Documentary about Monika Hertwig, daughter of notorious Plaszow concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth, and her meeting with Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, Holocaust survivor and Goeth’s former maid, in a search to learn more about her father.

The poem below is called Lost Generation and it’s by Jonathan Reed. Here’s it is:

I am part of a lost generation.
And I refuse to believe that
I can change the world.
I realize this may be a shock, but
“Happiness comes from within”
Is a lie, and
“Money will make me happy”
So in thirty years, I will tell my children
They are not the most important thing in my life.
My employer will know that
I have my priorities straight because
Work
Is more important than
Family
I tell you this:
Once upon a time
Families stayed together
But this will not be true in my era.
This is a quick fix society
Experts tell me
Thirty years from now, I will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of my divorce.
I do not concede that
I will live in a country of my own making.
In the future,
Environmental destruction will be the norm.
No longer can it be said that
My peers and I care about this Earth.
It will be evident that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic.
It is foolish to presume that
There is hope.

And all of this will come true unless we reverse it.

Lost Generation is a palindrome poem. The inspiration for this poem came from an Argentinian political advertisement, ‘The Truth’ by RECREAR.

Many teachers use The Lost Generation to teach tone.

Tone, in written composition, is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience. Tone is generally conveyed through the choice of words or the viewpoint of a writer on a particular subject.

Every written piece comprises a central theme or subject matter. The manner in which a writer approaches this theme and subject is the tone. The tone can be formal, informal, serious, comic, sarcastic, sad, and cheerful or it may be any other existing attitudes. Consider the following examples of tone:

• “I want to ask the authorities what is the big deal? Why do not they control the epidemic? It is eating up lives like a monster.”
• “I want to draw the attention of the concerned authorities toward damage caused by an epidemic. If steps were not taken to curb it, it will further injure our community”

The theme of both tone examples is the same. The only way we can differentiate between them is their separate tone. The tone in the first example is casual or informal while, it is more formal in the second.

An original animated version of Bradbury’s classic short story.

This animated version of this tale of technology and alienation was created in 2004.

We have been looking at similes and metaphors as part of our study of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Last week we looked at figurative language used in songs. This short video is good for revising some of the terms we studied.

In this video John Green Iexamines Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare. John delves into the world of Bill Shakespeare’s famous star-crossed lovers and examines what the play is about, its structure, and the context in which it was written.

As requested I have put the Term 2 task for your writing portfolios on Google Classroom. Any questions just message me. Hope you are all enjoying your holiday.

Great to read Shelby’s story in the ODT today.

Here is a sample if you didn’t see it, read the rest here. Read more from Cromwell College here and here.

You’re supposed to be able to tell a lot about someone from the way they react to a rainy day or tangled Christmas tree lights.We’ve never had to deal with the lights, but you’re always on edge when it rains; you can’t sit still for long and you keep peeking through the curtains to see if it’s stopped, even though we can still hear it drumming against the roof.

You told me once that when you were little, you would stay up all night when it rained because you couldn’t get to sleep, and I told you that when I was little I thought I could hear the rain singing and little fingers tapping in time on my window, and my mind stopped spinning.