Schoolmaster’s Blog

Poetry in the EFL classroom can be an awkward thing.

Since poetry usually is a very intimate, personal matter, it is not always easy to find texts that appeal to the complete class or course. This one might be helpful: Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology”. The idea is interesting: all the poems are epitaphs on tombstones in a fictional midwestern town - Spoon River. In more than 300 pages a whole panorama of life stories and social connections is unfolded. This provides not only for good reading but also for interesting ideas for the classroom: you can ask the students to reconstruct biographies, invent dialogues between the characters, write letters and so forth. A lot o things can come to your mind…

The book’s language sometimes is a bit dated, but it is not too demanding. Intermediate students should be able to deal with it.

Enjoy!

The background music - as always taken from podsafeaudio.com - is from an artist named Tyler Riggs.The song appropriately is called “Purgatory” .

Spoon River Anthology

Once again I’ve been experimenting with software, this time I used a trial version of Podcast Station

Looks like a great piece of software. the only drawback: it costs 60$… Let#s see.

Long time no see - sorry. Nonetheless, here we are again with another book recommendation. Roald Dahl certainly is no new author in the EFL classroom. I’m not quite sure, however, whether my personal favourite is standard here

Dahl wrote some autobiographical texts, notably “Boy - Tales of Childhood” and “Going solo”. “Boy” deals with his childhood in Wales, England and Norway in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Dahl went through a number of public schools in that time. His memories really are bittersweet, poignant, funny. They are good reading - certainly suitable for students at intermediate levels. You can link those texts to a number of topics: childhood, education, school, corporal punishment etc. Since most of the chapters are stories within themselves, you can use single chapters in the classroom, there’s no need to deal with the complete book - although it’s certainly worthwile.

I chose a chapter from a whole sequence of stories - it deals with “The great Mouse Plot”:

Bookblog #6 - Roald Dahl “Boy”

Enjoy!

The music you hear is from a band “Deadpan”, the song’s title quite obviously is “Boy“. The link will lead you to the song and its lyrics.
A short technical remark: The recording might not be quite perfect (actually - it is far from being perfect ). I’m experimenting with new equipment: a USB-microfone (Samson C01U) and new software: Castblaster. It’ll still take some time to get adjusted to all this…