ELISABETH SKOV OG ULLA KRUSAA
The
Magic of
Empowerment in English
LINDHARDT OG RINGHOF
ELISABETH SKOV OG ULLA KRUSAA
The
Magic of
Empowerment in English
LINDHARDT OG RINGHOF
The Magic of Learning Empowerment in English af Elisabeth Skov og Ulla Krusaa
©2014 Lindhardt og Ringhof Uddannelse, København – et forlag under Lindhardt og Ringhof Forlag A/S, et selskab i Egmont. Forlagsredaktion: Ulla Benzon Malmmose Billedredaktion: Kathrine Storm Grafisk tilrettelægning og omslag: Ulla Korgaard, Designeriet
Mekanisk, fotografisk, elektronisk eller anden gengivelse af denne bog eller dele heraf er kun tilladt efter Copy-Dans regler. Forlaget har forsøgt at finde og kontakte alle rettighedshavere. Tryk: Livonia Print 1. udgave 1. oplag 2014 ISBN 9788770665902
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Contents Bogens ide
Culture and Learning
5 page 8
Butler and Hope: The Pleasures of Study
10
Gloria Steinem: The Royal Knights of Harlem
20
Amy Chuan: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
27
Malcolm Gladwell: Caroline Sacks
33
Rachel Gould: Thucydides
41
Butler and Hope: Revision Strategy and Exam
49
The Workshop of the English Crime Writer
page 56
P.D. James: Telling the Story
58
P.D. James: The Private Patient
74
Agatha Christie: Strange Jest
81
D. Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow
94
Reading: A Road to Yourself and the World
page 102
Web Pages on Reading and Reading Strategies
104
Alan Bennett: The Uncommon Reader
106
Rachel Seiffert: Reach
114
Siri Hustvedt: On Reading
125
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
134
Be your Own Word Assistant
141
Poems:
147
William Henry Davies: Leisure
148
Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken
149
P.J. Harvey: The Colour of the Earth
150
Bruce Springsteen: Two Faces
152
Self-Esteem and Empowerment
page 154
Melanie Fennell: Self-Esteem
156
Michel Faber: Less Than Perfect
161
Butler and Hope: Keeping Things in Perspective
173
Rajaa Alsanea: Girls of Riyadh
182
Justine Picardie: The Fat Lady Sings
188
Maya Angelou: Further New Directions
195
Alain de Botton: Status Anxiety
198
C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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Photos Sara Legind-Hansen: 18, 19 Polfoto: 24 Martin Slottemo Lyngstad, 75 Peter Hove Olesen, 83 ø.tv. Topfoto, 83 ø.th. AP, 151 Gonzales Photo/Christian Hjorth, 152 AP/Susan Walsh Scanpix: 29, 63 Mary Evans Picture Library, 83n. Ronald Grant Archive/Mary Evans Eduardo Paolozzi/DACS/billedkunst.dk: 99 Thinkstock: 105 Hungarian National Gallery: 131 Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund, 1924.30: 155 Dover Publications inc © 2009: 159 Estate of John David Roberts. By Permission of the William Roberts Society: 189
Texts Gillian Butler and Tony Hope (2007) The Pleasures of Study, Revision Strategy and Exam and Keeping Things in Perspective from Manage your Mind. Oxford University Press. Gloria Steinem (1992) The Royal Knights of Harlem from Revolution from Within. Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 1992, 1993 by Gloria Steinem Amy Chua (2011) Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Penguin Books. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Chua. All rights reserved. Malcolm Gladwell (2013) Caroline Sacks from David and Goliath. Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2013 by Malcolm Gladwell. By permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved. Rachel Gould (1987) Thucydides fra British Short Stories of Today. Penguin Books. Extract from Thucydides by Rachel Gould reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www. petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of Rachel Gould. P.D. James (2009) Telling the Story from Talking about Detective Fiction. Faber and Faber Ltd. Copyright © P.D. James, 2010. P.D. James (2008) The Private Patient. Faber and Faber Ltd. Copyright © P.D. James, 2008. Agatha Christie (1960) Strange Jest from Miss Marple’s Final Cases. Harper Collins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, copyright © 1941 Agatha Christie. 4
Daniel Kahneman (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Kahneman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Alan Bennett (2007) The Uncommon Reader. Profile Books Ltd Rachel Seiffert (2003) Reach from A Day in the Life. Transworld Publishers. Siri Hustvedt (2012) On Reading fra Living, Thinking, Looking. Picador. Henry Holt and Company, LLC. George Orwell (1948) Nineteen Eighty-Four. Penguin Books. Copyright © George Orwell, 1949. Reproduced by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell. William Henry Davies (1911) Leisure from Songs of Joy and Others Robert Frost (1920) The Road Not Taken from Mountain Interval. “The Road Not Taken” from the book THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 PJ Harvey (2010) The Colour of the Earth from Let England Shake. Universal Music. Bruce Springsteen (1987) Two Faces from Tunnel of Love. Sony Music. Melanie Fennell (1999) Self-Esteem from Overcoming Low Self-Esteem. Constable & Robinson Ltd. Michel Faber (2005) Less Than Perfect from The Fahrenheit Twins. Canongate Books Rajaa Alsanea (2007) Girls of Riyadh. Penguin Group. From GIRLS OF RIYADH by Rajaa Alsanea, translated by Rajaa Alsanea & Marilyn Booth, copyrigh © 2005 by Rajaa Alsanea. Translation copyright © 2005 by Rajaa Alsanea & Marilyn Booth. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Justine Picardie (2003) The Fat Lady Sings from A Day in the Life. Transworld Publishers. Maya Angelou (1993) Further New Directions from Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now. Virago Press Alain de Botton (2004) Status Anxiety from Equality, Expectation and Envy. Penguin.
Bogens ide Det undervisningsmateriale, der her præsenteres, er beregnet til undervisning i engelsk i de videregående uddannelser som gymnasiet, hf, hhx m.m. Tekstvalget udgøres af et varieret udbud af nyere engelske og amerikanske tekster, fiktive og ikke-fiktive, repræsenterende forskellige genrer og sværhedsgrader. Som helhed er der lagt op til en undervisning, hvor aktivitet, selvstændighed og synlige læreprocesser er i centrum. I valg af emner, tekster og arbejdsopgaver sigtes der mod to mål: 1) At give de studerende sikre elementære færdigheder i læsemåder, tekstforståelse og formidling. 2) At udvide de studerendes oplevelse af styrke, glæde og selvtillid ved at blive vidende, aktive mennesker. Som indledning til hvert afsnit er der en oversigt over de tekster, fokuspunkter og aktiviteter, der kan arbejdes med. Målet med dette har været at tydeliggøre de forskellige vinkler på de undervisnings- og læringssituationer, der lægges op til og at inddrage de studerende i deres egen læring ved at gøre det klart, hvad der foregår, og hensigten med det. Tekster og arbejdsopgaver er inddelt i emner: •
Culture and Learning.
•
The Workshop of the English Crime Writer.
•
Reading: Your Way to Yourself and the World.
•
Self-Esteem and Empowerment. Bogen kan anvendes på mange måder i hele uddannelsesforløbet.
Små ugler i indholdsfortegnelsen markerer sværhedsgraden. Man kan læse alle dele og finde sammenhæng og udvikling i forløbet, eller man kan vælge at differentiere undervisningen og vælge de afsnit ud, der er mest relevante i en given situation, f.eks. vejledning i at lære – “The Pleasures of Study”- ved studiestart.
C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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Bogen er ligeledes velegnet til samarbejde mellem fagene, fordi emnerne har berøringspunkter til mange andre fag. Med sine klare mål og aktivitetsbeskrivelser er bogen desuden let at gå til for selvstuderende. Der forklares omhyggeligt, hvilken vej man skal gå, og hvor man skal hen med sit arbejde. Alle tekster er forsynet med optakter på dansk, der kan bruges til afsæt for læsning af teksterne og som oversættelsesopgaver. Der er endvidere arbejdsopgaver på engelsk (activities), genrebetegnelser, gloser, henvisninger til videre studier på nettet. Via websiden lru.dk/magicoflearning kan man blive henvist til supplerende materiale, f.eks. film. På lru.dk/magicoflearning er der også et link til bogens lydside, hvor udvalgte tekster bliver læst op. Disse er markeret med
i indholdsfortegnelsen.
