Friday, 28 July 2023

smartphones in the english language classroom

The news this week is that smartphones are bad for students:

Should smartphones be allowed in classrooms? A new report from UNESCO, the education arm of the United Nations, raises questions about the practice. Though smartphones can be used for educational purposes, the report says the devices also disrupt classroom learning, expose students to cyberbullying and can compromise students’ privacy.

About 1 in 7 countries globally, such as the Netherlands and France, have banned the use of smartphones in school – and academic performance improved as a result, particularly for low-performing students, the report notes.

As school leaders in the U.S. wrestle with whether or not to ban smartphones, The Conversation has invited four scholars to weigh in on the issue.

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Do smartphones belong in classrooms? Four scholars weigh in

But they seem to be very much part of the classroom when teaching English:

The results from the study show that smartphones do have the potential to improve teaching and learning of English amongst the teachers and students in different educational levels.

(PDF) THE POTENTIAL OF USING SMARTPHONES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

And there are some very practical ways ahead:

Here are ten tips on how to constructively allow the use of smartphones in class. Some of the exercises are just variations on traditional classroom activities. However, encouraging students to use smartphones to complete these activities will help them learn to use their devices to actively improve their English skills. Finally, it's important to insist that smartphone or tablet use in the classroom is approved only as a tool during a specific activity. In this way, they may not be tempted to use their smartphones for other reasons during class.
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10 Ways to Use Smartphones to Teach English

Mobile phones in the classroom have always been a controversial topic. Some teachers worry about the potential for student distraction, while others have decided to use them because they offer some positive learning benefits. The reality is that students, especially those ages 12-18, use smartphones on a daily basis. For most, smartphones are their device of choice, and nearly all 95% of all teens have them (Pew Research, 2018). Because this device is so commonplace, it makes sense to leverage its benefits.
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Using Smartphones in the Classroom - HuddleCamHD

The first step to using smartphones in your classroom is to rethink how you approach smartphones in a learning environment. Rather than fighting against smartphones for the attention of your students (a fight which you will lose) consider embracing the smartphone as a learning tool.

Using Smartphones in the Classroom: A Guide for Teachers

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Wednesday, 26 July 2023

would you eat people....

The science fiction film 'Soylent Green'...

This story is part of The Hollywood Reporter’s 2023 Sustainability Issue (click here to read more).In 1970, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day. One of the more alarming predictions that day was from Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foresaw a future in which “population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” resulting in the starvation death of hundreds of millions.Hollywood took notice and released a string of eco-disaster films in the years to follow.

Soylent Green Food Twist: A Planet With Too Many People, a Dark Secret – The Hollywood Reporter

By 2022,[3] the cumulative effects of overpopulation and pollution have caused ecocide, leading to severe worldwide shortages of food, water, and housing.[4] New York City has a population of 40 million, and only the elite can afford spacious apartments, clean water, and natural food. The homes of the elite are fortified, with security systems and bodyguards for their tenants. Usually, they include concubines (who are referred to—and used as—"furniture"). The poor live in squalor, haul water from communal spigots, and eat highly processed wafers: Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the latest product, far more flavorful and nutritious, Soylent Green.

Soylent Green - Wikipedia

Soylent Green (1973) Official Trailer - Charlton Heston, Edward G Robinson Movie HD - YouTube

The new documentary 'The British Meat Miracle'...

Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat - Final Trailer - YouTube

Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat begins in the usual way – with me reaching for the volume button, checking the running time (only half an hour – hurrah!) and wondering, yet again, why this man is shouting at me. This time it is about “THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS! NOW IT COSTS A PACKET JUST TO BRING HOME THE BACON! AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON EGGS!”

Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat review – this look at eating human flesh is a total curveball | Television | The Guardian

There is only one solution to the plethora of cookery programmes cluttering up the TV schedules, and that’s to eat Gregg Wallace

Wednesday, 19 July 2023

trump and trumpery

From the Mirriam-Webster dictionary:

trumpery
a: worthless nonsense
b: trivial or useless articles : JUNK

Trumpery Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

Here's the origin - and a graph which shows we're using it much more these days:

trumpery | Etymology, origin and meaning of trumpery by etymonline

And from the Urban dictionary:

Trumpery (noun): the use of outright lies, political smeers, bait and switch tactics, demagoguery, deflection, namecalling, political shell games, blameshifting, threats, fearmongering and any side show-con man methods to try to shield oneself from prosecution as a traitor, criminal, liar, fool, madman, and/or imbecile.
All the Trumpery coming from the White House is a threat to our democracy.
by Old Man On The Mountain May 13, 2017

