UK Elections explained for non-Brits

Here's the video by The Guardian I mentioned yesterday in class.

Arctic: Life in the Deep Freeze

Human Planet is a British television documentary series produced by the BBC with co-production from Discovery and BBC Worldwide. It describes the human species and its relationship with the natural world by showing the remarkable ways humans have adapted to life in every environment on Earth.

After watching the episode Arctic: Life in the Deep Freeze, now it's time to check your answers to the questions discussed in class, so click on the link below to find out!

Answers to the comprehension questions

And if you'd like to watch the Human Planet documentaries online, check out this link:

BBC Human Planet Explorer

Could Art Turn the World Inside Out?

Now that we have just finished the unit of Art, I would like to present to you one of the most stimulating photographers I have recently known: He's a French guy called JR, and he has described himself as a photograffeur (a photographer with a touch of graffiti in his art). He was awarded the TED prize back in 2011 for his inspiring work which he has spread all over the planet. JR's work combines art and action, and deals with commitment, freedom, identity, and limits. Check out his talk in TED: Could art actually change the world?

JR photograffeur wins the TED prize

I would like to say thanks to my former student and photographer Carlos Crespo for sharing JR's art with me, and with you.

From Mardi Gras to Cherrygoats

This is the celebration of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, its history and people:

And this is what we have right across the Atlantic, in Cádiz:

Coming up soon in EOI Pinto: Cherrygoats...  Cherrygoats you said? Yup, cherrygoats! But what the heck is that?

Wouldn't it be nice to sound like Leonard Cohen?

In 2011, Leonard Cohen received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature for "a body of literary work that has influenced three generations of people worldwide through his creation of emotional imagery in which poetry and music are fused in an oeuvre of immutable merit". When he came to Oviedo to collect his literary prize, he gave one of the most beautiful speeches I've ever heard in this kind of setting.

His voice is so soft and delightful, his pronunciation so clear and precise, and his tempo so fine-tuned, that I recommend you to listen and repeat his words: if you do so you will certainly make good progress in your pronunciation.

This post is dedicated to Paco for appreciating the good music, and for helping out with the classroom dynamics yesterday. Thanks, Paco!

Leonard Cohen's Prince of Asturias Speech

Ladies Please Remove Your Hats...

After watching the very beginnings of the motion pictures industry in class, I'd like to suggest you continue learning about this amazing human enterprise. Movies have been around for several generations now, and have deeply contributed to shaping our understanding of the world surrounding us. Please, watch the following documentary up to minute 12, since you will have to answer to the five questions I pose below. After that, you're free to continue watching the video until the end, maybe you'd like to sit back, relax, and grab some popcorn... Just an idea!

Open Questions:

1.- Who created the well-known American Movie Industry originally?

2.- Who were its first audience? Why?

3.- What was frightening about The Great Train Robbery?

4.- Who's the author of a new film language in the US? With which movie?

5.- How did film making become big business in the US?

What's the Key to Being a Great Dad?

After watching the episode of Modern Family which deals with parenting issues, now it's time to review the words and expressions we worked on together in class. Below you can find the vocabulary sheet and the episode with the subtitles. You should watch it again, a second viewing is surely gonna be of great help to understand all the expressions we learned, and to catch all the jokes!

vocabulary sheet
watch the episode with English subtitles

Spreading the good vibes

Hi guys,

This is the last post before the exam, so I figured you could use some time off and watch these people turning a dull routine visit to the gas station to fill up the tank into the funkiest, funniest moment ever! Worth the watch, really! Check out their singing..  there's some real talent hiding out there... Don't miss the couple's good vibes!

Click here to watch the video

Fake or Real? II

And this is one of the most visited videos in 2011, a breathtaking recording of animal interaction in a nature preserve called Kruger, in South Africa. Judge by yourselves: fake or real?

Pretty amazing, huh? But there's always room for some critical reflection here:  Do you think the man may be somehow involved in the way animals interact here? Maybe you wanna think about the dimensions of park safaris like this one...

