History: May, 1st: Internationa Workers´ Day

May Day is not about maypoles: the history of international workers' day

Forget the Morris dancers, May Day's roots are in the fight for workers' rights and it has long been a focus for protest

     If you see a history of May Day in the newspapers this year, it is most likely to recount the mystical, medieval origins of a pagan fertility festival. And though you may never have seen a maypole in your life, you will be assured that a ribboned piece of birchwood is the sign and sanction of May Day.

     Yet this has little to do with the reason that 1 May is celebrated in Britain, or why it is an international holiday, or why the Occupy movement is planning "global disruption" today. May Day is international workers day. As such, it is – in the words of Eric Hobsbawm – "the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar". And its past is more rowdy than is suggested by the imagery of Morris dancers serenely waving hankies and bells around.

     The origin of our present holiday lies in the fight for an eight-hour working day, in which cause the leaders of the socialist Second International called for an international day of protest to be held at the beginning of May 1890. They did so just as the American Federation of Labour was planning its own demonstration on the same date. The UK protest actually took place on a Sunday, and in London alone attracted 300,000 protesters to Hyde Park.

     Initially, May Day was intended to be a one-off protest, and in some ways quite a solemn affair. But it persisted amid a flourishing of trade unionism. The symbolism of the workers' Easter, of rebirth and renewal, dramatised this experience of revival. And it developed a carnivalesque aspect. May Day did not merely enact internationalism and working class solidarity; it celebrated these things with the familiar paraphernalia of badges, flags, art, sporting events and heavy drinking.

     The leaderships of Europe's growing socialist parties were often worried by the threat of repression coming from governments and businesses, and attempted to avoid excessively confrontational demonstrations. But such domesticating tendencies were counteracted by the severity of the social crisis sweeping Europe and the upheavals it produced. Even during the first world war, when protest was punishable by imprisonment and hard labour, May Day demonstrations were often flashpoints of anti-war struggle. It was at such a rally that Karl Liebnecht denounced the war before 10,000 striking workers at the Potsdamer Platz on 1st May 1916. In Britain, following the arrest of the Scottish socialist John MacLean for sedition in 1918, Glasgow workers embarked on a mass May Day strike and protest.

     European governments alternately preferred repression or co-option of May Day after the first world war. The traditional parties of the right tended to prefer repression, or the threat of repression. For them, regarding the jubilant May Days in revolutionary Russia with unease, the whole thing stank of treason. Fascist parties had a more ambivalent attitude, largely because unlike the traditional right they needed the support of a layer of workers. The Third Reich declared 1 May a "national workers' day" in 1933. But the original meaning of May Day reappeared at the darkest moments of the Nazi era, as when it was celebrated in the Warsaw ghetto which launched an uprising against the regime. Fascist Italy abolished May Day, expunging the radical working class traditions it embodied, but it also introduced a labour holiday on 21 April. Franco, who arguably waged the most vicious military struggle against the left in Spain, and who wiped out 200,000 in executions and concentration camps in the five years after his victory, simply outlawed May Day. It was not celebrated again until his downfall in 1975.

     In the postwar period, May Day was generally tolerated and in some cases even recognised as a public holiday. In the UK, 1 May was made a bank holiday by the Labour government in 1978. In some cases, this was part of a process in which organised labour was co-opted, resulting in the holiday becoming an observed ritual and little more. But it continued to inspire astonishing upheavals – May Day protests played a significant role in the Portuguese revolution of 1974, as well as in the uprisings against apartheid in the 1980s. And even in less dramatic circumstances, it assumed greater importance during periods of turbulence, such as during the miners' strike.

     May Day returned as a militant, if convivial, protest in the UK in 2000, due to the convergence of a broad coalition of activists under the rubric of anticapitalism. The combination of seriousness with playful exuberance was arguably in the best traditions of May Day, even if some statues were briefly defiled. The response of police, which was to develop and refine the technique of "kettling" over a number of years, was traditional in a less august sense.

     The Tories were reported last year to be considering scrapping May Day. The associations with a moribund labourism – or worse with anticapitalist tumult – are hardly obliging in the effort to cultivate a business-and-shopping facade for Brit-town. Yet it would be a futile gesture on their part. This impression on the international calendar was made by workers without the blessing of governments, and the evidence of history suggests that it can survive far worse interdictions. The fact that Occupy has now selected 1 May as the moment for another offensive attests to the enduring relevance of May Day as international workers' day.

Answer to the previous post

SUBJECT: Last week's ruling by the federal court of Canada that music fans who download music for personal use via peer-to-peer services, such as Kazaa and Grokster, are not breaking its local copyright law

 

VERB: highlights

 

OBJECT: the risk the music business is taking in deciding to sue music filesharers.

Mr. Passive Voice

How funny!

