Mr Heald’s Teaching Blog

If you’re looking for some inspiration for original writing, and want to see how the experts do it, this section of the Guardian website has a really interesting variety of writing in a range of styles, both poetry and prose.

It’s well worth a look, whatever your own level of writing.

More apologies

This time mainly to those Film Studies students who obligingly uploaded their work on Ei8ht to Frog. I’ve just been trying to mark the rest of it. I managed to download one, marked it, then couldn’t upload the marked version.

Now it seems I can’t access Frog at all at the moment, after a good while trying.

I understand we are going to upgrade to a new version of Frog after Christmas, which I hope will be more reliable. In the meantime, remember that email is very reliable and I usually manage to respond pretty quickly, so if you want to get stuff to me or to ask anything then email ajheald@gmail.com and I’ll be on to it asap.

I’ve upgraded all the Y12 Lang/Lit students to ‘writer’ status, so you should now see the ‘add page’ button.

Sorry for the confusion over that: it’s one of the issues that crops up when you’ve used a number of similar tools that behave in slightly different ways.

I’m glad to see that most of the Y12 Lang/Lit group have begun contributing to http://therivals.wetpaint.com.

However, the contributions have all been ‘threads’ so far, rather than edits to the wiki itself, so we’re not building up the archive of material I’m envisioning. I see no reason why we can’t make this the definitive online resource on The Rivals.

Take a look at this Kite Runner wiki for another idea of what we can work towards.

It’s another stupidly busy weekend (punctuated by the staff Christmas ‘do’ on Friday – a bit early for Christmas, but there you are) and I didn’t get round to putting anything on Frog as I’d said I hoped to for the Y12 Lang group.

However, since Catherine was missing on Friday she emailed to ask me about it and I reproduce a chunk of my email here for the benefit of any readers among the Lang group who might be looking in.

Remember you can get an RSS feed for this blog which will ensure you’re instantly updated with any new content, so if you’re reading this when it’s too late, let that be a lesson to you!

We ran through the groupings that people suggested and the key points I drew out of this were:

1. Groupings should really have more than two texts
2. The reason for the grouping should be linked to something significant about the nature of the text (eg. if you’re grouping them because they use 1st & 2nd person personal pronouns to establish a direct relationship with the audience, you should give some indication of why you think it was important for the texts to do that)
3. You should show that grouping is ‘problematic’, for example by showing that there are differences within the area of similarity that has led to the grouping (eg. in the pronoun example above, you might note that one of the texts shifts to third person for part of the text, while another uses first person plural, whereas the others use first person singular)
4. You should show awareness that some texts may fit into more than one of your groupings
5. You should try and use most of the texts (don’t leave more than a couple out)
6. You should address a range of frameworks, taking particular care to show knowledge of grammatical and pragmatic issues, as well as the more straightforward lexis and graphology.

Further to the analysis of Obama’s presidential election victory speech that some of use did the other week, the BBC have been doing the same.

Have a read here.

Ellie, from Y12 Film Studies, emailed to ask me about the editing term graphic match.

The term graphic match is used for shots where the content is different, but something about the two shots ‘matches’ visually.

Famous examples include the graphic matches between the moon and the eye in Un Chien Andalou, and between the bone and the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Un Chien Andalou – graphic match

2001: A Space Odyssey – graphic match

By now, if you’re in the AS Lang/Lit group, you should have received an invitation to sign up to the Wiki I’ve created for The Rivals. If you wish to use another email address rather than your school one, then that’s OK.

I’d like you to attach the malapropism newspaper articles to the appropriate page, please. If you don’t know how to that, then give me shout via email or on a comment here (all comments get emailed to me anyway, and if you comment here it may help anyone else who has the same or similar issues).

I’ve managed to edit out the clip you need, as a glorious DivX avi file that gives you the original aspect ratio of the film. You may need to download the DivX codec to view it (just google DivX and download and install the free codec if you find you can’t open the clip). I’ve also converted it to a WindowsMedia file just in case you can’t deal with the avi for some reason, but the WM file is horribly compressed, and squeezes the widescreen framing of the original into a much narrower frame.

My problems with Frog seem to have been resolved so I will put it on there (hopefully it will be there by the time you read this, but if not, please be patient: I’ll do it soon). If for some reason you have problems accessing Frog, please let me know and I’ll see if I can sort out an alternative. I’m also trying to upload some other resources including an excellent resource from the British Film Institute that tells you everything you need to know about Film Language using a short animated film to illustrate all the micro elements we need to look at.

More about that if I do manage to upload it. it’s a huge resource and I think I’m going to have to do it in school rather than via the internet from home.

I was really impressed with the interest my Year 8 class showed in thinking about the issues that our reading of Striped Pyjamas brought up today. Well done those of you who asked questions and contributed your knowledge and ideas. You’re so interesting to talk and listen to that I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever manage to finish reading the book!

Anyhow, the problem I had with adding assigning work to classes on Frog seems to have resolved, so you should find that work which should have been assigned in about week two is there now for you to have a look at over half-term.

Have a good break, Y8, and now the weather is growing colder and energy prices are going through the roof, always remember to “pu’ t’wood i’th ‘oil.”