Urban Dictionary: Trumpery

And so the words 'trumpery' and 'Trump' have come together:

Overcoming Trumpery | Brookings

Lexicographer Susie Dent looks at the language a little further:

Struggling to find the word to describe Donald Trump this week? The historical dictionary can help

In 1888 ‘trumpery’ was already well understood as a byword for something that may be extremely showy, but is also pretty worthless

In a glossary of words local to the West Country, “trumpery” is defined as “rubbish of any kind; weeds or any undesirable growth”. Lest we assume the word takes its inspiration from a certain US ex-President, who this week was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, the glossary was compiled in 1888, when “trumpery” was already well understood as a byword for something that may be extremely showy, but is also pretty worthless. It is a useful description perhaps for the state of a man who faces yet more legal troubles down the road but who continues to strut the political stage to the sound of ecstatic applause from supporters who are doubling down rather than backing away.
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If the current turbulence – even in already choppy waters – teaches us anything, it’s that Donald Trump’s base is resolutely immovable. Those who love Trump, love Trump, and nothing that their figurehead says or does is going to change that. While many of us struggle to fathom such arguably blind and bottomless loyalty, a historical dictionary will tell us that it is far from new, and that there is consequently a richness of words to describe it.
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Sequacity is a good place to start. In the 17th century, this described readiness to follow someone no matter what, without any independence of thought or judgement. Founded upon the Latin sequi, to follow, it is a sibling of “obsequious”, which immediately introduces the notion that many followers of a cause or individual are simply fawning flatterers, who may eventually look the other way should it suit them.

Friday, 14 July 2023

7 years on: why did people vote brexit?

Brexit happened seven years ago - and there have been different ways to look at it:

Brexit referendum seven years on: Where are we now? | Politics | News | Express.co.uk

Brexit’s 7 biggest headaches, 7 years on from EU referendum | The Independent

Although a lot of people aren't interested:

Seven years on, only one in three Britons can recall the EU referendum result | YouGov

Looking back what were the reasons for the vote?

Jay Doubleyou: brexit, britain and turkey

Jay Doubleyou: brexit: experts, elites and hedgefund managers

Jay Doubleyou: middle england: the heart of brexit britain

Jay Doubleyou: brexit: "the majority of leave voters were middle class. most lived in the south of england."

Jay Doubleyou: brexit and the culture wars

Jay Doubleyou: brexit from very different perspectives

The BBC asked people just after the vote:

BBC Radio 4 - The Briefing Room, Why Did People Vote Leave?

Maybe it had a lot to do with the decades before:

Tabloid Tales: How the British Tabloid Press Shaped the Brexit Vote - Simpson - 2023 - JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies - Wiley Online Library

The three classic British sitcoms that forecast Brexit

Britain and Europe Before Brexit: A Complicated Relationship | Time

Here are some extracts from a recent piece in the New European by David Kynaston:

Birth of a catastrophe: How the seeds of Brexit were sown in the 1960s

One of Britain’s leading historians explains how the roots of the decision taken seven years ago were laid decades before that

Were the 1960s, that most mythologised of all decades, when it all began to go wrong? I believe one can make a plausible case that that was when the long, slow-burning fuse was lit for half a century later.

We must start with de-industrialisation. Although the great step-change would come in the traumatic early 1980s, as Britain lost one-quarter of its manufacturing capacity in just two years, even in the 60s the direction of travel was unmistakable. At the start of the decade, employment was roughly equal between manufacturing and services, but by the end it had tipped decisively towards the latter, a change neatly symbolised by the moment the number of hairdressers passed the 100,000 mark.

Textiles, coalmining, shipbuilding, steel: all of Britain’s staple industries were in significant decline, as were the railways. This decline inevitably triggered the erosion of a working-class way of life, deeply in tune with industrial rhythms that had been established in the late 19th century and had come to seem permanent...

No one has written more powerfully about the social and psychic impact of de-industrialisation than Jeremy Seabrook, who on the very day that Britain voted to leave published in the New Statesman a characteristically impassioned piece about the death of the industrial way of life. “The ravages of drugs and alcohol and self-harm in silent former pit villages and derelict factory towns,” he observed, “show convergence with other ruined cultures elsewhere in the world.”

Almost all of this still lay ahead at the end of the 60s, but the left-behind signs were starting to become clear. And given that in some distinct ways Brexit has been a very male – even alpha-male – phenomenon, it is relevant that the 60s themselves saw, more markedly than in either the 1950s or 1970s, a growing proportion of women in the British labour force, once such a masculine preserve. And soon, unimaginable not long before, they would even be entitled to equal pay.