Topic 6

"Young people 'no longer believe TV ads"

Young people do not believe television advertisements any more and are more likely to find an internet chat room credible, according to the woman who controls the largest marketing budget in the country.
A generation gap has opened up between parents, who still regard TV as the most important medium, and people under 25, said Roisin Donnelly, who as marketing director of Procter & Gamble spends more than £100m each year marketing products such as Pringles, Pantene and Crest.
"When TV was first introduced it was worshipped. It came into the home and it was the new medium. People would go to [other people's] houses to watch it," Ms Donnelly said.
"Today's generation has always had TV and is much more media savvy. Research shows that younger people are more likely to believe a stranger in an internet chat room than a TV advertisement," she said.
TV advertising was still important to P&G, but it was increasingly focused on magazines, radio, the internet and "word of mouth" advertising, where consumers tell people directly they use a product.
The company's observations are based on extensive research and will sound alarm bells for TV stations whose future fortunes are dependent on TV advertising.
And it means that the likes of Procter & Gamble will probably spend more and more on winning celebrity endorsements.
Word of mouth is so important to the company that it regards it as a separate advertising medium.
The rise of weekly gossip magazines has been very important to P&G because it has allowed it to use celebrities to talk about the products they use, whether make-up, hair-care or household products.
The company regularly distributes a host of cosmetics products to celebrities in the hope they will mention that they use them in interviews in magazines such as Heat.
Four years ago when P&G launched Charmin, a new toilet paper, it distributed free samples to opinion leaders and what the company calls "chat" leaders - ordinary people who influence their social or work group.
The company locates these "chat" leaders through an extensive network of market researchers and consumers. For example, over the last two years it contacted more than 200,000 women to get feedback on its latest Pampers nappy products.
Like many marketers, P&G is moving into interactive advertising on digital television, which Ms Donnelly said "added to [the] credibility" of the advertising message because the interactive element gave the consumer the choice of what information to seek out.
Ms Donnelly said TV could still be an effective medium but that young people watched less TV and were less involved in the TV they watched.
Mobile phones are more important to young Britons than TV, according to a study by Starcom MediaVest, the media buying group.
The study said that young people enjoy the connection that internet and mobile phones give them and increasingly expect the same from traditional media such as TV.
Another advertiser, Diageo, which owns Guinness and Smirnoff, is still investing heavily in massive TV campaigns but is not relying on it. A spokeswoman said: "We are looking more and more to other areas such as sponsorship."
TV remains key for the drinks company, but 250,000 people have opted into a marketing campaign in which they are sent information about Guinness and other drinks such as Bell's whisky, Gordon's gin, Bailey's, Tanqueray, Johnnie Walker, Talisker and J&B.
Last year the Smirnoff Experience, a music sponsorship campaign, funded The Joy of Decks, an ITV documentary about DJs.

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Summary topic 5

Compositions for the weekend

Advantages and disadvantages of downloading music from the Internet
What´s your opinion about the next issue: English assures you better job prospects

Final Exams in May

Thursday, 2nd: Listening
Friday, 10th: Selectividad test
Friday, 17th: Class test

Some more online material: Theory and practice

Try do to some of the exercises here: Click here. Do also click here!

Would you be able to analise this sentence into S+V+....?

Last week's ruling by the federal court of Canada that music fans who download music for personal use via peer-to-peer services, such as Kazaa and Grokster, are not breaking its local copyright law highlights the risk the music business is taking in deciding to sue music filesharers.

Music dowloads

Is downloading really bad?

Two controversial findings last week have reopened the debate about music piracy. Yinka Adegoke reports

By Yinka Adegoke 

Monday 5 April 2004

    Last week's ruling by the federal court of Canada that music fans who download music for personal use via peer-to-peer services, such as Kazaa and Grokster, are not breaking its local copyright law highlights the risk the music business is taking in deciding to sue music filesharers.

    Add to that the fact that new research from Harvard Business School contradicts the record industry's central claim that file-sharing via such services seriously damages record sales, and you start to get a sense of the huge task facing the industry. But the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) and its UK sister body BPI are both taking this challenge to music fans outside the US. The IFPI is suing 247 fans in Canada, Denmark, Germany and Italy for online piracy, while the BPI is sending out messages across P2P sites warning fans to stop illegal activity or face the legal consequences.

    When it comes to figures on how record sales have been reduced by illegal downloading it has always been a case of lies, damned lies and statistics. The music industry is convinced that since the early days of the original Napster it has lost revenue. Jay Berman, chairman and CEO of IFPI, has no doubt that there is a strong link between CD sales and the availability of illegal content. "It's clear-cut to me," he says. "If there are 800m files [IFPI research] being shared for free then it is less likely that they would pay for music."

    But the research from Harvard and the University of North Carolina says that, on the contrary, file-sharing helps music sales. The authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, conclude that file-sharing had no effect on the sale of popular CDs in the second half of 2002. They go on to say that for the top 25% of albums (with sales of more than 600,000 copies) they found a positive effect: 150 downloads were said to increase sales by one copy.

