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| Mystery and Melancholy Giorgio de Chirico |
Ideally, to stimulate and
hold the students’ interest you need a touch of suspense and a balanced mix of
science and art. It is not every day that I can strike gold in this endeavour,
but from time to time I come across some promising material such as a recent
item entitled How we Found Three
Poisonous Books in our Library on Conversation.
You could introduce your
topic by writing down
books poison colour
and then asking the
students to think of any possible ways to link the ideas. The speculation would
enhance the mystery around the forthcoming text.
To test some fine points
in syntax I turned some extracts from the text into a transformation exercise,
which the students had to do before they read the text. They then confirmed their
answers while they read the text.
I also gave them a
vocabulary exercise to do in order to practise the new words.
However, I often get this
niggling feeling that the students are not quite active in learning when they
simply perform tasks, but on the other hand I am aware of the fact that because
they are young they need some guidance in order to become independent learners.
To this end, I searched on
the internet for some related topics and came up with the following:
The mystery of Caravaggio's death solved at last –
painting killed him, The
Guardian
and
Oil paints that could kill: did Albrecht and Margret Durer
poison their customers with their paintings? Part I, By Dr. Elizabeth Garner and Joe Kiernan
Next, I devised some kind
of framework within which the students can prepare an oral presentation of each text and
assigned each to pairs of students. They had to meet up outside school and work
together on their presentation. I was pleasantly surprised by how well they
accomplished the task and how many questions arose out of doing this
independently.
I provide the copies of the
Student’s handouts here:
(Some Greek equivalents
are given by way of explanation for some lexical items. I am all for such shortcuts
when it comes to technical terms or words which it would take too long to
explain.)
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