any topic relating to Business
thank you
S"

I began to reply that Business wasn't really my subject and that I still had trouble understanding the remortgaging rules in Monopoly... and then the penny dropped. S didn't want me to proofread anything, he wanted me to write an essay which he'd then pass off as his own. I was shocked. I was morally outraged. I bade him good day.

Now, call me naïve (thanks, I needed that,) but I hadn't realised that this-sort-of-thing is not only common today, it's an industry. A recent BBC report  revealed that, for essay-factories such as UKEssays.com, it's a boom industry. The report also revealed the unseemly slanging-match (sorry, 'lively debate') taking place between the commercial essay-writers and UK universities, which can be summarised as follows:

UK university:    You, Sir, are a scoundrel, and are fuelling plagiarism with your immoral, profit-driven...
Essay writer:     PROFIT-DRIVEN??? You're a fine one to talk! I know you get £5k more for taking a foreign student over a UK student, so you take any old dross, irrespective of whether they can even SPEAK English...
UKU:     I'll have you know, Sir, all our foreign students have passed their IELTS exam!
EW:      Duh! They pay someone to sit the exam for them. Wakey, wakey!
UKU:     Stuff and nonsense! Anyway, the fact remains, Sir, that your meretricious activities are fuelling plagiarism!
EW:      Not guilty, squire. All I do is provide a MODEL essay, which students may find helpful.
UKU:     Helpful? I'll say they do... etc etc

Edifying, isn't it? What can be done? Now, call me old-fashioned (thanks, I needed that,) you could always make students sit in front of a question-paper armed only with a pen and paper... Nah, it'd never work.

And remember, if any of you is tempted to copy any of this blog, you'll only be cheating yourselves.

League tables, damned league tables and statistics

It's official: School League tables "do not aid choice." Statisticians from the University of Bristol claim, in a BBC report today, that 78% of league tables are 67% unreliable as indicators of 54% of schools' future performance. Apparently, "less (sic) than 5% of secondary schools could be separated from the average or each other." Uh?

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) publishes data about the performance of England's schools each year. The data involves both "raw scores" (RS) of pupils' results and "contextual value added" (CVA) scores which take into account other factors known to affect them such as pupil ethnicity and poverty. For a parent, the relevant question is whether any particular school can be expected to produce better achievements for their child than any other. "In this context," according to the Bristol University statisticians (BUS) " the information involved in the contextual value added tables (CVATs) should not be taken into account (NBTIA)" Oh, why didn't you just say so?

Now, I have always turned to the BBC as a source of reliable and cogent reporting, but then again, this report appeared on the same day on which they deemed Jonathan Ross to be worth £18m of licence payers' money. I began to have my doubts, and decided to consult DCSF's own website.

Ah, sanity!
"In January 2004, Ministers signalled their intention that a more sophisticated value added methology (MSVAM) be used"  (nice subjunctive.) DCSF have now "developed the CVA measure, which adjusts predicted achievement (PA) to take account of not only prior attainment (also PA,) but also a range of other factors (ROOF) observed to impact on performance which are outside a school's control (OASC.)" Thought so.

Furthermore, "The Learning and Skills Council has been developing subject and qualification value added measures (SQVAMs) as part of its Learner Achievement Tracker (LAT). The LAT also remains in pilot phase and will be formally released with the Department's Post-16 CVA measure."

Oh good. That's cleared that up (OGTCTU)

Adventure Rock reveals pupil archetypes

The BBC PC game Adventure Rock is aimed at 6-12 year-olds.. The BBC commissioned a study of children's behaviour in this virtual world from Professor David Gauntlett and Lizzie Jackson of the University of Westminster. Prof Gauntlett said online worlds were "very useful rehearsal spaces," where children could "try all kinds of things largely free of the consequences that would follow if they tried them in the real world."

The researchers identified 8 archetypal roles which their study group adopted during play:

1. Explorer-investigators
2. Self-stampers
3. Social climbers
4. Fighters
5. Collector consumers
6. Power users
7. Nurturers
8. Life system builders

Do teachers recognise any of these archetypes from the classroom?

1. "Miss, that man who picks you up from school, is he your boyfriend?"
2. "Sir, I just stamped on my foot!"
3. "Your boyfriend's really good-looking, Miss."
4. "Sir, he laughed at me so I stamped on his foot too."
5. "Sir, do you want to see my bottle-tops?"
6. "I'll tell everyone he's your boyfriend, Miss."
7. "He cried when I stamped on his foot, Sir, so I gave him some of my bottle-tops."
8. "Are you and your boyfriend going to have babies, Miss?"

In another report, teachers are advised against using social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook. The reason is obvious. Your pupils will ridicule you when they discover you like Shania Twain and have fewer than 700 friends.