Garbage Warrior

(Tipp von Jochen Lüders)

Charles Dickens 200 - congratulations!

It's Charles Dickens's 200th birthday today - he was one of the most successful and influential authors of the 19th century. The power of his stories and his characters is still visible today, for example from the sheer fact that so many films have been made of his novels. The most famous are probably these three:

• Oliver Twist
• David Copperfield
• Great Expectations

I can recommend all three of them.

Saving the Planet

Have a look at this little booklet of online links and information. Which of these items do you find most interesting and/or informative? Use the comments to voice your view.

If you want it bigger than in this embedded version below, go to there: Saving the Planet.

Mündliche Partner-/Gruppenprüfung

Here is the link I promised to post last time - it will take you to a PDF file at the site of the "ISB" (Staatsinstitut für Schulqualität und Bildungsforschung, München), which is responsible for developing most of the guidelines and test formats that we have to deal with. The file contains two pages, the first one of which gives you the rubric of criteria in combination with a description of what kind of performance earns you how many points; the second page is a form to be filled by the examiners during (and after) the exam.

Bewertungsraster Abiturprüfung: Mündliche Teilprüfung

Richard III., once more

Let's be fair ... let's give Richard a chance to say how it really was:

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18/Writing task

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18)
by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Task: Write a text beginning with "Shall I compare thee to ...", between six and twenty lines. It can be either a traditional poem or a modern one, it may even be prose. It can be a love poem, but doesn't have to be. If you are looking for a paraphrase of the sonnet in order to understand it better, you can look here: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/18detail.html

Cartoons

One of the tasks encountered in both 'Schulaufgaben' and the 'Abitur' exam is the analysis of a cartoon.

In order to get some practise, it is advisable to look at a couple of cartoons and describe and interpret them. You can find innumerable examples at Daryl Cagle's website. Cagle, a cartoonist himself, set up this very useful site that covers professional cartoons from newspapers all over the world, with special emphasis on US affairs and topics.

Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index