Vi håber, der i arbejdet med bogen opstår både faglig dygtighed og personligt selvværd. Ulla Krusaa og Elisabeth Skov September 2014
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C U LT TURE AND LEARNING
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Culture and Learning TEXTS
FOCUS
ACTIVITIES
Butler & Hope: The Pleasures of Study (n-f)
Mental fitness
List the ideas of the text Discuss study techniques
Gloria Steinem: The Royal Knights of Harlem (n-f)
Chess and change
Search the effects of chess Act in a role play Write an article to the school magazine
Culture and learning
Outline main ideas Play a part Realize your values
Competition in science studies
Learn from Caroline’s university story
Rachel Gould: Thucydides (f)
Muddling school
Compare with Caroline Sachs
Butler and Hope: Revision Strategy and Exam (n-f)
Anxiety
Build up exam strategies
Amy Chuan: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (bio) Malcolm Gladwell: Caroline Sacks (n-f)
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T H E M AG I C O F L E A R N I N G
Bob Dob: Lonely Day (2008)
Culture and Learning
99
Butler & Hope:
The Pleasures of Study Manage your Mind (2007)
OPTAKT Som den unge mand på billedet side 9 ønsker de fleste at kombinere studielivet med bogen med det sjove. I den følgende tekst gives der vejledning i at få bonus i studierne, så man får mere fritid og bedre resultater. De to forfattere har stor erfaring i rådgivning af studerende og samler her nogle af de bedste råd. The Pleasures of Study er en guldgrube af gode anvisninger og forklaringer, som det varmt kan anbefales at afprøve og afstemme efter egne behov. Megen tid og skuffelse kan undgås, hvis man får en konkret viden om de retningslinjer, det kan betale sig at følge i arbejdet med boglige emner. Intellektuelt arbejde er højt værdsat i vores samfund, men det kræver koncentration, arbejdsmetoder og evne til også at kunne arbejde alene.
analogous: ensbetydende appropriate: anvendelig
Study is not only for students: good study methods are useful to us all. A little regular study is analogous to a little regular exercise: it strengthens
vocational: faglig
habits and develops skills that are useful for a lifetime. The principles
accumulate: blive større
explained in this chapter are appropriate to a wide range of situations: to
achievements: præstationer
school or university students studying full-time; to part-time students, attending evening classes or studying alone; to people who wish to improve their vocational qualifications; and to people who want to pursue a hobby or learn a new language. This chapter is relevant whether you want to study a topic, learn a musical instrument, or write a novel, because the ideas in it can be applied to any task which requires you to make use of your mind in a systematic way. A little regular study can provide you with one of the great pleasures in life; your learning will accumulate and you will enjoy knowing more about the things that interest you. Such knowledge will also build your confidence and help you to feel proud of your achievements. If you are a student, then studying efficiently will be a bonus, giving you more free time as well as better results. Good study techniques are not difficult to
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T H E M AG I C O F L E A R N I N G
master, and it is surprising how few students make use of them. Do not be
put off: forvirret
put off by their apparent simplicity; often the simple and straightforward
state: fastslå
methods are the most effective.
the amount: omfanget correlated: i overensstemmelse achieve: udrette
The law of mass effect There is one central law about study: the law of mass effect. This states that the amount of work you do (the amount you learn or the amount you write, for instance) is strongly correlated with the amount of time you spend doing it. Certainly, many students study in an inefficient way, so that long hours of hard work achieve much less than they could. But it is important not to believe the myth that by studying incredibly efficiently you can achieve a lot by doing remarkably little. What you can do is achieve a great deal by combining work and recreation in moderate amounts. Any worthwhile study will therefore take some time. The main reason why people who study often achieve less than they want to is that they do not put in the hours. Therefore, if you want to study, you need to set aside time to work. So why not make it easy to start, and fun to do?
Making it Easy to Start Most people find it difficult to get down to work. You might promise yourself that you will sit down and write for an hour at eight o’clock in the evening. At eight o’clock you think it would be nice to have a cup of tea. At a quarter past eight you make a quick phone call. At half past eight there is a program on the radio or TV. At nine o’clock you listen to the news. At twenty past nine a friend phones. At half past nine... . All this is common experience and there must be few people who do not waste time or use their time in this way. But the single most important difference between good and bad students is in the ability to get down to work. The problem with not getting down to work is twofold: first, it results in too little work being done; and second, it results in an unsatisfactory use of the time when you are trying to get down to work, because so much of the time not working is spent in a kind of no man’s land, which is neither work nor recreation but being about to work, worrying about work, not quite relaxing but not quite working either.
C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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In order to get down to work, you need to make it as easy for yourself
environment: miljø dispiriting: deprimerende
as possible. Just as it takes time for an engine, starting from cold, to run
gloom: tristhed
smoothly, so it is with ourselves. Sometimes we need a kick-start to get
clutter: rod
going; but once in the swing of it, it is usually much easier to keep going
expedient: plan benefits: fordele
and can be a real pleasure too.
hump: pukkel wane: forsvinde
Four ways of helping yourself to get down to work Create a good work environment. There is nothing more dispiriting than looking at the place where you are going to study and finding that it fills you with gloom. Try and keep a particular place, a room or part of a room, for work. Make this place attractive in your own particular way. Decorate it with pictures, or flowers, or whatever it is that you enjoy. Make yourself an inviting table top, for example, by getting rid of unnecessary clutter. List the task beforehand. We tend to use any excuse not to get down to work, and one is uncertainty over where to begin: “Shall I do this, or that?� And the uncertainty becomes an excuse for doing something else. Plan in advance what it is you are going to work on. The simple expedient of writing a list of the various things to do and the order in which you are going to do them can save hours of wasted time. Try not to be too ambitious when you make your plan. You can always do something extra at the end if there is still time. Keep the benefits of study clearly in mind. However easy you make it for yourself to start the work, there will still be a small hump to get over. You need to keep before you the benefits to be gained from doing the work. With large tasks this is particularly important; otherwise, an initial enthusiasm might wane and you may never find the energy to start. Write down all the things you could gain from doing the work, and read the list when you are due to start, to give yourself a boost. This is particularly useful if you are going through one of those phases when you feel discouraged, or have lost heart. Leave the work environment inviting for the next time. Most people tidy up, and find the things they need in order to get started, at the beginning of the study session. When they stop the session, they leave everything in a disorganized mess. The problem with this is that the mess becomes a barrier to starting the next work session. The solution is simple. Spend
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T H E M AG I C O F L E A R N I N G
the last few minutes of the study period tidying up and getting ready for
accommodate: tilpasse
the next session so that it will be easy to start. This is also one of the best
daunting: skræmmende
times to plan in advance what to do next.
bite-sized: småbidder slab: humpel assorted: forskellige reference book: håndbog, opslagsbog
Making it Fun to Do Make use of your best time of day You may have little choice when to study, or it may not matter for you anyway. But some people work better, or more easily, at some times of day than at others. Some people are morning workers; others work best in the evenings. If you have preferences, try and accommodate them.
Study in short periods Many people fail to study because they believe that once they get down to it they should keep at it for hours. This is so daunting that they do nothing at all. It is much better to have more modest goals and actually do the work. We recommend that you work in fairly short, “bite- sized pieces,” the size of the bite depending to some extent on you and to some extent on the subject matter. If you are studying in the evenings, after work, then we recommend keeping the bites small; otherwise, you are likely to turn on the TV instead.
Variety – the chocolate box approach An enormous slab of chocolate would be difficult to eat all at once, but in a box of assorted chocolates each chocolate is small, and there is a great deal of variety. Whatever it is you want to study, break up the study into short periods with frequent breaks, and give yourself variety. If you do this you will find it much easier to “eat” your way through the box, and you will find that you have completed a great deal of work. A student came to us for help because he was finding it very difficult to carry on with his studies. Each morning he faced several hours of sitting in the library “studying,” feeling bored and tired. We asked him to tell us about his study. “It’s just the same each day. I go to the library and read.” “Do you never write anything?” “Of course, I have to write essays.” We carried on asking him exactly what he did. It turned out that what he saw as the one task of “studying” was a myriad of different tasks. He C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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condense: sammentrænge schedule: planlægge
would order books from the librarian; some he would read as reference books, selecting material and taking notes. Sometimes he would read
breaks: pauser
novels, as part of his study, reading all the way through. Before writing an
assembly line: samlebånd
essay he would return to his notes, and condense them. He would plan
erudite: lærd
his essay and play around with some of the ideas. Then he would write,
scholarly: videnskabeligt
and then edit what he had written. At any stage he might talk to other students or discuss topics with a tutor. In fact, he was not just doing the same task all the time but doing a wide variety of tasks. We suggested that he plan out his next morning’s study, identifying the different tasks and ensuring that he only did each one for a relatively short period for example, about forty-five minutes at a time. We also asked him to schedule in breaks. The plan for his next morning looked like a chocolate box. It was made up of a variety of small, more or less, appetizing chunks. A week later he was a transformed student: keener on his work and more satisfied than he had been before. This transformation had been achieved by the simple process of breaking the study period up into a variety of tasks, and showing him that what he had seen as one boring activity was in reality a number of different activities, any of which might become boring if you did them for too long. When study becomes boring and repetitive, like an assembly line, it loses its variety and hence its attractiveness.
Planning and Organization Study with a purpose in mind Why do you want to study? Whatever the reason, keep it in mind. Keep it in mind in order to: decide what information you want, decide on your priorities, and choose what to do with the information you collect. You do not have to have a very erudite or scholarly purpose; you could just be curious. Suppose you want to learn Portuguese because you want to be able to speak a little when you go to Portugal on holiday. The words and phrases that you learn – the tapes and books which you might use to learn from – all these should be chosen bearing in mind that it is for a holiday that you wish to use the language. If you were learning Portuguese for business purposes, then you would need a different vocabulary. Your purpose helps you decide what and how to learn. Perhaps you want to 14
T H E M AG I C O F L E A R N I N G
Elisabeth Skov: CafĂŠ Nook
learn Portuguese in order to read business reports but do not need to
cover to cover: fra ende til anden
speak the language. So your purpose also helps you to decide what to practice. If you want to learn the language in order principally to read it, then practice reading it. If you want to learn it principally to speak, then practice speaking it. If you want to be able to understand, then practice listening to it. The purpose helps you to decide how much you need to do. Your aim, in learning Portuguese, might be to be able to order a meal and ask directions. You may not need to be fluent. Most people read books from cover to cover in a linear fashion even though, for most study purposes, this is not the best thing to do. It is unfocused, and wastes a lot of time. When studying, think more of the way in which you might read a newspaper – browsing, selecting, reading some articles right through, dipping into some and ignoring others altogether. Select what you read and select how much you read. In making the selection keep the purpose in mind. What are you aiming to get from this bit of reading, this bit of study?