    Berman is scornful of the research, pointing out that it was carried out in the record industry's traditionally strong second half of the year - when Christmas boosts sales.

    "If I listened to that study my business would have improved," he says. The one thing that the report claims which he agrees with is that tracks from the most popular albums are those most likely to be downloaded. For Berman, this explains a worrying trend, which has seen a "substantial" fall in the number of albums sold by the biggest artists. He points out, for example, that in the period the Harvard report covers, 2002, only one album (by Linkin Park) sold more than 5m copies.

    But Wayne Rosso, chair of the US based lobbying body P2P United and CEO of Optisoft, supports the Harvard research and claims that despite legal action in the US, P2P traffic numbers have remained healthy.

"The recording industry is so completely misguided in its use of fear tactics that it can only engender even more contempt from fans. And what's even more ridiculous is that they're all profitable and their business is up, in part due to the free marketing they get from P2P networks. They should be paying us!"

    And the artists, too, are not so certain that the stats being bandied about by the record companies stand up to scrutiny. Dave Rowntree, the drummer of Blur, told the industry weekly New Media Age last week he was furious that the BPI had followed its US counterpart RIAA by threatening to sue music fans blamed for online piracy.

    "It's preposterous," he said. And he wondered how the researchers could know for certain if people spent less money on CDs because they downloaded music. "How do they know that? The BPI isn't speaking on behalf of all the industry."

    The study, based on 3,667 adults in the UK, found that 8 million people in the UK download music, with 92% of them doing so illegally. The study also claimed that downloaders spent 32% less on albums and 59% less on singles than before they started downloading.

    BPI spokesman Matt Philips says: "We could have taken legal action a year ago but we were surprised as anyone when the in-depth research came through. The scale of the problem has been masked by the fact that we sold more albums in the UK than we've ever sold before."

    Interestingly, at the new paid-for Napster its internal figures show that the biggest purchasers of downloads to burn on to CDs via its on-demand service are the same people who pay $10 a month to listen to as much music as they like via its streaming service.

    Though Napster is reluctant to say that this supports the claim that access to music via P2P services could boost record sales, a spokesman accepts that: "People given a wide access to songs are more likely to buy than others."

    Whatever the reasons for the dip in record sales, it seems that the days of top performers, such as Prince or Michael Jackson, shifting tens of millions of albums might well be behind us. But some feel that the music industry should learn to turn the current challenges facing it to its advantage.

    At legal P2P service Wippit, which recently signed deals to distribute music from EMI and BMG, CEO Paul Myers feels strongly that the record companies are sending out a one-sided message. Referring to the BPI research, he says: "For me this just says there are 8 million who are familiar with download services who want to buy music."

   Myers also believes they should be thinking long-term: "This message would be much more powerful if it was also backed up by a campaign encouraging legal downloads. A TV commercial for the new Outkast CD or a personal message to a P2P user could contain the message, 'If you're going to download it, download it legally from Wippit'."

    The fact that people outside the US are finally showing some interest in legal services is backed by figures put out by Peter Gabriel's OD2, Europe's largest digital music distribution service. It has revealed that over a million digital downloads were bought via its retail partners across Europe, including mycokemusic.com, HMV.co.uk, MSN and Tiscali, in the first quarter of this year.

    These figures are impressive if you consider the relatively low profile of the OD2 services, apart from mycokemusic.com. This augurs well for the arrival of Apple's iTunes and the new Napster in the UK. Berman is very keen to get the services up and running in Europe. "I want iTunes, Real and Napster here as soon as possible. I'm trying more than ever for a licence on behalf of all these services."

    How long does he think his industry will still be about selling CDs? "Five years from now we'll still be selling CDs, but I think a substantial part of our business will be digital sales."

Today´s afternoon class will verse on Nominal Clauses

Music and education: Are we educated to appreciate the beauty of music?

Joshua Bell: no ordinary busker

    Those Carling Live miniature spots are the bane of so many commuters' lives in London: little semi-circles of doom that you have to somehow avoid in the daily crush of the rush hour, in order to escape the orbit of whichever over-enthusiastic busker is trying to compete for your change, belting out a rendition of Streets of London or O Sole Mio, artfully arranged for congo and kazoo, delivered with an ear-splitting intensity that makes a day in the drudgery of an office seem like a completely sane way to spend the majority of your waking life.

    But how would you feel if the musician you just passed swiftly by was not, in fact, a serial auditioner for Pop Idol or, at best, a jobbing music student trying to supplement their beer money, but one of the world's great instrumental soloists? Earlier this year, that's exactly what happened on the Washington Metro system. Unsuspecting commuters were treated to a virtuoso performance from a guy in a baseball cap and unassuming T-shirt. Book-ending his 43-minute set with a towering account of one of the peaks of the solo violin repertoire - Bach's D minor Chaconne - this was no ordinary busker, but Joshua Bell, doyen of the international music scene, whose film-star looks and high-octane performances reduce classical music audiences to raptures wherever he plays.

