I hope everyone remembers that we are going to see “Moon Palace” in the theatre in Delmenhorst on the 24th of February.

As I have to pay our tickets in advance, please bring € 8,- to school tomorrow.

After a thorough analysis of the inaugural address of President Barack H. Obama (2009), compare his speech to one of these:

• Abraham Lincoln (1861/1865)
• Woodrow Wilson (1913/1917)
• John F. Kennedy (1961)
• James E. “Jimmy” Carter jr. (1977)
• Ronald W. Reagan (1981)
• Bill Clinton (1993/1997)
• George W. Bush jr. (2001/2005)

All to be found here at the New York Times or at Bartleby. Some of them can also be found as videos on youtube.

Create your own word cloud(s) for your two speeches using www.wordle.net to help you illustrate your comparison as you present it to the course.

If you need any help with stylistic devices and want to know more about speeches in America, check this great site: American Rhetoric.

Getting ready for the final exams!

While you are discussion the article we read in school today, you may also want to have a look at this outrageous piece of news: “Breast cancer gene-free baby due” which gives interesting information about a baby that was born today as I just heard on the news! Again, something quite interesting for us. Have a look.

Also, do not forget to bring you SiZa and maybe do the first few pages to get into it again.

@home for Monday:

• Work on Sicher ins Zentralabitur pp. 80-82; task p. 82 d) could also be done on John and Lenina with a comparison of those two with Romeo and Juliet for example.

Presentations to be ready for presentation on Monday:

• Shakespeare (Svenja + Laura)
• Mass Media (Carolin + Dagny)
• Totalitarianism (Florian + Steffen)
• Industrial Revolution/Industrialisation (Kai + Gerrit)

Also on Monday:

• Exams will be returned and oral/semester grades will be made public

@home 1: Do the last preparations for your podcast so that you only have to do finishing touches in the first lesson on Monday. You are expected to finish recording your podcast on Monday in the first lesson, as this is the only one we can use F1. So bring all the music and sound effects you need, make all the notes beforehand, and bring your headsets again.

@home 2: Choose five of the Post-Reading Tasks (copy) and be prepared to present your answers on them on Monday in the second lesson.

You all watched your specific movie and I want you to do some preparations at home for the final step on Friday. Check the names of the characters on the internet to find out whether they mean anything. Prepare the background of the movie so that you and your group of three can work on your podcast in F1 on Friday. If you own one (and my guess is quite a number of you do) please bring your headset to school with you.

The technical side of preparation involves you reading this tutorial on the software you are going to use: http://www.lehrer-online.de/dyn/bin/563870-563973-2-audacity-tutorial_sie.pdf Maybe you’ll even download the software and try it at home first. Easy to use and a lot of fun.

If you still asking yourself what the heck a podcast is, have a look around this page and check some of them: http://protopage.com/schoolmaster#Untitled/Podcasts

If you need inspiration listen to the Auricher Dystopian Podcasts here: http://donathlk.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/sep-29th-oct2nd/

We dealt with that speech of Mr. Obama and now it is your turn. Use the pages 77 – 80 in SiZa to get some help on how it is done and then write your own speech using stylistic devices to make your speech more appealing. You get to choose from these two possible contexts:

a) You are Mustapha Mond. Prepare a speech in which you present the system of the BNW as the perfect system. Think about the situation in which you are holding this speech as well as who is your audience. It could be in front of a committee in before the BNW to convince them to create the BNW, it could be on the Falklands or in Iceland in front of those outsiders in an attempt to convince them to join forces with the government – and maybe get someone like Helmholtz to become a controller, it could also be in front of a group of Alpha to reensure their belief in the system.

b) You are John the Savage. Pepare a speech in which you present your doubts of the system of the BNW, in which strongly argue against it. Remember that John would use a specific set of values as well as language.

Additional:

If anyone is interested, here are the Spoof New York Times (careful it has a size of roughly eight MB) and its website as well as a link to youtube with a mentioning of the newspaper in the news (see how unimaginative those newspeople are). The question everybody seems to ask is, why anyone (a group called the “Yes Men” admitted responsibility) would publish such a newspaper with as many as 1.2 million copies. Make up your own mind before you search through the internet about what they had to say about it.

We worked on Obama’s Victory Speech from November 5th, 2008. We got started with the analysis and will continue with it on Monday.

In preparation please to SiZa pp. 11 – 14 bearing in mind the Obama speech. Also, please have a look at the speech again for its stylistic devices and contents after you did these exercises.

If you want to listen to the speech or even see it check these links:

See and listen

Listen only (mp3)

It seems I have caught something nasty and will not be able to attend course lessons on Monday. Still, this nothing to panic about, I have got something you can do to kill the time and get on with your studies on Brave New World.

As a homework for the lesson on Friday please do the following tasks in writing/in the blog:

1) Familiarise yourselves with the terms “utopia” and “dystopia”. Explain in which category BNW falls and give reasons for your decision.

AND, if you haven’t done so already, work on those chapter tasks and be prepared to write a quick post-reading comprehension test about the novel on Friday. Be sure you know what happens and especially WHO the people are we have been talking about for so many lessons!!

2) Ethical questions raised by BNW

We already talked about genetic engineering in detail and at least to some extent you used that knowledge in your exams, but I want you to consider what other developments Huxley wanted to warn about in BNW. Make a list of at least five trends that he critically dealt with in his novel. It might useful to get a bit of background information about the time he wrote that novel.

3) Write a personal review

Remember, personal reviews contain some facts about the author, information on the plot, a description of the main characters, an analysis of the ‘message’ of the novel (what does the author want to say?), and your personal opinion of the novel. Also remember that you usually do not quote from the novel in a review, do not spoil the end of it, and that you give your opinion in the end saying what you liked and what your disliked about it and whether and to whom you would recommend the novel.

Here are the citizen files that the different agents of the Department of Identity Supervision created, even though we haven’t seen all those presentations. A thanks again to those who already presented their performances: good work!

Bernard Marx

Helmholtz Watson

Lenina Crowne

the D.H.C.

Linda

John the Savage

Mustapha Mond

P.S.: Sarah-Marie’s and Silje’s graphic of Freud’s “Super-ego, ego, and id” will follow next week when I had time to add what we said about it concerning the novel.