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The same is true when taking notes. Keep the purpose in mind.
pose: stille daunting: afskrækkende dispiriting: deprimerende estimate: vurdering abandon: forlade
Do you want these notes to replace having to read the book again? Or to remind you what is in the book and where to find it? Do you want to remember the contents in detail, or to bring away some main ideas? Is
overtime: over tid
the material such that once you have remembered the main headings
accumulate: ophobe
you can remember the rest, or does it demand that you remember a
ensure: sikre
great deal of specific information? It is not only the ultimate purpose (ordering a Portuguese meal) that you need to bear in mind, but also the more immediate one. Reasons for note-taking can vary from improving concentration to making you feel productive; notes can provide a memory aid or a sense of achievement. Exactly what form your notes will take depends on what you are making them for.
Salami-cutting big projects into slices Big projects often pose particular difficulties. They can be daunting at the beginning because they are so big. And they can be dispiriting in the middle when the initial blush of enthusiasm has paled and the end is still out of sight. No project is too large, or large projects would never get done, but large ones do need to be tackled systematically- for example, by using the salami principle: cut big projects into slices. If you “eat” the slices one by one, you will eventually consume the whole “salami.” In other words, set yourself small manageable tasks so that by progressing through them you will eventually accomplish the large task. Most people grossly underestimate how long it takes them to do something they have set for themselves, and often have to double their original estimates. Focusing on the demands made by each “slice” makes these estimates much more accurate, as well as making each slice more appetizing.
An attitude of project completion The salami approach can enable you to organize and begin a large project, but there may be other, new projects you are keen to get on with as well, and this is where the danger lies. It can be tempting to abandon the current project and start a new, more exciting one instead, so that overtime you accumulate a number of half-finished projects. If you want to complete them, you need to adopt the kind of attitude that helps to ensure that starting new projects does not prevent you from finishing old
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ones. Be prepared to delay the onset of new projects. Keep them in the
delay: udsætte
planning stage until the old ones have been completed.
elaborate: kompliceret reward: belønning chunk: luns
Finishing the Study Period File your work for easy access At the end of your study period, sort and file your materials. “I know I’ve made some notes on this somewhere...” The best notes in the world are of little help if you cannot find them at the right time. When studying, one of the things you need not be wasting your time doing is looking for information, looking for notes you put somewhere, or looking for the right file. You need a simple and effective system for filing your notes and material whether your notes are on paper, or on the computer. The system does not need to be elaborate. It can make use of shoe boxes or those well-tried methods which efficient offices find effective: envelopes, files, storage boxes, filing cabinets, or a series of notebooks. If you do not know how to file your notes, then it may be sufficient simply to file them in the order in which you write them. We tend to be good at remembering roughly when we did things and which things we did before others. If you use a loose-leafed file, and take a separate piece of paper for each new learning time, then you can always re-sort later if you want to and such re-sorting is even easier if your notes are in electronic form. The other key to not wasting time trying to find things is to have a specific place, or computer file, in which you keep your notes. When you finish a piece of work, always put it back in its place. Do not leave it out where it might get mixed up with other things, or incorporated into the newspapers or your children’s play.
Reward yourself for each study period Animal trainers know the importance of reward. The principle is simple: you will enjoy doing things more if they are rewarding and then you will be more likely to want to do them again. In order to boost your chance of studying, you can build in extra and immediate rewards. For example, you might decide that if you spend three hours studying on Saturday afternoon you will then go out to the cinema. If you are studying in smaller chunks, then a token system might help. For example, for each hour of study you might give yourself a token. You can then “spend” the C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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token: prĂŚmie
tokens on “luxuries�- things that you would not allow yourself to do or buy without the tokens, but that you very much enjoy (make yourself some pancakes; soak in the bath; buy a plant or new pen). In this way studying becomes associated with pleasures that you can think of if you are finding it difficult to get down to work. The key to success is to keep the rewards simple and fairly immediate. Giving yourself something good to look forward to helps you to work, whereas giving yourself the pleasure before you work makes working that much harder.
Sara Legind-Hansen: Awareness 2014
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Activities Focus: Mental Fitness •
Make a list of the advice in the text and relate it to your own study experience.
•
Discuss the advice in groups.
•
What is most difficult for you in a study situation? Which advice may help you out?
•
How do you combat boredom?
•
Select some of your study problems and set up a plan to solve them.
•
Sum up the qualities needed to “navigate” through the challenges of study.
Sara Legind-Hansen: Owl 2014
Describe the owl above and explain how the owl has been used in our culture. Also search the net for information.
C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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Gloria Steinem:
The Royal Knights of Harlem Revolution from Within (1992)
OPTAKT Gloria Steinem beskriver et skoleprojekt i en junior high school i et af New Yorks fattigste kvarterer, Spanish Harlem. En lærer tager initiativ til at danne en skakgruppe for de unge. Det betyder en omlægning af deres vaner og fritid – og selvforståelse. Fra at se sig selv som tabere i et hårdt nedgørende miljø, revolutioneres de langsomt og får ny selvopfattelse og nye fremtidsmuligheder.
light-years: lysår infant: børnematernal: fødselsmortality rates: dødelighed average: gennemsnitlig life expectancy: forventet levealder affluent: rig invisibility: usynlighed condescension: nedladende holdning high: highschool/ gymnasium barren: gold concrete: beton fences: indhegning chessboard: skakbræt
Within walking distance of my Manhattan apartment but also lightyears away, there is a part of New York called Spanish Harlem. In many ways, it is a Third World country: infant and maternal mortality rates are about the same as in, say, Bangladesh, and average male life expectancy is even shorter. These facts it shares with the rest of Harlem, yet here, many people are also separated from the more affluent parts of the city by language. When all this is combined with invisibility in the media, the condescension of many teachers and police who work in this Third World country but wouldn’t dream of living there, and textbooks that have little to do with their real lives, the lesson for kids is clear: they are ‘less than’ people who live only a few blocks away. At a junior high that rises from a barren patch of concrete playgrounds and metal fences on East 101st Street, Bill Hall teaches the usual English courses, plus English as a second language to students who arrive directly from Puerto Rico, Central and South America, even Pakistan and Hong Kong. Those kids are faced with a new culture, strange rules, a tough neighborhood, and parents who may be feeling just as lost as they are. Bill Hall is faced with them. While looking for an interest to bind one such group together and help them to learn English at the same time, Bill noticed someone in the neighborhood carrying a chessboard. As a chess player himself, he knew
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this game crossed many cultural boundaries, so he got permission from a very skeptical principal to start a chess club after school. Few of the girls came. Never having seen women playing chess, they assumed this game wasn’t for them, and without even a female teacher as a role model, those few who did come gradually dropped out. Some of the boys stayed away too – chess wasn’t the kind of game that made you popular in this neighborhood – but about a dozen remained to learn the basics. Their friends made fun of them for staying after school, and some
principal: rektor dozen: dusin fares: billetter captain: lede lag behind: være bagefter improve: blive bedre State Finals: afgangsprøve disparate: helt forskellige shut-down: ensomme eligible: kvalificeret
parents felt that chess was a waste of time since it wouldn’t help get a job, but still, they kept coming. Bill was giving these boys something rare in their lives: the whole-hearted attention of someone who believed in them. Gradually, their skills at both chess and English improved. As they got more expert at the game, Bill took them to chess matches in schools outside Spanish Harlem. Because he paid for their subway fares and pizza dinners, no small thing on his teacher’s salary, the boys knew he cared. They began to trust this middle-aged white man a little more. To help them become more independent, Bill asked each boy to captain one event, and to handle all travel and preparation for it. Gradually, even when Bill wasn’t around, the boys began to assume responsibility for each other: to coach those who were lagging behind, to share personal problems, and to explain to each other’s parents why dress wasn’t such a waste of time after all. Gradually, too, this new sense of competence carried over into their classrooms, and their grades began to improve. As they became better students and chess players, Bill Hall’s dreams for them grew. With a little money supplied by the Manhattan Chess Club, he took them to the State Finals in Syracuse. What had been twelve disparate, isolated, often passive, shut-down kids had now become a team with their own chosen name: The Royal Knights. After finishing third in their own state, they were eligible for the Junior High School Finals in California. By now, however, even Bill’s own colleagues were giving him reasons why he shouldn’t be spending so much time and effort. In real life, these ghetto kids would never ‘get past New Jersey’, as one teacher put it. Why raise funds to fly them across the country and make them more dissatisfied with their lives? Nonetheless, Bill raised money for tickets to
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World Champion: verdensmester was floored: gik i brædderne scholastic: skolernes rally: slutte op om corporation: virksomhed approach: henvende sig til leg: etape falter: vakle deliberate: velovervejet, bevidst previously: tidligere encounter: møde spell: fortryllelsen draw: remis, uafgjort at random: tilfældigt achieve: opnå
California. In that national ‘competition, they finished seventeenth out of 109 teams. By now, chess had become a subject of school interest – if only because it led to trips. On one of their days at a New York chess club, the team members met a young girl from the Soviet Union who was the Women’s World Champion. Even Bill was floored by the idea that two of his kids came up with: If this girl could come all the way from Russia, why couldn’t The Royal Knights go there? After all, it was the chess capital of the world, and the Scholastic Chess Friendship Games were coming up. Though no US players their age had ever entered these games, officials in Bill’s school district rallied round the idea. So did a couple of the corporations he approached for travel money. Of course, no one thought his team could win, but that wasn’t the goal. The trip itself would widen the boys’ horizons, Bill argued. When Pepsi-Cola came up with a $20,000 check, Bill began to realize that this crazy dream was going to come true. They boarded the plane for the first leg of their trip to Russia as official representatives of the country from which they had felt so estranged only a few months before. But as veterans of Spanish Harlem, they also made very clear that they were representing their own neighborhood. On the back of their satin athletic jackets was emblazoned not ‘USA’, but ‘The Royal Knights’. Once they were in Moscow, however, their confidence began to falter badly. The experience and deliberate style of their Soviet opponents were something they had never previously encountered. Finally, one of the Knights broke the spell by playing a Soviet Grandmaster in his thirties to a draw in a simulation match. The Russians weren’t invincible after all; just people like them. After that, the Knights won about half their matches, and even discovered a home-grown advantage in the special event of speed chess. Unlike the Soviet players, who had been taught that slowness and deliberation were virtues, the Knights had a street-smart style that made them both fast and accurate. By the time Bill and his team got to Leningrad to take on the toughest part of their competition, the boys were feeling good again. Though they had been selected at random for their need to learn English, not for any talent at chess, and though they had been playing for only a few months, they won one match and achieved a draw in another.