    So what was the reaction of the commuters? You might have imagined a crowd would develop - "Hey, this guy's good!", "I don't mind being late for work to listen to this!", or "Man, I didn't think the violin could sound like that!" - and, in the Richard Curtis remake, Bell would make the whole station come to a standstill, causing a spontaneous multiple epiphany as people realised the hollowness of their pathetic, materialistic lives and their spirits awoke up to a world of transcendent beauty.

Alas, that's precisely what didn't happen. Out of 1097 people who passed him (the Washington Post counted every one of them), a grand total of seven - yes, seven, without any zeros - stopped to listen for more than a minute to him. He earned US$32 and a few cents, not enough to get a ticket to most of Bell's gigs.

    The lesson: clearly, Bell's busking experience proves the pervasive philistinism of a society that has lost its soul along with its ability to take time out and just listen, and reveals the decrepitude of our taste and discrimination to a nadir when we can't even recognise beauty when it's there, right in front of our faces. Or is it? You could use this as a stick to beat western society, but the exercise - really a stunt, which Bell conceived over a cup of coffee with a Post journalist - actually proves the power of context to create perceptions of artistic quality and even the artistic experience per se. Would you appreciate or even notice a Turner watercolour if it was stuffed in the corner of a restaurant you were eating in? Or stop to watch a great Godard movie if it came on one of those screens in Piccadilly Circus? And if you didn't, does that make those experiences anything less than great art?

    Concerts are turned into unforgettable experiences by a communal act of listening, the magical and illusory creation of an oasis of silence in which the music can speak. That's why concert halls are designed to make us silent, to force our attention on to the stage, the performer. And we're quiet for bad performers just as we are for legendary ones, for a mediocre performance by a third-rate orchestra or for a titanic interpretation by the Vienna Phil - just as we're islands of grumpiness and get-me-out-of-here-ness when we're on the tube. The surprise, to be honest, is that anyone at all stopped to listen to Joshua Bell at L'Enfant Plaza that Friday morning. I'm not sure I would stop to hear Nigel Kennedy, say, playing at the bottom of the Leicester Square escalators in the middle of the Friday morning commute. Would you?

Topic 5: Let´s start with flamenco!....and..."Olé"

Do you like this piece of music?

Flamenco's humane roots

Forget the Hollywood image – flamenco has deep-rooted social and political resonances that cross culture and genre

     Flamenco is a name widely known but a music little understood (outside its Andalusian heartland). Forget about Hollywood images of flounces and castanets. Even the bravura solo guitarists and dance troupes are peripheral. The heart of flamenco is the cante, the art of flamenco song. Its most compelling spectacle is starkly simple: a lone cantaor (singer) and a lone guitarist sitting on straight-backed chairs on a bare stage, plumbing the cante jondo (the "deep songs") associated with the gypsies of southern Spain.

     Flamenco is abrupt and angular, frequently harrowing, sometimes ecstatic, always spontaneous and at the same time meditative. There are no choruses, refrains or hooks. It's headlong and forceful, marked by dramatic shifts in mood, volume and tempo. Flamenco demands attention and empathy. It casts its own mood and brooks no compromise. It's a popular music utterly alien to "pop" as we know it. "Deep song," said the poet Federico García Lorca, "is a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvellous undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, [and] eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music."

     It's impossible to tell the story of flamenco without talking about Lorca, who found in it a source of inspiration in a lifelong political-cultural-sexual struggle against bourgeois philistinism. The recovery and promotion of deep song was part of the poet-dramatist's larger democratic embrace of popular beauty, an antidote to what he came to see as the inhuman machine of modern capitalism.

    As a leftist and modernist, he was ahead of his time in embracing cultural diversity and plural identities. For him, the universality of flamenco lay in its peculiarity, in its unique expressive forms, in the access they gave to remote but shared human realms. He championed the music of the gypsies as he did the Muslim and Jewish roots of Spanish culture. All of which made him a prime target for the fascists, who murdered him in the early days of the civil war.

     In flamenco, the major creator is the cantaor, who in each performance invents the song anew, building it extemporaneously from a fixed framework provided by the sub-genres known as the palos. Among the more frequently heard of these are the solemn siguiriyas and soleas, the Moorish-influenced fandangos, the rhythmic bulerias and festive allegrias. Each palo has its own history, rhythmic pattern (compas), melodic scale and associated lyrics. It's not meaningful in flamenco to say someone "covers" someone else's song; its essence is improvised. In this respect, as well as in its use of modes outside the familiar major and minor scales of western music, it resembles Arabic and Indian classical music.

    The cantaor can dwell at length on a single phrase, probing and elongating it, then complete the rest of the verse in a rush of tumbling syllables. The voice slides into and around the notes, dredging up micro-tones from hidden depths. It's an immensely suspenseful music, building to serial climaxes, hesitating, holding back, plunging forward.