As with de-industrialisation, so too with that pet hate of the Brexiteers, “globalisation”. Although it did not become a recognised phenomenon as such until the 1990s, and although exchange controls were still firmly in place, there were indications during the 60s of the way things were going. Not only was foreign ownership of British companies increasingly prevalent, epitomised by Nestlé taking over Crosse & Blackwell as early as 1960, but these years saw the rapid flourishing of international finance centred on the City of London. This led to the rise of what became known as the Euromarkets, which involved a dominant role for American banks and in effect represented stage 1 of the internationalisation of the City, to be followed two decades later by the much more publicised stage 2, the Thatcher-era deregulation known as “Big Bang”. The Square Mile was becoming ever more adrift from the UK economy...

In short, taking these examples as a whole, we are talking about culture wars; and this was the decade when the battle-lines were drawn, often a long way from swinging London.

To end with the story a friend once told me… It was 1969, a Sunday evening in Goole (a town about 30 miles inland from Hull), and he had taken his girlfriend to the pub – where the barman refused to serve them. Their crime? She was wearing trousers. Carnaby Street and the King’s Road may have been at their fashionable height, the Rolling Stones may have been playing at Hyde Park, but Goole was still Goole.

Over the ensuing half-century, the forces of social conservatism would enjoy two defining moments in the sun. The first came in 1979, as Margaret Thatcher was swept to power not, in my opinion, because of her free-market views, but instead because many believed (on the whole mistakenly, as it turned out) that she was the person to turn the clock back to a Britain, above all an England, as it had been before the 60s; and of course the second came in June 2016, when incidentally the Leave vote was higher in Goole than almost anywhere else. “Nostalgia for the past” was the instinct to which the EU’s Michel Barnier would attribute the Leave vote. To a large extent he was right.

Birth of a catastrophe: How the seeds of Brexit were sown in the 1960s - The New European

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Tuesday, 11 July 2023

are schools in england teaching second languages?

The Brits don't learn 'foreign languages' - even though they've got a lot of 'foreigners' in the UK:

Jay Doubleyou: global britain: seeing the languages of immigrants as an asset to be nurtured

It hasn't been made easy with Brexit - as there are not enough the sort of 'foreigners' who teach languages in schools:

Jay Doubleyou: the uk's critical shortage of foreign language teachers

It's not getting any better:

Language learning is still in decline in England's schools | British Council

Learning another language is not compulsory in England:

According to government guidelines, it is not compulsory for you to study a foreign language at GCSE (or in Scotland). However, in Wales, while you do not have to study a foreign language it is compulsory for you to study both English and Welsh as a part of your GCSEs.
Some schools (especially private schools) may choose to make studying a language at GCSE compulsory for their students. Doing a language at GCSE can be great for your personal and professional growth as it can teach you a number of skills that you can use later on in life.

Do You Have to do a Language at GCSE? - Think Student

There are many who think it should become a must in schools:

Learning foreign languages should be compulsory, says report | Languages | The Guardian

Here are the latest trends from the British Council:

Headline findings 

The headline findings for 2023 include: 

• Almost nine out of ten responding primary schools have some pupils for whom English is an Additional Language (EAL). 

• The 2023 data reflect a positive increase in the number of primary schools in contact with secondary schools concerning language education. 

• French remains the most popular language at Key Stage 3, followed closely by Spanish in both state and independent sectors. 

• German is the third most popular curricular language, but entries are much higher in the independent sector. 

• For the fourth year running, Spanish continues to have the highest number of A-level entries. 

• Schools’ international engagement is improving since the Covid-19 pandemic. 

• Further study is required to observe how parents’/carers’ attitudes to languages can affect pupils’ desire to study a language.

language_trends_england_2023.pdf

With more here:

News in Numbers: Which languages are most popular in English schools? - E L Gazette

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Monday, 10 July 2023

rhyme rhythm repeat: the cumulative song or tale: "this is the house that jack built"

A cumulative song is a song with a simple verse structure modified by progressive addition so that each verse is longer than the verse before. Cumulative songs are popular for group singing, in part because they require relatively little memorization of lyrics, and because remembering the previous verse to concatenate it to form the current verse can become a kind of game.

Cumulative song - Wikipedia

"The feather on the wing, and the wing on the bird, and the bird on the nest, and the nest on the twig, and the twig on the branch, and the branch on the tree, and the tree in the bog,
And the bog down in the valley-o."
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn
That woke the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt

Sunday, 9 July 2023

oracy

As one cabinet minister put it to the Sunday Times this weekend: “The first rule of politics is that if you listen to Charles Moore and do the complete opposite of what he says, you won’t go far wrong.”