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When the Knights got back to New York, they were convinced they could do anything. It was a conviction they would need. A few months later when I went to their junior high school clubroom, Bill Hall, a big, gentle man who rarely gets angry, was furious about a recent confrontation between one of the Puerto Rican team members and a white teacher. As Bill urged the boy to explain to me, he had done so well on a test that the teacher, thinking he had cheated, made him take it over. When the boy did well a second time, the teacher seemed less pleased than annoyed to have been
conviction: overbevisning rarely: sjældent annoyed: irriteret bias: fordom internalize: internalisere resist: modstå dingy: snusket junior high graduation: skoleafslutning law: jura accounting: revisor reunion: møde med gamle skolekammerater
proven wrong. ‘If this had been a school in a different neighborhood,’ said Bill, ‘none of this would have happened.’ It was the kind of classroom bias that these boys had been internalizing – but now had the self-esteem to resist. ‘Maybe the teacher was just jealous,’ the boy said cheerfully. ‘I mean, we put this school on the map.’ And so they had. Their dingy junior high auditorium had just been chosen by a Soviet dance troupe as the site of a New York performance. Every principal in the school district was asking for a chess program; and local television and newspapers had interviewed The Royal Knights. Now that their junior high graduation was just weeks away, bids from various high schools with programs for ‘gifted’ kids were flooding in, even one from a high school in California. Though all the boys were worried about their upcoming separation, it was the other team members who had persuaded the boy who got that invitation to accept it. ‘We told him to go for it,’ as one said. ‘We promised to write him every week,’ said another. ‘Actually,’ said a third, ‘we all plan to stay in touch for life.’ With career plans that included law, accounting, teaching, computer sciences – futures they wouldn’t have thought possible before – there was no telling what continuing surprises they might share at reunions of this team that had become its own support group and family. What were they doing, I asked, before Bill Hall and chess-playing came into their lives? There was a very long silence. ‘Hanging out in the street and feeling like shit,’ said one boy, who now wants to become a lawyer. ‘Taking lunch money from younger kids, and a few drugs now and then,’ admitted another.
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The World Champion Magnus Carlsen comics: tegneserier parable: lignelse, historie confidence: selvtillid contagious: smitsomt
‘Just lying on my bed, reading comics, and getting yelled at by my father for being lazy,’ said a third. Was there anything in their schoolbooks that made the difference? ‘Not until Mr Hall thought we were smart,’ explained one, to the nods of the others, ‘and then we were.’ At first glance, this parable seems to be a simple example of the words of football coach Vince Lombardi: ‘Confidence is contagious, so is lack of confidence.’ But that’s only one of its lessons. If we think about
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our own classroom experiences – whether in schools that were far more privileged than those of Spanish Harlem, or just as bad with not even a Bill Hall – we may also remember that we became more or less smart depending on our teachers’ vision of us, that we learned better when teachers invested themselves in their subjects and expected us to do the same, and that we knew very well when our textbooks and teachers were
transform: omforme, transformere knowledge: viden possession: ejendom miseducation: forfejlet uddannelse inklusive: de der er in concepts: begreber reinforce: forstærke goal: mål
excluding us. In Transforming Knowledge, Elizabeth Minnich describes education as the possession of the few – and therefore a miseducation of everyone – as a problem found not only in ghetto junior high schools, but also in elite universities: The root problem reappears in all fields and throughout the dominant tradition. It is, simply, that while the majority of humankind was excluded from education and the making of what has been called knowledge, the dominant few not only defined themselves as the inclusive kind of human but also as the norm and the ideal. A few privileged men defined themselves as constituting mankind/ humankind ... Thus, they created root definitions of what it means to be human that, with the concepts and theories that flowed from and reinforced those definitions, made it difficult to think well about, or in the mode of, anyone other than themselves, just as they made it difficult to think honestly about the defining few. To change education, as she says, the goal is ‘to think ourselves free, to free our own thinking’. Thinking ourselves free starts with questions: What happened to those girls who left the chess club? Would they have stayed if there had been a woman teacher? What was going on inside that teacher who wanted to be right more than he wanted his student to do well? What was in the texts those boys were reading – the whole world or only certain parts of it, and certain people? When The Royal Knights come home from high school and college, will they be more or less themselves? Most important of all: What was our own education like?
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Activities Focus: Chess and Change •
Why do these young people suffer from low self-esteem?
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The text says “gradually their skills both at chess and English improved.” How do you explain that success in one area is transferred to another area. Do you know of other examples?
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Point out the advantage of being a member of a well-functioning team. What did the boys get from the team? Why did the girls drop out?
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Describe the way in which self-esteem develops in this story?
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Make a role play in which Bill Hall, the teacher, is met with arguments for and against his idea of setting up a chess club (from his headmaster, colleagues, parents, students etc.)
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Write about chess:
Det følgende citat er taget fra en artikel i Politiken den 29. aug. 2010. Oversæt citatet til engelsk eller skriv evt. et kort indlæg på engelsk til skolebladet eller lign., hvor du argumenterer for oprettelsen af en skakklub. “At spille skak aktiverer mange dele af hjernen. Og hos børn udvikler det blandt andet koncentration, logisk sans, kreativitet og evnen til at tage beslutninger.” Det fortæller læge og tidligere hjerneforsker ved Aarhus Universitet Kjeld Fredens, som i mange år har beskæftiget sig med læringsprocesser blandt børn og voksne. “Skak er aktiv læring. Det kan i modsætning til mange andre spil kun spilles med stor koncentration, ved at tænke strategisk, og ved at man reflekterer over sin egen tænkning – når man tænker flere træk frem. Det er en vigtig drivkraft for, at man kan lære selv at lære”, siger han. “Generelt handler det om at finde og få tændt børns indre motivation, så de gør noget, fordi de selv synes, det er en god idé. Så kan de få en succesoplevelse, som er med til at fremme deres koncentration, og det kan overføres til andre områder, hvor de har svært ved at klare sig.” 26
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Amy Chua:
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011)
OPTAKT At se på hvordan andre lande og kulturer opfatter opdragelse og uddannelse er yderst tankevækkende. I 2011 udkom en bog der provokerede mange i USA Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother af Amy Chuan. Som amerikaner med kinesisk baggrund ser hun med kritiske øjne på vestlig opdragelse og sammenligner den på en humoristisk måde med den effektive kinesiske opdragelsesmodel som ifølge hende stensikkert fører til succes i uddannelse og karriere. Forældrene spiller en vigtig rolle: At tro på sine børns evner og gøre noget ved det fører til selvværd. Men vejen kan være hård. Læs selv følgende uddrag.
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do: •
attend a sleepover
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have a playdate
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be in a school play
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complain about not being in a school play
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watch TV or play computer games
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choose their own extracurricular activities
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get any grade less than an A
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not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama
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play any instrument other than the piano or violin
whizzes: vidunderbørn (slang) prodigies: vidunderbørn extracurricular: uden for det normale skema
• not play the piano or violin I’m using the term “Chinese mother” loosely. I recently met a supersuccessful white guy from South Dakota (you’ve seen him on television), and after comparing notes we decided that his working-class father had definitely been a Chinese mother. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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go out on a limb: tage en risiko, vove den påstand diverse: forskellige lax: slappe see eye to eye: se ens på squeamishness: utilpashed reflect: afspejler excel: udmærke sig approximately: omtrent drill: træne, øve participate: deltage i analog to: sidestykke til in public: offentligt permit: tillade
Chinese heritage, almost always born in the west, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I’m also using the term “Western parents” loosely. Western parents come in all varieties. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Westerners are far more diverse in their parenting styles than the Chinese. Some Western parents are strict: others are lax. There are same-sex parents, Orthodox Jewish parents, single parents, ex-hippie parents, investment banker parents, and military parents. None of these “Western parents” necessarily see eye to eye, so when I use the term “Western parents”, of course I’m not referring to all Western parents – just as “Chinese mother” doesn’t refer to all Chinese mothers. All the same, even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments thirty minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough. Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.” By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be “the best” students, that “academic achievement reflects successful parenting,” and that if children did not excel at school then there was “a problem” and parents “were not doing their job.” Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams. This brings me to my final point. Some might think that the American sports parent is an analog to the Chinese mother. This is so wrong. Unlike your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which
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they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold.
2. Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can’t. Once when I was young – maybe more than once – when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me “garbage” in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply
garbage: affald damage: ødelægge, skade adult: voksen ostracized: frosset ud rehabilitate me: undskylde mig metaphorically: i billeder, metaforisk concede: indrømme conciliatory: forsonende
ashamed of what I had done. But it didn’t damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn’t actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage. As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests. “Oh dear, it’s just a misunderstanding. Amy was speaking metaphorically – right, Amy? You didn’t actually call Sophia ‘garbage.’” “Um, yes, I did. But it’s all in the context,” I tried to explain. “It’s a Chinese immigrant thing,” “But you’re not a Chinese immigrant,” somebody pointed out. “Good point,” I conceded. “No wonder it didn’t work” I was just trying to be conciliatory. In fact, it had worked great with Sophia. The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem
Chinese School C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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tiptoe: liste, gå uden om eating disorder: spiseforstyrrelse toast: udbringe en skål for A: karakter svarende til 12, bedste karakter mind-set: tænkemåde mediocre: middelmådig recital: fremlæggelse assume: gå ud fra, regne med strength: styrke fragility: skrøbelighed A-minus: karakter svarende til 10, næstbedste karakter praise: rose gasp: gispe B: middelkarakter, ca. 7 disapproval: utilfredshed inadequate: utilstrækkelig insecure: usikker disgrace: fiasko, skændsel aptitude: talent, evne curriculum: pensum grades: karakterer principal: rektor credentials: kvalifikationer devastated: totalt knust
unimaginable – even legally actionable – to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to ‘their daughters, “Hey fatty – lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of “health” and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her ‘beautiful and incredibly competent.” She later told me that made her feel like garbage.) Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, “You’re lazy: All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out. I’ve thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets. First, I‘ve noticed the Western parents are extremely anxious about their children’s self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently. For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child “stupid,” “worthless,” or “a disgrace.” Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child’s grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher’s credentials. If a Chinese child gets a B – which would never happen – there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese
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mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A. Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish, and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.) Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it’s probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it’s true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating, and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud. By contrast, I don’t think most Westerners
substandard: under standarden; dårlig excoriate: kritisere skånselsløst excel: klare sig godt, udmærke sig inflated: oppustet lavish: øse ud over; overdænge owe: skylde Confucian: kinesisk filsofi filial piety: sønlig kærlighed sacrifice: ofre trench: skyttegrav grueling: udmattende tutor: undervise interrogate: udspørge repay: betale tilbage obey: adlyde indebted to: stå i gæld til foist sth on sby: prakke nogen noget på provide for: sørge for override: underkende, sætte til side Villager: landsbyboer – birolle i et stykke rehearsal: prøve
have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. Jed actually has the opposite view. “Children don’t choose their parents,” he once said to me. “They don’t even choose to be born. It’s parents who foist life on their kids, so it’s the parents’ responsibility to provide for them. Kids don’t owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids.” This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent. Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children’s own desires and preferences. That’s why Chinese daughters can’t have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can’t go to sleep-away camp. It’s also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, “I got a part in the school play! I’m Villager Number Six. I’ll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I’ll also need a ride on weekends.” God help any Chinese kid who tried that one. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that Chinese parents don’t care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It’s just an entirely different parenting model. I think of it as Chinese, but I know a lot of non-Chinese parents – usually from Korea, India, or Pakistan – who have a very similar mind-set, so it may be an immigrant thing. Or maybe it’s the combination of being an immigrant and being from certain cultures. C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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Activities Focus: Culture and Learning •
Sum up the Chinese mother’s program as to upbringing and schooling. What is she opposed to in the Western way of dealing with children and young people?
•
Prepare a panel discussion in which a group of Chinese mothers explain their viewpoints in front of a Danish audience.
•
How would you like to empower your own children?
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Write a letter to your future children in which you set up your program for their upbringing. Be inspired by the two sets of values inherent in Western and Chinese culture.
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Malcolm Gladwell:
Caroline Sacks David and Goliath (2013)
OPTAKT Caroline Sacks har lige siden barndommen været interesseret i naturen. Hun elskede at iagttage insekter og andre dyr med sit forstørrelsesglas. Hendes store idol var den kvindelige dykker Eugenie Clark, og hun drømte tidligt om at studere naturvidenskab. Hun tog ekstra kurser på college i naturvidenskab og matematik, medens hun gik på high school. Da hun som voksen med meget flotte karakterer skal vælge universitet, står valget mellem “Maryland” og “Brown”, det sidste et meget prestigefyldt universitet på Rhode Island. Hun vælger Brown som hun anser for at være det sted der giver hende de største chancer. Men studiet udvikler sig ikke som det drømmestudium, hun havde forventninger om. Malcolm Gladwell har en forklaring på, hvad der skete for hende efter sin samtale med hende.
1. The trouble for Caroline Sacks began in the spring of her freshman year, when she enrolled in chemistry. She was probably taking too many courses, she realizes now, and doing too many extracurricular activities. She got her grade on her third midterm exam, and her heart sank. She went to talk to the professor. “He ran me through some exercises, and he said, ‘Well, you have a fundamental deficiency in some of these concepts, so what I would actually recommend is that you drop the class, not bother with the final exam, and take the course again next fall.”‘ So she
freshman: førsteårsstuderende extracurricular: valgfri fag sophomore: andetårsstuderende deficiency: mangel på viden concepts: begreber a low B: karaktererne går fra A (højest) til F (lavest) – disheartening: deprimerende
did what the professor suggested. She retook the course in the fall of her sophomore year. But she barely did any better. She got a low B. She was in shock. “I had never gotten a B in an academic context before,” she said. “I had never not excelled. And I was taking the class for the second time, this time as a sophomore, and most of the kids in the class were firstsemester freshmen. It was pretty disheartening.” She had known when she was accepted to Brown that it wasn’t going to be like high school. It couldn’t be. She wasn’t going to be the C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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curve buster: stræber inadequacy: utilstrækkelighed miserable: ulykkelig abandonment: opgivelse mourn: sørge over agonize: være ked af, lide under pride: stolthed bugs: insekter
smartest girl in the class anymore – and she’d accepted that fact. “I figured, regardless of how much I prepared, there would be kids who had been exposed to stuff I had never even heard of. So I was trying not to be naive about that.” But chemistry was beyond what she had imagined. The students in her class were competitive. “I had a lot of trouble even talking with people from those classes,” she went on. “They didn’t want to share their study habits with me. They didn’t want to talk about ways to better understand the stuff that we were learning, because that might give me a leg up.” In spring of her sophomore year, she enrolled in organic chemistry – and things only got worse. She couldn’t do it: “You memorize how a concept works, and then they give you a molecule you’ve never seen before, and they ask you to make another one you’ve never seen before, and you have to get from this thing to that thing. There are people who just think that way and in five minutes are done. They’re the curve busters. Then there are people who through an amazing amount of hard work trained themselves to think that way. I worked so hard and I never got it down.” The teacher would ask a question, and around her, hands would go up, and Sacks would sit in silence and listen to everyone else’s brilliant answers. “It was just this feeling of overwhelming inadequacy.” One night she stayed up late, preparing for a review session in organic chemistry. She was miserable and angry. She didn’t want to be working on organic chemistry at three in the morning, when all of that work didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere. “I guess that was when I started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t pursue this any further,” she said. She’d had enough. The tragic part was that Sacks loved science. As she talked about her abandonment of her first love, she mourned all the courses she would have loved to take but now never would – physiology, infectious disease, biology, math. In the summer after her sophomore year, she agonized over her decision: “When I was growing up, it was a subject of much pride to be able to say that, you know, ‘I’m a seven-year-old girl, and I love bugs! And I want to study them, and I read up on them all the time, and I draw them in my sketchbook and label all the different parts of them and talk about where they live and what they do.’ Later it was ‘I am so interested in people and how the human body works, and, isn’t this amazing?’ There is definitely a sort of pride that goes along with ‘I am a science girl,’ and it’s almost shameful for me to leave that behind and say, ‘Oh, well, I am going
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Mark Gertler: The Merry-Go-Round (1916) C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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goal: mål premed (pre-med) students: for at læse medicin skal man ofte tage forkurser i visse fag. rigorous: strengt med høje krav percentile: promille shatter: ødelægge be clueless: stå på bar bund deprivation: tab, at blive forbigået coined: skabt quiz: udspørge air corps: luftstyrke, luftvåben promote: forfremme people of ability: dygtige ansatte enlisted men: menige soldater
to do something easier because I can’t take the heat.’ For a while, that is the only way I was looking at it, like I have completely failed. This has been my goal and I can’t do it.” And it shouldn’t have mattered how Sacks did in organic chemistry, should it? She never wanted to be an organic chemist. It was just a course. Lots of people find organic chemistry impossible. It’s not uncommon for premed students to take organic chemistry over the summer at another college just to give themselves a full semester of practice. What’s more, Sacks was taking organic chemistry at an extraordinarily competitive and academically rigorous university. If you were to rank all the students in the world who are taking organic chemistry, Sacks would probably be in the 99th percentile. But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country – and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn’t stupid at all. “Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner.”