     Remarkably, this intensely rhythmic music makes no use of percussion instruments (the castanets are for tourists). Instead, hand clapping, finger snapping, knuckle rapping and foot tapping create a rhythmic brocade, enriched by cross and counter-rhythms and studded with syncopations. It's a sophisticated, highly technical folk music; even the hand clapping requires intensive study and is not to be attempted by amateurs.

Flamenco's roots spread wide. There are Arab, Berber, Jewish, Byzantine, Spanish American and even south Asian influences. All these and more were fused in the forge of the gypsy experience into a singular art form, unlike any of its sources, evoking its own worldview, its own existential stance. It's as silly to say gachos (non-gypsies) can't sing the cante as to say that white people can't play the blues (there have been numerous masters), but what is true is that it was in the gypsy barrios of Seville, Jerez, Granada, Malaga and Cadiz that flamenco flourished, and it is marked indelibly by that history.

     The singers draw from a treasury of colloquial coplas (verses), brief, trenchant lyrics that face death, loss, persecution, love, loneliness, injustice and jealousy without trimmings. They are bare and stark, "a song without landscape," Lorca said, "withdrawn into itself and terrible in the dark."

Only to the earth
do I tell my troubles
for there is no one in the world
whom I can trust.

In the coplas, love is a wrenching, perilous experience:

When we walk alone
and your dress rubs against me
a shudder runs deep in my bones.
I went to a field to cry
screaming like a madman
and even the wind kept telling me
you loved someone else.
Emotions are presented as facts, without justification:

I am jealous of the breeze
that touches your face.
If the breeze were a man
I would kill him.

The injustices of the world stand unmitigated; the songs are sometimes pure indictment:

You killed my brother
I'll never forgive you
wrapped in a cape you killed him
he did nothing to you.

    It's often said that flamenco is not political because it dwells on the personal fate of the individual. That seems to me to imply a narrow definition of both the political and the personal. The palos and the coplas are, of course, collective creations. In using them as the foundation for a highly personal act of expression, the performer reconnects with that common experience, an experience shaped by poverty and persecution. The songs confront blank, powerful forces with nothing but the singer's own irreducible being. It's a music of clannish outsiders, and much of it certainly feels like a prolonged protest, an act of defiance whose only reward is itself.

    The dominant figure in modern flamenco, its chief icon and martyr, was the marvellous Camarón de la Isla ("the shrimp from the island"), a gypsy from an impoverished but musical family who died in 1992 at the age of only 42, from the combined effects of cancer and long-term drug abuse. Small of stature, quietly spoken and affable, Camarón was nonetheless hugely charismatic, a master of the deepest core of flamenco tradition and at the same time a bold innovator. His 1979 album, La Leyenda del Tiempo, is often lazily dubbed "the Sergeant Pepper of flamenco", in that it mixed studio techniques, unorthodox instruments, pop-style choruses and lyrics drawn from Lorca poems. Not all the fusion elements work, but the heartfelt, rhythmically compelling singing is ravishing. Camarón possessed one of the great voices of the 20th century. As a genius of modern popular culture, he stands with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan.

    On his left hand Camarón wore a tattoo of the Jewish Star of David and the Muslim Crescent – a powerful statement from a gypsy in a country emerging from the centralist Castillian-Catholic hegemony of the Franco years. In his wake, innovation and fusion have become commonplace, but continue to arouse passionate resistance. Though I'm a newcomer to flamenco, I understand the fear that something precious and irreplaceable will be lost if the core of the cante is compromised. However, flamenco does seem alive and well in southern Spain, with numerous clubs, schools, festivals, and new as well as old performers making magical music. Despite the dissolution of much of its social base, as gypsy barrios have been decanted into tower block suburbs, flamenco continues to bring a multi-dimensional past into a living present.

    As one of the first folk musics to undergo commercialisation (as early as the mid-19th century), flamenco has long been the site of fierce arguments about purity, authenticity, tradition and innovation. For ethnomusicologists, it's a field day. The postmodernists have taught us to be wary of claims to authenticity or purity. Nonetheless, flamenco itself remains a quest for authenticity, for the pure expression of those human emotions that are both uniquely, intimately personal, and universally shared. And while authenticity may remain elusive, I suspect the search for it will continue to play a part in any effort to redeem one's humanity from an inhuman society.

Summary topic 4

Health issues: The power of a smile

Ok, I have to admit that I wanted to close this topic with Chomsky´s comments on the purpose of education. However, I could not resist posting something related to what we talked about in classs: the possitive effect of a smile.

Smiling at Strangers

How the simplest of gestures can spread joy for years

Published on February 5, 2012 by Alex Lickerman, M.D. in Happiness in this World
 

When I was a first-year medical student, my classmates and I used to go down to the hospital cafeteria between lectures to buy snacks. The women from whom we bought them at the check-out counters were all young and sullen, rarely even glancing up at their customers as they rang up purchases. Their customers, in turn, seemed equally uninterested in them. So I decided one day I was going to get them to smile each time they rang up my purchases. To do this, I decided I'd simply start smiling at them myself.