Johnson really cares about creating new jobs – especially if your name is Paul Dacre | Marina Hyde | The Guardian

Charles Moore is a journalist, the biographer of the first female PM of the UK and a lord: 

Charles Moore

He has just commented on a speech from the leader of the opposition in the UK parliament: 

Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘oracy’ is in trouble thanks to British education’s hostility to elitism

The point the politician would make is that it is very much about 'elitism':

Class? Labour was once too wary of the mine-strewn territory to use the word. Tony Blair talked of meritocracy – “we are meritocrats”, he declared in his first keynote speech of the 2001 general election campaign... Keir Starmer strode into that minefield on Thursday outlining the fifth of his “missions”, and the one that may prove the most politically defining: he calls it “my personal cause”. He would “shatter the class ceiling”.

Class is economic, but it has many ingredients. Starmer and Phillipson’s approach is a school programme of cultural and emotional enrichment, giving all children experiences and skills the middle classes take for granted. “Oracy” – a new word on me – will thread through a curriculum stressing speaking, confidence and communication skills, those great social dividers.

Keir Starmer has finally used the C-word: acknowledging the barriers of class that still divide us | Polly Toynbee | The Guardian

So, what is 'oracy'?

Keir Starmer said teaching oracy – often defined as developing skill in using spoken language – would be a central part of Labour’s educational priorities if the party took office after the next election. “It’s not just a skill for learning, it’s also a skill for life. Not just for the workplace, also for working out who you are – for overcoming shyness or disaffection, anxiety or doubt – or even just for opening up more to our friends and family,” Starmer said.

Keir Starmer has finally used the C-word: acknowledging the barriers of class that still divide us | Polly Toynbee | The Guardian

His argument is that young people need the skills to express themselves, writing in the Times that ‘an inability to articulate your thoughts fluently is a key barrier to getting on and thriving in life.’ He also thinks that teaching them will get children off their screens, which is more ambitious even than the targets Sunak has set his government.

Anyway, private schools routinely teach these oracy skills, but they aren’t emphasised as much in the state sector, and so Starmer is arguing that all children should have the same education in confidence and articulacy. This is personal for him – you may not have heard him mention before that his father was a toolmaker – as he sees class and social mobility as being a core part of what he stands for. Together with Bridget Phillipson, who he referred to this morning as the ‘current shadow education secretary’, Starmer has shaped this particular policy himself...

Starmer commits to oracy classes for children | The Spectator

Here are a couple more definitions: 

Oracy is to speaking what numeracy is to mathematics or literacy to reading and writing. Discover more about why it’s so important

What is oracy and how can you teach it? | English-Speaking Union

What is oracy? - YouTube

Oracy is as important as reading and writing. That’s our claim at School 21. Why do we think this? The research base is strong. (I recommend seeking out any work by Neil Mercer and Robin J. Alexander. You can start here: Mercer and Littleton, 2007 and Wolfe and Alexander, 2008 [PDF]). The theory is that purposeful dialogue focused on the exploration of complex ideas extends student thinking. Deep thinking creates the conditions for retaining and then mobilising important knowledge. Through informed debate, argument, and persuasion, students are cognitively stretched.

Oracy: The Literacy of the Spoken Word | Edutopia

Oracy in the Classroom: Strategies for Effective Talk - YouTube

The term oracy was coined by Andrew Wilkinson, a British researcher and educator, in the 1960s. This word is formed by analogy from literacy and numeracy. The purpose is to draw attention to the neglect of oral skills in education.

Oracy - Wikipedia

From the FT:

Private school students tend to be better at talking because, in their homes, Labour’s education policies are being discussed over dinner. But it is also because the schools set out to teach them. Debating and public speaking are taken almost as seriously as football and cricket: Eton even employs debating coaches.

State schools can’t be blamed for this as they have enough to do dragging students through written exams. And, on top of that, they are feeding their charges, acting as social workers and entering data into spreadsheets. Teachers are so stretched that now is not a great time to suggest they take on anything else. However, it must still be possible, with some additional funds, to teach children to converse, debate and persuade. The emphasis should start at nursery and continue to the end of university.

Starmer is right to speak up for the dreadfully named ‘oracy’ | Financial Times

Here's a trailer from a French film where the teacher is trying to get the students to express themselves:

The Class - The Class: Trailer | IMDb

It's important for young people to be able to express themselves:

“We talked about things you wouldn’t usually consider. It was good to be able to express your opinions and say how you feel.”

Young mens practical exercises.pdf



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