2 Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how Mack soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts. But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps. On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one 36
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of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn’t get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers – so you weren’t that unhappy. “Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity,” Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. “If he had earned a promotion, so had
promotion: forfremmelse rare: sjælden longevity: lang tid i tjenesten peers: ligestillede achievement: præstation conspicuous: bemærkelsesværdig rating: udnævnelse context: sammenhæng deprived: forbigået, snydt for noget exploration: nærmere undersøgelse profound: dybsindig puzzling: modsætningsfyldte suicide: selvmord
the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system.” Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally-by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?
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burden: byrde brilliant: dygtige, strålende ridiculous: latterlig abilities: evner self-concept: selvforståelse challenges: udfordringer crucial: helt afgørende, væsentlig pioneer: bringe frem for første gang selective school: eliteskole mixed: blandet prestigious: prestigefyldt incredibly: utroligt entrance examination: adgangsgivende eksamen measure: måle
Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school – except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class – are going to face a burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere. Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great. Students at “great” schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel? The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called – appropriately enough – the “Big Fish Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their class at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school. Students who would feel that they have mastered a subject at a good school can have the feeling that they are falling farther and farther behind in a really good school. And that feeling – as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be – matters. How you feel about your abilities – your academic “self-concept” – in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence. The Big Fish-Little Pond theory was pioneered by the psychologist Herbert Marsh, and to Marsh, most parents and students make their school choices for the wrong reasons. “A lot of people think that going to an academically selective school is going to be good,” he said. “That’s just not true. The reality is that it is going to be mixed.” He went on: “When I was living in Sydney, there were a small number of selective public schools that were even more prestigious than the elite private schools. The tests to get into them were incredibly competitive. So the Sydney Morning Herald – the big newspaper there – would always call me up whenever they were holding their entrance examinations. It would happen every year, and there was always this pressure to say something new. So finally I just said – and maybe I shouldn’t have – well, if you want to see the positive effects of elite schools on self-concept, you are measuring the wrong person. You should be measuring the parents.”
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3 What happened to Caroline Sacks is all too common. More than half of all American students who start out in science, technology, and math programs (or STEM, as they are known) drop out after their first or second year. Even though a science degree is just about the most valuable asset a young person can have in the modern economy, large numbers of would-be STEM majors end up switching into the arts, where academic standards are less demanding and the coursework less competitive. That’s the major reason that there is such a shortage of qualified Americaneducated scientists and engineers in the United States. At the time she was applying to college, Caroline Sacks had no idea she was taking that kind of chance with the thing she loved. Now she does. At the end of our talk, I asked her what would have happened if she had chosen instead to go to the University of Maryland – to be, instead,
common: almindeligt STEM: fællesbetegnelse for studier i “Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics” valuable: værdifuld asset: fordel, gode would –be majors: de der måske kunne tage en kandidateksamen switch into: skifte til the arts: humanistiske fag less: mindre demanding: krævende coursework: kurserne shortage of: mangel på scientist: videnskabsmand engineer: ingeniør
a Big Fish in a Little Pond. She answered without hesitation: “I’d still be in science.”
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Activities Focus: Competition in Science Studies
•
What was Caroline’s attitude to nature and science as a child?
•
Outline Caroline’s transition from High School to the University of Brown. Why does she give up her science studies?
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Explain what Gladwell means by using the expression: “The Big Fish – Little Pond Effect.”
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Comment on the lines: “How you feel about your abilities – your academic “self-concept” – in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks.”
•
Compare the mindset of the Chinese mother to the advice given by Gladwell.
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How do you tackle difficult tasks and challenges in a competitive group (class, party, friends, family…)?
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Rachel Gould:
Thucydides British Short Stories of Today (1987)
OPTAKT I novellen Thucydides er fortælleren en 17 årig pige, der beretter om en periode i sin gymnasietid. Hun læser, ret usædvanligt, græsk og går med begejstring op i et værk, skrevet af den gamle græske historiker og general Thucidydes, ca. 400 før vores tidsregning. Han har skrevet meget detaljeret om Den Peloponnesiske Krig, en af tidens store krige, og den unge pige fascineres af hans sprog og den mængde af informationer, han giver, selv om han også udelader vigtige sider af emnet. Men på andet år får fortælleren problemer. Hun kommer ind i en bølge af forsømmelser og skyld. Læs, hvordan denne krise udvikler sig og gå på sporet af, hvad der sker for hende som studerende og som menneske.
I expect you’d have mitched off school if you’d have been doing Thucydides. You thought nobody did Greek any more, I suppose? Well, when I was doing my A-levels, some people still did: two of us, to be precise, and Thucydides was what we started on. I don’t know how much you know about Thucydides. I had a love-hate relationship with him (that’s a cliché, I know, and perhaps I’ll cut it out later, but at the moment I’m just trying to tell you the story). The Penguin translation I was using
mitch off: pjække A-levels: valgfag (gymnasium HF) crib: oversættelse obscure: svær at forstå inordinately: overdrevent contradictory: modsigende Edward VI: engelsk konge( 1537-1553) diary: dagbog
as a crib had something in the introduction about his style being obscure. He certainly was hellishly difficult at times. If he’d been alive today, he’d have been the sort of man – an academic probably – who speaks in inordinately long sentences, and who forgets half-way through quite what the structure of his sentence is, so that it ends in a way which is totally contradictory to the beginning. All very well, you might think? Yes, but he wasn’t speaking, he was writing, so why didn’t he correct himself afterwards? I never quite figured it out. But on the other hand he was a fascinating man. I don’t know whether you’ve seen Edward VI’s diary in the British Museum, the one C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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cargo: læs af varer barrel: tønde vessel: skib cavalry: ryttere hoplite: soldater shield: skjold stake: sætte pæle ned disgrace: falde i unåde exiled: forvist gloss over: gå let hen over gist: det væsentlige
who was Elizabeth’s brother – I think he was sixteen when he died? Well, it’s full of figures, statistics I mean: lists of all the cargoes coming into London with all the details of the number of barrels of salt fish and ballast and the tonnage of each vessel. He obviously had a passion for detail. I’m telling you this because Thucydides was the same. When you read about the battles in his War, you always knew how many people were on each side, how many were cavalry and how many hoplites, and what sort of shields they had, so you could have made a film about it, there was so much information. If he could find out the exact details from people who were in the battle, he gave them to you. And if he couldn’t find out exactly, he made them up, so they would fit in. I don’t think that matters, do you? (Some people did. They said this was history, and history shouldn’t be made up. But I had a good answer to that: that the Greek for history is the same as the Greek for story, which is true.) And then, if you’re a girl – I am, and I never wanted to be – it’s useful to find out how you stake a harbour-bottom to sabotage an incoming enemy fleet, and things of that sort. I became very interested in military tactics. Thucydides was a general himself at the beginning of the war, so you know he gets things right. Later on he was disgraced in some strange way which he never makes clear, and was exiled from Athens – that’s one of the few details he doesn’t give you. So that’s why I liked and didn’t like Thucydides. I don’t think the problems started in my first A-level year. I worked very hard – of course I was doing other subjects as well as Greek. In the evenings after I came back from school we had tea and watched some television and then I went up to my room. I don’t remember working on my other subjects, but I remember Thucydides. I had my book case on my left, opposite the bed, and my desk – only a table, really – next to that, with my volume of Thucydides and a vocabulary book and the two huge volumes of the Liddell and Scott dictionary. I worked slowly. At the beginning I was prepared to gloss over difficulties. I knew there was a lot I didn’t really understand, and my vocabulary was small, and sometimes I had to look up almost every word in a sentence. But as I got better, I became more perfectionist. I would worry over a sentence for minutes, half an hour perhaps, until I not only understood the gist of what he was saying, but the relationship, grammatically, of every word to every other word in the sentence. And that was difficult, because Thucydides was so obscure, as I said before. Sometimes my father offered to help me, but I
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refused. He taught classics at the University, he was clever and a patient teacher, but I wanted to convince myself that I could cope with Greek on my own, without help.