     "Hello!" I started saying each time I'd approach. At first, they actually shrank from me physically. But within a few days, they started to smile back at me. And as time passed and I continued to smile and say a bright hello each time I came before them, I noticed something interesting: most of the time they were still wearing the same lifeless expressions. I'd become their "on" switch. Their focus was so concrete that to the person in line right before me they remained their same apparently disinterested, unhappy selves. But as soon as I entered the narrow band of space immediately before them, their eyes would suddenly light up and their mouths would curve into a smile. And I could tell, though we never exchanged any words other than "hello" and they knew absolutely nothing about me, that they were genuinely glad to see me.

     Such, I discovered, is the power of a smile, even between strangers. In the intervening years I've found myself wondering why most people don't smile at people they don't know. In observing my own reactions, I've noticed the following:

1. I'm often lost in my own thoughts, trying to solve a problem, ruminating over one I can't, planning or thinking about what I'm about to do. In short, I'm everywhere except where I actually am.
2. Even when I think to smile at passing strangers, I can't always muster up a genuine one. It turns out, according to V.S. Ramanchandran in his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, we're capable of mounting two different kinds of smiles, one genuine and the other forced, which are in fact generated in two separate parts of the brain. They look different, these two smiles, which is why we can always tell one from the other with ease. To produce a genuine smile we must genuinely feel like smiling. To smile at a stranger in a meaningful way, then, requires we muster some kind of real feeling for them—that we care about someone we don't know, if only in a small way. Thus, for me, smiling at strangers is a small exercise in compassion. The benefit of smiling accrues to me as well as to those at whom I'm smiling, however: studies have also shown that feeling just as often follows expression. That is, when we smile, it actually makes us happier, even, it turns out, if our smile is forced.
3. Smiling at strangers might be taken as an invitation I don't want to offer—for a conversation I don't want or have time for, or for some kind of entry into my life (however small it may be) that feels invasive. We often guard our privacy intensely and prefer the barriers that exist between strangers to persist, finding ourselves reluctant to break them down even a little bit. But that attitude, I've found, often conceals an inability to set appropriate boundaries. If we're in a hurry, we can simply hurry on along. Or excuse ourselves. Or employ any number of socially appropriate reasons to keep a stranger at a social distance we find comfortable.

     In the end, of course, I concluded that I really had no good reason not to smile at everyone. Certainly, it takes some amount of attention and energy. But in smiling at strangers, I acknowledge their humanity, and in doing that, in reminding myself of it, I promote peace. How? By bringing joy to others that's far out of proportion to the investment required—as I learned seven years after I first started my smiling experiment. I'd finished medical school and residency, and had returned to the University of Chicago as an attending physician. One day soon after I'd arrived, I went down to buy lunch in the same cafeteria. And when I approached the check-out line, I found myself greeted by a cashier I didn't at first even recognize who, wearing a happy, surprised smile, suddenly exclaimed in delight, "Where have you been?"

For you to practice...and more!

Click here to practise a bit on grammar and vocabulary. By the way, remember to bring the diagram I told you about by Thursday. And don´t forget to write your composition. I want to see more complex structures. ;P

To finish topic number 4: Noam Chomsky on education

What is the purpose of education according to Noam Chomsky? Do you agree?

Politics: Death of Margaret Thatcher and the structure of the Parliament

Margaret Thatcher

Structure of the Parliament

Selectividad test related to one of the aspects seen in Jane Eyre

As you know, one of the aspects dealth with in Jane Eyre has to do with how the educational system was conceived of. Here you have a selectividad test that deals somehow with this issue. Click here! Do also have a look at this article:

Bring back the cane to improve pupil discipline, say parents

Half of parents believe that the cane should be reintroduced to restore order to the classroom, research suggests.

     Some 49 per cent of mothers and fathers are in favour of corporal punishment to crack down on the worst offenders, it was revealed.

     The vast majority of parents also want greater use of other back-to-basics discipline measures including detention, expulsion and forcing badly behaved children to write lines.

     Even a fifth of secondary school pupils themselves support the reintroduction of caning or smacking.

The disclosure comes amid claims from Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, that “adult authority” has been eroded in too many schools.

     Speaking at a conference on behaviour in London yesterday, he said: “Even though there are many schools in which behaviour is great, there are far too many in which it is simply not up to scratch and, as a result, we have a problem with truancy, with disruption [and] with exclusion.”

One of the Coalition’s favourite head teachers also admitted that staff in some schools devoted as much time to “crowd control” as teaching.

     Sir Michael Wilshaw, principal of Mossbourne Community Academy, Hackney, said: “Without good behaviour a young and inexperienced teacher can become vulnerable to the bullies in the classroom and leave the profession.

     “Something like one-in-four newly-qualified teachers leave the profession in the first few years. That is a tragic loss of talent.”

     Corporal punishment was banned in state schools in 1986.

