After the show
And it’s all over now. The students of Global Village celebrated the end of the school year on Wednesday. But how they did it! The performance was simply a hit. The audience – other students, parents, friends, and a great number of chance passers-by – all reacted spontaneously. You could hear laughter, giggling and applause every now and then. As for the actors, they did their best. The nervousness of the rehearsals disappeared the moment the drumming announced the beginning of the play. Later some of them said that they did actually miss a word or two, but it was hardly noticeable. To me they were professionals, and it was a double pleasure watching good performance played by good actors, as well as watching my own marvellous students – the shopkeeper, Capulets’ servant, Father Lawrence, Lord Montague, Tybalt, Benvolio, Prince Escalus, and many many others.
And to those who couldn’t come – don’t worry. You’ll still have a chance to see them next school year – in a student theatre, in one high school or another. They are too good actors to let them stop at the beginning of their careers :)
(basia_t)
A street in Verona, Italy
The cast:
Mateusz Acewicz (Gimnazjum nr 19)
Przemek Alkowski (I LO)
Marta Baczewska (Gimnazjum nr 3)
Mateusz Bałasz (Gimnazjum nr 7)
Dymitr Borys (Gimnazjum nr 4)
Michał Citko (Global Village)
Damian Czykier (Gimnazjum nr 9)
Magdalena Gorbacz (gościnnie)
Gabriela Karczewska (VI LO)
Paulina Kordiukiewicz (VI LO)
Jan Kowalski (Gimnazjum nr 8)
Jakub Kwiećkowski (III LO)
Justyna Łobaszewska (Global Village)
Wojciech Łukaszewicz (Global Village)
Adrian Młodzianowski (VI LO)
Rafał Onoszko (Gimnazjum nr 7)
Marta Opacka (VI LO)
Marcin Szychowski (XI LO)
Daniel Taranta (Gimnazjum nr 17)
Krzysztof Tarasiuk (SP nr 12)
Second time around
In the midst of testing and bringing the school year to a close, a bunch of some twenty Global Village enthusiasts are busy staging Romeo and Juliet again. This time we are attempting the entire text of our heavily, alas, simplified version, but we are putting it on outdoors so that more people could join us and have fun. The two main characters are played by new actors, otherwise most of the last year’s cast has remained the same. And there’s lots of live music added to give the play a more contemporary feel. Rehearsing it is a bit of a stunt itself, since it’s practically impossible to bring the whole cast, all from different schools, together at a given time. The only way we could possibly have them all for a rehearsal is to encourage them to play truant. This week we are taking rehearsals to the location.
Creative Minds T-shirt 2008
Here comes the summer, and with it, the return of the Global Village T-shirt, after an absence of eight years. This time we are offering a high quality black T-shirt with the logo printed in orange and grey, catch-phrase in white, down the front, plus the web address printed in white on the left sleeve. It comes in two styles – boys and girls, all sizes, as a limited edition series of 200. Once they’ve been sold, they won’t be reprinted.
The Creative Minds T-shirt is available at GV office and sells for 25 PLN. Contact Megi on 085 74 20 256.
Love at first sight
There are so many worlds existing parallel, the rich and the poor, the young and the elderly, those who are healthy and those who suffer. Recently I have come across another one.
I was imprisoned in my clumsy body and had to approach the surface every fifteen seconds for breath, but diving over a coral reef turned to be my dream come true. Surrounded by a shoal of fish in any color man could imagine, I felt like a part of the underwater world. The rays of sunlight were gently touching the variety of shades and shapes. Unbelievable. Awesome.
Only then did I realize that I had just knocked on the door to the world I had never known before, the world I would love to explore. Without intervention, only pure observation and admiration of its endless beauty.
At this very moment, as I am sitting in front of my PC, that world lives its own life. I am so content to be aware of its existence and hope to have a closer encounter with it one day.
diana_ielts7
Double alienation
When we work with a course book and we decide to put the language over in a certain order, we place the learners in a situation of double alienation:
(a) this is not their language (not their mother tongue)
(b) this is not what they want to express (we ask them to re-use, with a greater or lesser degree of freedom, gobbits of language chosen by people from outside their group, that is to say the authors and readers who work for the publishers).
This double alienation impacts negatively on the participants’ motivation and on their ability to understand, retain and integrate the foreign language. It also impacts negatively on the way the people learning the language relate to each other.
In traditional methodological terms, the “transfer” phase of the lesson which is meant to allow the learners to freely re-use language previously presented in the course book, in practice often runs into trouble and imposes artificial constraints on the learners. The same can be said for techniques that present participants with language at the start of the lesson and then require them to re-use some of this language right away.
(Bernard Dufeu)
We join in tulipomania
Far from being hypocritical, we’ve always been reluctant to follow any aggressive marketing strategies in order to churn out an immediate success. What particularly concerned us a few years ago was that market-borne tulipomania, whose promoters claimed the right to outline and guard standards in teaching English. Now that they no longer seem to raise these standards any higher and routinely make specials offers to buy them cheaply, we’re eager to help the tulip, their image, restore its tarnished reputation.
Late last summer Global Village planted at a secret location hundreds of tulip bulbs, hoping to put the flowers on display when they are in bloom. Several varieties have just begun to bloom. Tomorrow then we are showing them to the public. The exhibition opens at noon in front of Akcent bookshop in the square. Be there to admire the sheer beauty of the tulip. All exhibits will go for sale to support a good cause.
Earth Hour 2008
Global against global warming
(Maciek Żytowiecki, fat_fish group)
Reasons to be teachers
A few weeks back we had a series of teacher training sessions on the sources of our own motivation in choosing the teaching profession. It was educating to examine all individual motives and listen to the little stories behind our decisions, which, seemingly very different, often overlapped and boiled down to the same thing – the need for expression and creativity.
Here is our collective list of reasons for becoming teachers.
I love the English language. (given by 4 out of 7)
I want to contribute. (1/7)
I love to explain things. (1/7)
I believe in the value of education. 1/7)
I am good with people. (1/7)
The job gives opportunities to be creative. (1/7)
A teacher inspired me. (1/7)
I feel at home in the classroom. (1/7)
I like people who go into teaching. (1/7)
I like the exchange of ideas. ( 1/7)
I like to help people. (1/7)
The winter of 1565
Have you noticed? Every figure in the picture looks stooped and unnaturally bent forward: the hunters, the people by the fire, the two figures down there on the pond, in front, and all the skaters. Even those greyhounds are bent, they look so miserable and weird, remind me more of weasels than dogs. Is it because they are cold? It seems like a very severe winter. Or maybe they are an unhappy lot? The hunters return empty-handed. The village runs out of winter supplies. And on top of that the king imposed high duties this year…
No, it can’t be that. The soothing sensation that arises form contemplation of the painting tells me that this is just another winter afternoon in a faraway country inhabited by a nation different from all the other (the stooped figure being its characteristic trait), where dwarf-like people lead their perhaps hard, but definitely happy lives.
(michał_t)