mull over: gruble over interpretation: fortolkning guilty: skyldig
So that was how the first year went. It was in the second year that things started going wrong. Not right at the beginning of the year, I think, but after a time I’d got myself into a hell of a mess. I had boy problems too, but I won’t go into details over that. Like Thucydides I shall leave something out. It’s always more interesting, don’t you think, when a writer leaves something out? You can mull it over and wonder, and then it gives the critics a chance to have their different interpretations. Anyway, somehow I stopped working. It happened like this. One day, I hadn’t had time to prepare any Greek. I felt guilty, and I didn’t go to my class. Then the next class, I felt even guiltier – not only had I not prepared
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previous: forrige class: timer assembly hall: aula mitch off: pjække suffice it to say: det er nok.. Dylan Thomas: walisisk digter ( 1914-1953) literally: bogstaveligt talt Tolstoy: russisk forfatter ( 1828-1910) marshy: marsk-lignende crooked: kroget peninsula: halvø oil refinery: olie raffinaderi plume of smoke: røgsky
my Greek, but I hadn’t gone to the previous class, and those two things together were harder to explain than either of them separately. So I didn’t go to that class either. And so it went on, until it had escalated to such a point that I had to avoid my classics teacher in the school assembly hall, in the corridors, everywhere. So then I had to mitch off school. Perhaps it’s not called mitching where you live, but that’s what it’s called in Swansea. It means staying away from school without having a letter from your parents to say that you were ill, or had to go to the dentist, or were looking so pale that your mother thought you surely would be ill, if she insisted on your taking that horrid long bus journey. I just mitched. Perhaps I should have mentioned before that I lived in Swansea, but it’s not really central to the story. Suffice it to say that it’s where Dylan Thomas went to school – you probably know that. But now I’d better give a brief description of where we lived, because that will explain a few things. You probably think that descriptions are boring. I do too, but you see, I want to be a writer later on, and writers always give descriptions at some point in the narrative, and so I think I should practise, and you’ll have to bear with me. When we came to Swansea, we looked at all sorts of different houses – old ones in the old parts, ones near the University and ones out beyond the Mumbles on Gower Peninsula, but what we chose was a hole in the ground. I mean that literally. By the time we came to move, the house was more or less finished, but when we first went to look at the site it was just a hole with a bulldozer in it amongst lots of other holes. So why did we choose it? Because of the view. If I were Tolstoy I could wax lyrical about that view. The house was almost at the brow of a hill which led on to a wild, marshy patch of common land where sometimes, in the very early morning, you saw foxes, and then to a golf course. The other way, towards the south, it looked over Swansea bay to the crooked Mumbles peninsula with its lighthouse and the coast of Devon beyond, and on the other side out towards the enormous Port Talbot oil refinery which grew plumes of smoke in the day time, and brilliant orange flames in the night, burning off the waste gases. It wasn’t a view you would call sublime, I suppose, but it had something of everything, and it was never boring to look at. The sea was the best thing. In towns you tell the weather and the seasons by the greenness of plants and the times that flowers grow. But in Swansea you told the weather from the mood of the sea as well. The sea is more extreme. Sometimes an intense blueness with tiny foam-
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caps to each wave, but sometimes a thick angry oily grey, and enormous waves breaking over the sea wall at Mumbles and flooding the fishermen’s cottages. I didn’t realize how much I loved the sea until I left. Then down the street and round the corner from the house was the park. It had been the grounds of a large house at the bottom of the park which now belonged to the University. It was a strange park, a bit fantastical. The people from the house must have had a good headgardener, a man with a bizarre imagination. At the top, nearest our house,
bizarre: mærkelig, bizar daffodil: påskelilje violet: viol luscious: frodig folly: ruin incongruent: mærkeligt, som ikke passer til omgivelserne slope: skråning ridiculous: latterligt to get into a muddle: få problemer lazy: doven
was an area of dogs’ graves, about ten of them, all labelled with their names and dates, with daffodils and violets growing round them in the spring. Then there was a long wide sweep of grass that ran straight down the hill to the sea road. On one side was the big house, on the other a wood, and beyond that an area with a curious winding stream planted thickly with rhododendrons that grew luscious jungle flowers of red and white and dark pink. In one place there was a folly, and in another a sort of Chinese pagoda with a Chinese bridge crossing a pond covered with water lilies. Nothing could have been more incongruous in a park in Swansea, and it was one of my favourite places. I said that this description was going to help you understand how things happened, and this is why. Every morning we walked through that park down the grass slope to the sea road where we waited for the bus to school. We is myself and my brothers and sister. I forgot to tell you until now that I had any brothers or sisters – it didn’t seem necessary because this story is really about me, and a little about my father. But I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t an only child, in case you thought in that ridiculous Freudian way that it was because I was an only child that I worked so hard and let the work get on top of me and then had to mitch off school. So usually we walked together and caught the bus together, but sometimes one or other of us went early, to play football before school started, or copy someone’s homework if we hadn’t had time to do it the night before, or it had been too difficult. When I got into this dreadful muddle at school it didn’t seem odd to any of them that I started getting up a bit earlier and going off to catch an earlier bus. In fact, that isn’t what I was doing. I walked down to the park gates, turned right just inside the fence and walked to the Chinese pagoda. If it was sunny I sat on the steps leading down to the pool, and if it was raining I sat inside the pagoda. Sometimes I spent the whole morning there reading. You mustn’t think that I was lazy, and that that was why I mitched. It was just that C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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transition: overgang puberty: pubertet adulthood: at blive voksen harbinger: varsel lawn: græsplæne waterlogged: stod næsten under vand moulds: skimmel slug: snegl jam-jar: syltetøjsglas
Thucydides was so obscure. I said just now that I want to be a writer, and probably already then I had an idea that that was what I wanted to be, so I read voraciously, especially poetry. But if it was very cold, I couldn’t bear a whole morning in the pagoda, and I timed on my watch, carefully, the times when everyone should have left the house – my brothers and sister to my school, my mother to the junior school where she taught, and my father to the University, plus half an hour for all eventualities (the car breaking down, or someone oversleeping). Then I went back up through the park to the house, let myself in and spent the rest of the day in comfort in my room. Well, this is where we get to the main point of the story, where you will see how indirectly Thucydides was the cause of my discovering something awful. If he hadn’t made his Peloponnesian War so difficult to read, I don’t suppose I ever would have discovered, and if I hadn’t discovered I probably would not have done a lot of things I did afterwards. Because the discovery made me change my views about a great many things. If you were going to be Freudian about things, you would probably say that it caused my transition from puberty to adulthood. And everyone knows how painful that transition is. It was late spring by this time, but in Swansea the spring, instead of bringing the first fine weather and being the harbinger of summer, was often the beginning of a rainy season that I sometimes thought couldn’t be much worse than the monsoons. As the alarm went off in the morning you were immediately aware of the constant sound of water, falling from the sky, pouring down the gutters and the drains and in streams down the road. The lawns in front and behind the house were water-logged, the trees sprouted moulds on their trunks, and in the park it was difficult to avoid the slugs there were so many. On this particular morning the rain was so heavy I considered not leaving the house at all, but that would have been dangerous, and I got myself up and to the park in the end. I don’t know why, but when I got back to the house, my father’s car was still in the drive. Perhaps I hadn’t allowed the full extra half an hour – it was so wet and I was so cold. The only thing to do was to wait in the garage until he left, and that’s what I did. It was a case of making the best of a bad job. Some people’s garages are so neat you could quite happily live in them, but ours wasn’t one of those. The old book case of my grandfather’s, with its jam-jars full of rusting nails and screws, tins of oil and coils of fuse-wire, was the neatest thing in it. The rest was a
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chaotic jumble – the lawn-mower and the step-ladder, tools and a flat tyre – and there was hardly enough light coming through the one low window to read by. So I simply sat, listening to the rushing rain, and through that for the scraping of the front door against the metal door-sill, which would signal my father’s departure. After almost half an hour the rain seemed to ease off a little, and then the door scraped and I heard the clicking of my father’s shoes – he had recently taken to wearing a pair of old-fashioned
jumble: rod ease off: stilne af miserable: elendig things were coming to a head: “krisen spidsede til” dismal: trist remonstrate: bebrejde lecture: skælde ud slightly: en smule in repentance of: idet jeg fortrød
black face-up shoes, with metal half-moons at the back of the heel to stop them wearing down. But then as I stood up and tried to rub the pins and needles out of my legs, I thought I heard other footsteps. I probably wouldn’t have been sure – the rain was still swirling down the gutters – but then I heard voices. One was my father’s; the other a woman’s voice, not my mother’s. ‘Get in,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you to the bus-stop.’ ‘Couldn’t you take me all the way? I’ve got a class at eleven and the weather’s filthy.’ ‘Sorry. We might be seen. You really shouldn’t have come here either. It was a stupid thing to do.’ ‘I had to. I was miserable after yesterday evening and I thought you might ...’ Her voice trailed off, the doors slammed, and after some damp rumblings the engine started up and the car reversed up the drive and then down the hill. The quietness of the rain flowed slowly back and I stared blankly at the rust on the back of the garage door. I thought of my mother starting on the third lesson of the day on the other side of the town. It was at the end of that week that the school telephoned my parents to tell them that I hadn’t been to school for some weeks. I must have suspected that things were coming to a head. I had gone to bed with a slight temperature and the beginnings of a cold, a real one, but one which stemmed not so much from sitting in the damp garage as from my state of mind, which was as dismal as the weather. My parents came up separately to talk to me. My mother remonstrated quietly, and my father lectured me slightly. I cried. He thought I was crying about Thucydides, in repentance for the work I hadn’t done. But I was crying about him. I was seeing things in a different perspective, and Thucydides didn’t seem so much of a problem as he had before.
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Activities Focus: Muddling School •
Sum up the life of the 17-year-old narrator.
•
Compare this story with that of Caroline Sacks. Pay attention to similarities and differences.
•
Search for explanations as to why the 17-year-old girl drops out of school.
•
How would you advise her to deal with her new problem and reestablish her joy in life and studies.
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Butler and Hope:
Revision Strategy and Exam Manage Your Mind (1995)
OPTAKT Eksamen er noget de fleste studerende ser hen til – og frygter. På den ene side er det en lettelse, fordi den sætter et punktum for en opgave, et skoleår eller afslutter en hel uddannelse. På den anden side rummer den frygt, fordi det er en test på, om man behersker det nødvendige stof og færdigheder. Det er derfor godt at samle op og repetere hen ad vejen, så eksamen bliver en naturlig afslutning på et forløb og ikke den angstfremkaldende prøve som det er for mange. I de følgende tekster gives der både vejledning i at repetere, huske og klare nerverne til eksamen.