     Some independent schools continued to mete out physical punishment, such as a slap to the hands or ordering press-ups, until it was outlawed 10 years later.

     But a survey of 2,000 parents and 530 children by the Times Educational Supplement has found strong support for the reintroduction of smacking or caning to discipline the most badly behaved pupils.

     Some 49 per cent of parents and 19 per cent of secondary school pupils supported the move.

     More than three-quarters of parents also backed the use of after-school detention, suspension and expulsion and writing lines to punish bad behaviour. Some 55 per cent even said teachers should make more use of shouting to put children in their place.

     The YouGov research found that 85 per cent of parents believed teachers were now less respected than when they were at school and 83 per cent said they faced stricter classroom discipline as children.

But the Department for Education rejected calls to bring back the cane.

     Last night, a spokesman insisted that other measures – including additional powers to physically restrain the most violent children and search those suspected of carrying banned items – would improve standards of behaviour.

     “There is no intention of ever reintroducing corporal punishment,” he said. “Parents are right to demand that their children learn in a safe and ordered environment – that’s why we are toughening up teachers’ disciplinary powers and restoring their authority.”

     Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT union, said: “A mythology has grown up around corporal punishment and its effectiveness which was never borne out by reality.

     “A study of inspection reports from the 50s and 60s highlighted behaviour that would not be tolerated today, such as vandalising school property or assaulting teachers.

     "These were common features of life in many schools in years gone by despite the routine use of corporal punishment.

     “In fact, evidence suggests that behaviour has improved significantly since corporal punishment was abolished."

Selectividad Test: April Fool´s Day

Do you remember that April 1st was April Fool´s Day? Here you have a selectividad test related to this issue. Click here.

Job interviews

Looking for a job is not an easy matter, especially nowdays. In order to look for a job you have to follow a number of steps or a number of steps are involved:

a) Look for a job (having a look at the net or the newspaper...)

 b) Send application letter. See example here. See template here and here

c) Send a CV (AmE. Resumé). See example here. See template  here.

d) Letter of recommendation (this might be required ). See example here. See template here.
e) Job interview. See example here. Train for the questions  here.

Next exams!

Here are the dates of the next exams:

May 2nd: (Dictation and) listening
May 10th: Selectividad Test
May 17th: Grammar and Use of English

Exercises topic 4

We are about to finish topic 4. Remember to bring the exercises on "HAD BETTER" for next day. Do also exercises 1 to 5 from page 46 dealing with adjectives. You know a lot about adjectives already. The only difference is the topic where they appear. Since this topic "has to do" with jobs and so on the adjectives we are going to deal with are related to PERSONAL QUALITIES.

EOI enrolment dates and examination papers: B1 and B2

As I told you some "entries" ago, you can already enroll for the B1 and B2 examination papers. To see an example of the exams you are bound to do (should you enroll at all!) click here.

For more examples of tests in other areas click here.

Yesterday was April Fool´s Day

Yesterday was April Fool´s Day, a day similar to our "Día de los Inocentes".

The Victorian Age: women, religion, love, education...

Intdoduction

The Victorian Age marked a period of great transition in many aspects of human life. The onset of the industrial revolution changed the way people made and sold goods, which in turn changed the way people lived. Industry and agriculture flourished, creating economic prosperity. Laws were passed to improve the working conditions of the laborers in the mills and factories. Literature written during this period was changing as a result of the events that were happening. Religious beliefs were being challenged by many different viewpoints. As far as philosophy is concerned, the idea of utilitarianism was introduced which believed that people’s actions should be judged by their moral good, the greatest pleasure for the greatest number. Furthermore, he ideas of historians were also considered. They viewed the Bible as a record of historical events rather than a spiritual handbook. Lastly, in terms of science, the geologic and astronomic discoveries made by scientists introduced a new, non-spiritual belief. Along with this, the idea that the human being evolved from ominids was also introduced by Charles Darwin.

    In terms of Literature, Jane Eyre is a paradigm novel. The novel shows the image that society had of women, education, and religion under the reign of Queen Victoria. There are many novels where you can see the same topics, but the one you have to study is this one.

Education

There were different types of schools for the different social classes. Boys and girls did not share the same spaces. Bad behaviour was punished severely phisically. (For more info click here!)

