Jasper Jones & symbols

Task one: please look at the collages slides.  Make sure you have asked two really thoughtful questions.  Nothing like "why is your name in the corner?"!!!!!!!!!!!!! [if you were away on Wednesday, then please make a collage (google drawing) showing images linked to Jasper Jones.  Then add it to the slideshow that has been shared with you (check your email)].

Task two: answer a question left for your slide really thoughtfully.  Include detailed examples and explanations, and show as much understanding of the text itself as possible.  Wherever possible, make links to the wider world, and how Jasper Jones represents other forgotten, ostracised and neglected teenagers in the world, how his code of honour functions for him, the place he finds sanctuary in, the gap between his world and those of Charlie and Eliza.

If you finish this and you have done a fantastic job, help someone else with their answers, or spend some time re-reading Jasper Jones.

Thursday 26 September 2019

Kia ora English Literature students
Ummmmm.... I am still too sick to come to school today.  I looked on Hapara to see how you got on yesterday and there is no work there from anyone.  I made two resources that are the same as on yesterday's blog post and shared them straight into your ENL212 folders.  The idea is that you could write straight onto the one called "Greta Thunberg Unfamiliar texts practice."

So... today:
1. Can you finish the Greta Thunberg work from yesterday please.  If you could type it in, that would be great, so I could see how you are getting on when I plan tomorrow's lesson.
2. When you finish that, please can you either re-read Jasper Jones or spend some time revising language techniques (this resource is useful) or learning key quotes from Jasper Jones.

Unfamiliar text practice - Greta Thunberg speech to UN

ENL212 students - you have a printed copy of the speech transcript, plus you have a write-on copy of the questions in your ENL212 folders on google drive.

Greta Thunberg speech analysis - unfamiliar text practice

Your big question is: analyse how Thunberg develops a sense of urgency about climate action.

To prepare to answer this question, plan out answers to the following questions:

1. What is Thunberg’s key message to her audience?
2. What language choices does Thunberg make at the opening of her speech which shows her sense of power and links her to young people throughout the world?
3. Find examples of the following language features/techniques and for each one, explain what it emphasises or develops: parallel structure, alliteration, second person narrative, statistics, rhetorical question, threat, emotional appeal.
4. How does Thunberg finish her speech to maximise the sense of power of young people in the climate action challenge?

Once you have notes on the four questions above, you will be ready to write 3-4 paragraphs answering the main question: analyse how Thunberg develops a sense of urgency about climate action.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.

My message is that we'll be watching you. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Thank you.

 

Speech: task & preparation

Simon Sinek has a powerful argument for getting to the heart of why as a way of connecting our message to our audience.

Here is the speech task, which I have also smartshared into your ENL212 folders.

Revision work for Friday 23 August 2019: Unfamiliar texts & Jasper Jones

Jasper Jones

Task A
Here is a summary of the events in Jasper Jones (email me if for some reason this link doesn't work).  To build your familiarity with the key events, read this summary and then make a timeline to show the events in a simple visual graphic.

Task B
The destruction of Mr Lu's garden
Charlie spends a lot of time thinking and reading about the world, and trying to make sense of it.  But it is the practical action of the destruction of Mr Lu's garden which forces the people in Corrigan to make a decision about whether they want thugs to rule their town.

1. Describe the destruction of Mr Lu's garden and the attempted attack on Mr Lu himself in your own words.  You could do a brief summary, or write it as a newspaper report where you have collected statements from eye witness accounts, including Charlie, Mr Bucktin, the young thugs and the other neighbours.
2. What is Craig Silvey wanting us to understand about the young men who attacked Mr Lu?
3. Mr Lu's flower garden is a symbol of the man himself - quiet, very carefully tended, respectful of others, containing exotic beauty from another place that isn't Corrigan.  The garden is something that all passers by can enjoy, and gardening is something that many other Corrigan residents also enjoy.  When the garden is destroyed, something beautiful is destroyed that was bringing only pleasure to the world. This outrageous incident, and the physical violence towards Mr Lu, prompts people to bring plants around over the next few days to show sympathy.  See page 220:                     
4. On page 213 (copy with the forest on the front), Mr Bucktin describes Mick Thompson, the young man who attacked An Lu, as a coward and a fool.  "he's a man who's trapped in his own gutter." - can you explain this phrase in your own words?  Who else is "trapped in their own gutter" in the novel?  What strength is needed to get out of our own gutter, and how does Silvey show that this is possible in the novel?

Unfamiliar text

• Today we will carry on our work on the 2018 paper.  I have some resources to give you some new information to think about language techniques, but they are protected and stubbornly resistant to going on google drive.  So I have emailed the pdf to the class.  The information on metaphor is not all utterly needed at level two (you don't have to spend ages discussing tenor and vehicle in your 2.3 ansers), but it does give you a deeper insight into how metaphors work, and the idea of a weak or strong metaphor is useful. 

• I have also sent an email with a resource on symbolism.

• There are exemplars of answers on the NCEA English site.  

The miners' hall scene: language features, distress & ignorance

"From inside the hall, I heard a single scream, a crockery crash, the gasp of a crowd, then a sustained barrage of sobbing and screeching.  It was loud and unintelligible.  Heads turned."

Task #1: Annotate this quote, indicating what we hear, what we see, language features, contrast and effects.

Task #2: Analyse how Silvey uses language features to deepen our understanding of distress and ignorance in Corrigan with particular reference to the Miners' Hall meeting scene.

Vietnam war: local pressures in Corrigan

Part One
(page 7) Jeffrey's parents are Vietnamese, so he's ruthlessly bullied and belted about. ...But he takes it all astonishingly well, which has always eased my guilt, given that I'm never brave enough to intervene."

alliteration:
bullied/belted
sycophancy/spite
peach/pits

consonance:
wipe/slap

Do now: What does the quote above suggest about Charlie's reaction to racism at the time when we first meet him?  How does Silvey use language features to develop our understanding of Charlie?

Part Two:
(pp132 & 134)
Scene at the Miners Hall

Part Three:
(pp118-120)
"Some of my family got killed."

"It happened yesterday.  It was my ma's brother and his wife.  My aunt and uncle.  They won't tell me much more than that.  It happened in the village that she grew up in.  I don't know.  I think it was a bomb."

Jeffrey looks momentarily startled.  "Well, because there are bombs, Chuck.  It's a war.  It's pretty dangerous."

Charlie: "But they should be able to do something."

"I see him out the back door.  I know I should say something appropriate and comforting, but I can't think of what.  Words fail me.  Like they always fail me when I need them.  I just crimp my lips and look hopeless."

Jeffrey explains that his cousins are still alive but orphaned, and his parents want to bring them over to Australia but that is difficult.  Charlie says, "Really?  But why? They're orphans! They should be able to come here straightaway!"

"He scuttles off, his shoulders rounded slightly in a way I've not seen before."