Unlike a computer, we rarely remember something we have learned just once. We tend to forget what we have just learned (as illustrated in the graphic figure page 50) unless we rehearse and use the material or revise our learning. Adopting an efficient revision strategy is one of the best ways of improving your memory.
revision: repetition recipe: recept in plain language: med rene ord, sagt ligeud rehearse: øve ever-increasing intervals: med længere og længere mellemrum
What is an efficient revision strategy It turns out that the most efficient revision strategy, when you are learning facts or want to remember a large number of details, is to revise very soon after the original learning and then to space out additional revision periods further and further apart. This applies whether you are a student or whether you are learning bus routes in a new town, a complicated recipe, or how to set the video recorder. In plain language, if you recite to yourself, or go over in your mind’s eye, something you want to remember, as soon as possible after learning it, you will find it easier to remember later, and the more often you rehearse something, the better it will withstand the test of time, Your rehearsals can then be spaced at ever-increasing intervals. An efficient revision strategy for everyone is one which leads to your remembering most after spending the least possible amount of time learning. C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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AMOUNT REMEMBERED
100%
50%
20 min
24 hours
1 hour TIME
How quickly we forget material we have just read.
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A revision strategy for exams If you are studying for exams, then it is best to plan your revision well in advance. Do not panic, however, if your exam is already looming and you have only just picked up this book. There are still some things you can do to help. First, we will consider the situation in which the exam is still some way off and you can plan a revision strategy. The elements of such a strategy are as follows: 1. Start with an overview: What are your strong points? Where are your gaps ??? knowledge? Where should you devote your energies? It is never possible to know everything. Think more about how to make use of what you do know than about how to learn a large number of new things. 2. Plan a timetable for your revision. Do not be too ambitious. Make the amount of time you can spend revising realistic, and don’t expect to revise too much in any given time. 3. Plan a revision of the revision. In other words, plan to cover your material in revision once, and then to revise everything again in about a quarter the time it originally took to revise. You might even revise a third time – in a given shorter time. 4. You will always cover less in a given time than you originally estimated. Make sure that there is some slack in your timetable. End your revision some time before the exam (as much as two weeks before if possible) so that there is time to read just when you fall behind schedule (this happens to everyone). If one part of the revision is taking a lot longer than you thought it would, cut your losses and move on to the next topic. Use the “slack” in your timetable to return to the problematic topic. 5. Condense your notes at each revision so that you end up with brief notes you can revise just before each examination. 6. If possible practice answering examination questions, and under conditions as close to those of the exam as you can devise. For multiple-choice examinations, practice answering relevant multiple-choice questions. For essay papers, practice writing and giving yourself the same time allowed during the exam.
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keep your nose to the grindstone: holde sig til emnet (grindstone: slibesten) distraction: forstyrrelse coherently: sammenhængende muddled: forvirret, rodet anxiety: angst arousal: vækkelse improve: blive bedre
Every exam is to some extent a game and you will improve by practicing playing the game. Once you have a basic knowledge of the subject, then how well you do in the exam will depend more on your examination technique than on your extra knowledge. Indeed, too much knowledge causes its own problems because extra knowledge may enable you to see complexities in the questions which the examiners do not intend. If your teachers cannot provide opportunities to practice then form a group with your fellow students, or do it on your own. Answer some questions under examination conditions, and then discuss your answers with others if you are part of a group. This provides examination practice as well as extra learning and revision. If the exam is imminent and you have not previously planned a revision strategy, the key is to use your remaining revision time well. The danger is that you will feel so anxious about the exam that you will waste the time you do have. Work out the number of hours you still have for revision. Decide on the best use of these. Would it be best to use the time practicing exam questions, or revising your notes? Do you have time to browse through your notes? Or to highlight important bits? Could you write a series of condensed notes, perhaps using spider diagrams? Do not forget the fundamentals of good study, such as getting down to work and rewarding yourself; and, however the exam goes, give yourself a treat after it.
Examination nerves It is normal to worry before an exam – the problem is how to manage the worry so that it works for you rather than against you; so that it helps you to focus your attention rather than allowing it to wander over alarming possibilities; to keep your nose to the grindstone rather than escape into endless distractions: to think quickly and coherently rather than become muddled and confused. Anxiety, even in quite high degrees, can be extremely useful both when you are preparing for an exam and during the exam itself, so anxiety in itself is nothing to worry about. Thinking of it as “arousal” instead of anxiety may make it more understandable and acceptable, and learning how to keep it within the effective range for you may well be useful. This is something that can be learned, and that improves with practice. First, it helps to know what to expect. Anxiety may make it hard to sleep, filling your mind with thoughts about all the things that could go 52
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wrong (none of the topics you studied come up; your mind goes blank; you answer the wrong questions; you misunderstand what the examiners want of you; you forget everything you ever knew). Thinking these things does not make them true – they are just reflections of the pressure you are putting yourself under to do well, so do not be tempted to believe that they are likely to happen just because they are in your mind. Thinking you are stupid does not make you stupid – it makes you miserable or angry. Anxiety about exams also increases the chances of making
topics: emne tempt: friste miserable: ulykkelig prediction: forudsigelse increase: blive større decrease: blive mindre impending: nært forestående prime: præparere, lægge en grund for lid: låg exaggerated: overdrevet shortcomings: mangler, fejl assessment: vurdering
unrealistic predictions: that you will fail completely, that your career will be ruined, that your family will never forgive and forget. Research studies have shown that these unrealistic predictions increase the nearer the exam comes and decrease dramatically the moment the examination is over. Just before an exam, it is common to predict not only that the exam will go wrong for you, but that everything else in life will also go wrong: your relationships, your finances, your health, and even events in the outside world – airplanes seem more likely to crash, earthquakes more likely to happen, and so on. One reason for this is that the heightened level of anxiety produced by the impending exam has “primed” other information in your mind concerning things that could go wrong, as if they were all stored in the same box, and facing the examination has taken the lid off. The most important message you can give yourself is this: these predictions are exaggerated and unrealistic. They are another sign of anxiety, and you do not need to believe them but rather should ignore them. Anxiety about exams also tends to polarize the difference between students and their teachers, sometimes to the extent that it feels like a battle between the two – as if they, the examiners, are against us, the students. Teachers once they have turned into examiners are suddenly supposed to be on the lookout for your mistakes and errors, to be lying in wait to catch you out, to have an eye only for your shortcomings and not for your strengths. This is another “distorted” way of thinking that is common when anxiety is high, and it ignores the important fact that teachers and examiners are basically pleased and proud when their students do well. The better the students do, the better it reflects on their teaching, They actually remain on the same side as the student throughout, and can probably also remember just how it felt to be taking exams, and how easy it is to suppose that such an assessment reflects C U LT U R E A N D L E A R N I N G
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relief: lettelse let down: svigtet rudderless: “uden ror”, uden mål og mening hurdle: forhindring purposefulness: målrettethed in limbo: i et tomrum exhausted: udmattet sources: kilder chucked: forkastet temporary: midlertidig setback: tilbageslag, modgang
one’s qualities as a person and not just one’s performance in an exam on a particular subject. Some people can bask in relief the moment the exam is over, but others feel let down and rudderless. An exam is rather like a hurdle that you cannot see beyond, as if life stopped at that point, which is of course absurd. But the purposefulness provided by preparing for an exam can feel good. So losing it can leave you feeling purposeless and lost. At the same time the result of the exam is unknown, leaving you in limbo, in a state of uncertainty. The more exclusively your life before the exam is focused round the exam, the worse the post-examination blues are likely to be. One solution is to make sure that you keep time beforehand for the pleasures you usually enjoy: talking with friends, going to the cinema, listening to music, and so on. These pleasures will remain with you afterwards. If they feel somewhat blunted, then do not withdraw from them, but recognize that you may be tired – even exhausted – and that until you have had some rest, and some recreation, they may not be so enjoyable as once they were. Finally: What if you fail the exam? This is where it helps to apply the 100-year rule. Who will remember in 100 years? Or even in 2 years? What do other people do who fail exams? What other sources of pleasure and success do you have? Seeing the exam as a hurdle does not mean that you are running a race after which those who do not get a prize are chucked. Are people who always pass exams any happier than those who do not? These are the questions to ask yourself, in order to see the failure for what it is; a temporary setback but not a judgment on you as a person.
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Activities Focus: Anxiety •
“An efficient revision strategy for everyone is one which leads to your remembering most after spending the least possible amount of time learning”. Be inspired by this quotation from the text and catalogue the ideas you personally find useful in order to achieve better memory as well as efficiency in your studies. Experiment with your new strategies in subjects in which you wish to excel.
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Form groups of 3 or 4 and discuss your exam experiences. Start with telling each other your best and worst experience. Pay attention to the elements which constituted the good /bad experience
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Read the text “Examination Nerves” aloud in the group and find out what is said about “Anxiety”. Write down on flash cards phrases from the text (quotations) that might be useful to remember.
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Write a letter to a friend who suffers from examination nerves and advise him or her on how to deal with the problems.
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Make a role play of an exam and perform it in class.
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I bogen The Magic of Learning ser vi på læring som et slags magisk univers, hvor nye livsformer dannes. Gennem læringens evne til at skabe oplevelse, forandring og livskraft sættes den studerende i stand til, ikke kun at navigere i tekster og studier her og nu, men også på lang sigt. Bogens undertitel “Empowerment in English” understreger, at arbejdet med sprog, læring og analyse har et bredere perspektiv, der udvikler styrke hos den enkelte studerende. Med nyttige skills i bagagen og målrettede arbejdsmetoder opbygges faglighed og reel self-esteem. Mange aspekter, som er nødvendige for unge, når de sætter kursen i studielivet. Se også lru.dk/magicoflearning
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