 

Women

Science: Charles Darwin

In 1859 (mid-way through the Victorian Age), Charles Darwin published a work that opposed the conventional way of thinking about religion. The Origin of Species proposed the theory that man actually evolved from a lower species rather than having been created by a higher power. The idea of this notion was devastating to many Victorians. Darwin’s work was responsible for a huge cultural debate between the old way of thinking and the new. A conflict arose because Darwin eliminated the possibility of a designing God (Landow). His work began by proposing the theory of a struggle for existence. He used this term to describe how each living creature had to compete within its own limitations to survive. If there were not any limitations on growth and reproduction then the world would have become overpopulated. The details of this theory went on to include variation and mutation as part of the battle to exist. Over time, the traits that helped an organism to survive became dominant and the less beneficial traits were eventually lost. These ideas conflicted with the teachings of the Bible. The Victorian God was ever powerful, the creator of all things and was responsible for the fate of the world. Darwin stated that he was not ruling out a God, but that he was less immanent than previously believed (Hart, paragraph 10). God is in the position of a clock-maker who starts things up, but rather than interfering periodically, he is in the background with nothing much to do (Hart, paragraph 10). The idea that organisms were able to change at all challenged the previous belief of a fixed unchanging order. The ideas of Darwin were very biological and non-selective as far as the role of humans in nature; humans are just another species on the earth. Some of the literature written during this time directly reflected the writer’s attitude toward the revolutionary ideas that were being presented. In Memoriam, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson depicted one man’s stuggle with Darwin’s ideas of existence.

Industrialization Process

The concept of EMPIRE

The Madwoman in the Attic: Angel or Monster?

In “Jane Eyre,” the character of Bertha Mason serves as an ominous representation of uncontrollable passion and madness. Her dark sensuality and violent nature contrast sharply with Jane’s calm morality, and it is no surprise that Bertha’s presence at Thornfield is a key factor in transforming Mr. Rochester into a stereotypical Byronic hero. Moreover, Bertha’s marriage to Mr. Rochester serves as the primary conflict of the novel, and it is only after her death that Jane is able to achieve personal happiness by marrying Mr. Rochester. However, Bertha’s position as the “Madwoman in the Attic” also speaks to larger social questions of femininity and authorship during the Victorian period.

In 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar made a breakthrough in feminist criticism with their work “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.” In the 700-page text, Gilbert and Gubar use the figure of Bertha Mason as the so-called “Madwoman in the Attic” to make an argument about perceptions toward female literary characters during the time period. According to Gilbert and Gubar, all female characters in male-authored books can be categorized as either the “angel” or the “monster.”

The “angel” character was pure, dispassionate, and submissive; in other words, the ideal female figure in a male-dominated society. Interestingly, the term “angel” stems directly from Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem “The Angel in the House,” in which he described his meek and pious wife. In sharp contrast to the “angel” figure, the “monster” female character was sensual, passionate, rebellious, and decidedly uncontrollable: all qualities that caused a great deal of anxiety among men during the Victorian period.

However, Charlotte Brontë (as well as many other contemporary female authors) did not limit her characterizations to this strict dichotomy between monster and angel. Jane Eyre possesses many of the qualities of the so-called angel: she is pure, moral, and controlled in her behavior. Yet, at the same time, she is extremely passionate, independent, and courageous. She refuses to submit to a position of inferiority to the men in her life, even when faced with a choice between love and autonomy, and ultimately triumphs over social expectations. Moreover, Jane’s childhood adventures demonstrate much of the same rebelliousness and anger that characterize the “monster.” It is clear that Jane’s appearance of control is only something that she learned during her time at Lowood School; she still maintains the same fiery spirit that defined her character as a child.

With the character of Bertha Mason, Brontë has a more difficult time when it comes to blending the distinctions between angel and monster. The readers only meet Bertha when she is in the depths of madness, having been confined in the third-story attic of Thornfield for nearly fifteen years, and there is not enough interaction between her and the other characters to demonstrate any “angelic” behavior. Yet, Bertha’s position as the obstacle to Jane’s happiness with Mr. Rochester, as well as her state of complete imprisonment, suggest that her madness may have been partially manufactured by the male-dominated society that forced her to give up her wealth in marriage to Mr. Rochester. Moreover, the similarities between Bertha’s behavior in the third-story attic and Jane’s actions as a child in the red-room suggest that neither character is full angel or full monster but rather a combination of the two.

While Brontë does not differentiate between angel and monster in her portrayal of Jane and Bertha, she does, however, argue for moderation of the passions in all of her characters. Mr. Rochester and Bertha both have too much passion in their lives, while St. John Rivers has too little. Bertha’s passion manifests as madness, while Mr. Rochester’s passion is displayed in his debaucherous behavior on the continent and his determination to make Jane his mistress. St. John, on the other hand, suppresses all of his passion and love for Rosamond Oliver, and thus becomes a cold and aloof man whose only desire is to fulfill his duty to God. Of the three characters, Mr. Rochester is the only one who eventually achieves a balance of passion; after Jane’s departure from Thornfield and the loss of his eyesight, he becomes much more spiritual and is able to achieve the same emotional moderation that Jane exhibits throughout the novel.

Although Bertha does serve as one of the seeming villains of the novel, she should be seen more as a critique of a society in which passionate woman are viewed as monsters or madwomen. Charlotte Brontë’s act of writing a novel – particularly such a Gothic one - was no doubt equally threatening to the men of her time period. In some ways, Brontë’s decision to merge the identities of the “angel” and the “monster” in the two primary female characters of her novel can be seen as a personal statement about the conflict between passion and passivity in her own life.