SCC English

'Haiku' for the Exodus

2010-03-13T09:26:00.004Z

We're off today after exams end at lunchtime - both school and posting here resume on Thursday 18th, straight after the St Patrick's Day Exodus. So here's a way to sign off that's both colourful and pithy - another poem from the Images in Poetry series, this time the shortest we've posted, a haiku from Jack Cherry inspired by a painting by Jackson Pollock.

Haiku, by Jack Cherry

Dancing in the paint
Lives a man with a rich sense
Of satisfaction.

Selected SCC English Tweets

2010-03-13T09:00:00.000Z

The weekly selection. We're on an Exodus break from this afternoon until next Thursday morning, March 18th, so posting will resume then as we head into the last 9 days of term.

Irish Blog Awards: few education blogs, but have a look at lit blogs from @eoinpurcell, @jenblogsbooks, @davidmaybury
2010 Irish Blog Awards 'short'list: http://bit.ly/9aaGdC.
Handling all that reading: "my evolution into schizophrenic multimedia literature butterfly " in the Guardian: http://bit.ly/at8ndN
Dominic Dromgoole of @The_Globe interviewed in Irish Times on new production of Friel's 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!' http://bit.ly/bu9QI0
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray: review - "this gigantic, marvellous, witty, heartbreaking novel". http://bit.ly/cTcfR8.
National Tree Week in Ireland- http://bit.ly/b7SQLs. Poem of the Week - 'Binsey Poplars' by Gerard Manley Hopkins- http://bit.ly/cDnT4h
Well worth reading from today's Guardian, by Phil Beadle: the benefits of Twitter for teachers: http://bit.ly/936b9w
'Echo and Narcissus'- another poem in our Images in Poetry series:- http://bit.ly/aD9955. http://bit.ly/aD9955.
First of a series reviewing #iPhone #apps of use in school/English teaching and learning. Starting with the obvious: http://bit.ly/cqhH79

iPhone/iPod Touch Apps

2010-03-11T11:39:00.007Z

We're going to start reviewing and recommending apps for use on the iPhone/iPodTouch platform (henceforth, just 'iPhone', for neatness), in tandem with our science friends over on the Frog Blog. Obviously, we may overlap at times, especially about general educational utilities: read their post today on 'My Homework' - "This excellent, easy to use, iPhone application is useful for everyone, pupils and teachers alike and at all levels, from primary to third level." (We may have to have a high-level secret summit meeting to discuss pooling recommendations in one place. Coffee later, lads?)

But mainly we'll be looking for apps of particular use in English learning and teaching.

First up, and of course of general educational use, is the distinctly obvious, but no less useful, Google Mobile App (free), which gives you easy access to many Google services. This school, like many others, now uses Google Apps on its own domain, and here's a simple way to get to your online Gmail, Reader, Tasks and so on. In school, perhaps the greatest use is Google Docs - access those essays, notes, revision material...

Download it (free) from iTunes here.

Irish Blog Awards 2010

2010-03-11T09:11:00.004Z

We're delighted to be in the mix after the first round of judging in the 2010 Irish Blog Awards, which has produced a short (actually, medium) list; there's another round now to select the finalists. We're in the Best Group category.

There's lots of good reading in the overall list. There aren't many education blogs, but still, vaguely in our area, have a look at Eoin Purcell (publishing), David Maybury (writing and children's books), The Lady Loves Books (er, books).

National Tree Week poem

2010-03-09T09:00:00.002Z

This is National Tree Week, and Mr Swift's IIIb CSPE set have planted a mountain ash as their Action Project; see a report on the College site here. So it's appropriate to have as our 61st Poem of the Week one of the great poems about trees, Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Binsey Poplars'.

As in his poem 'God's Grandeur' (on the Leaving Cert course), Hopkins was well ahead of his time in his concern for our environment (for him, of course, a manifestation of God's presence). He wrote this poem after seeing that trees near Oxford had disappeared. In the words of the biographer Robert Bernard Martin, 'the destruction seemed an emblem of the loss that man inflicts on the planet.'

Poster (above) by Lily Guinness.

'Binsey Poplars', by Gerard Manley Hopkins
felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.