Fake or Real? I

... I know you guys were all heart broken the other day in class... But believe me, it's always better when we see and face reality as it is, and are not deceived by the appearances, don't you think? Now you can tell your friends that the poor lemmings never commited suicide. It's been a ubiquitous myth, but we buy it no more. And where does that myth come from? In 1958 Walt Disney produced White Wilderness, part of the studio's True Life Adventure series. This documentary featured a segment on lemmings, detailing their strange compulsion to commit mass suicide. But this was all fake! In fact, it was staged: the lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off the cliff by Disney filmmakers! The epic "lemming migration" was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on a snow covered turntable.
As Karl S. Kruszelnicki puts it in his article, considering a company like Disney, where one rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty, it's rather odd to think that Disney could be so unkind to another rodent, the lemming...

Read more about the lemming suicide myth here

More on puzzling science tricks

Here I suggest a new listening task for you guys: it consists in catching the expressions the experimenter uses to describe some of the actions that he's carrying out in this video. They all involve an action verb. You just have to listen out for the sentence where this action verb appears, and write it down. Find the lists of verbs below. Then click on the key to the listening practice at the bottom of this post to find out how accurate you were with this information filling practice.
1) fill -->
2) place over -->
3) invert -->
4) support & remove -->
5) pour -->
6) overflow -->
7) place & turn upside down -->
8) come out -->
9) tip -->
10)cause the water to come out -->

PS: Didn't you just love his goggles?? Hey, maybe that blue coloring is totally radioactive!

key to the listening practice

But does speed yoga exist for real?! We need a Slow Revolution

Now that we're done with the mid-year exams, we might as well just stop for a while, have some time off to think and reflect on what we have achieved this year, which is quite a lot! (more than we would think, for sure), and shake off the stress we carry around as we are in motion, fast motion, from work to school, from school to our daily chores, etc... People from the Slow Movement know about this feeling, and some years ago started sending out this message for us to regain a more humanlike pace, and stop living like powered up robots. 

What follows is a description of this movement posted in wikipedia, and a really nice talk by worldwide-known advocates of Slowness. 

The Slow Movement promotes a cultural shift toward slowing down life's pace. It began with Carlo Petrini's protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome, in 1986 that sparked the creation of the Slow Food organization. Over time, this developed into a subculture in other areas, such as Cittaslow (Slow Cities), Slow Living, Slow Travel, and Slow Design.

And now watch the video. I suggest that you sit back on your chair, breathe, make yourself comfortable, and, importantly, leave the cell aside, no whatsapps to be checked and that kind of stuff... just relax and listen to these people talking about how to start shifting our minds.

Human Planet

Human Planet is a British television documentary series produced by the BBC with co-production from Discovery and BBC Worldwide. It describes the human species and its relationship with the natural world by showing the remarkable ways human have adapted to life in every environment on Earth.

After watching the episode Arctic: Life in the Deep Freeze, now it's time to check your answers to the questions discussed in class, so click on the link below to find out!

Answers to the discussion questions

Britart: Banksy is back!

Banksy is a pseudonymus England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humor with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. To see a slideshow of his best creations, click on the link below, and then watch the video to hear more about his last exhibit in the Bristol City Museum, and complete the quiz questions to test your understanding.

The slideshow: Best of Banksy

Banksy at the Bristol City Museum

What's the key to being a great dad?

After watching the episode of Modern Family which deals with parenting issues, now it's time to review the words and expressions we worked on together in class. Below you can find the vocabulary sheet and the video, in case you wanna watch it again: A second viewing is surely gonna be of great help to understand all the things that are going on during this episode, and to catch all the jokes!

vocabulary sheet

download the video here

download the subtitles here

Hieronymus Bosch

The triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1504) 

Hieronymus Bosch, born Jeroen Anthonissen van Aken (c. 1450 - August 9, 1516) was an Early Netherlandish painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of his works depicts sin and human moral failings. Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. His works contain complex, highly original, imaginative, and dense use of symbolic figures and iconography, some of which was obscure even in his own time.

The video that follows is a short extract from a full documentary film produced by BBC FOUR, called Hieronymus Bosch and the Delights of Hell. While concentrating on the artist's central themes and imagery, the film also examines the medieval culture in which he worked. The extract below corresponds to part 1 (out of 5), and lasts 10 minutes. It has no English subtitles, except for the part they speak in French, but the narrator speaks fairly clearly and slowly. Now that we have analysed The Conjurer in class, maybe you feel like exploring more of his groundbreaking paintings. If so, the  BBC FOUR documentary can be a good start!

And remember we're going to a British Art Show this Friday in downtown Madrid! Click on this link to find out more about it: Treasure Island: British Art from Holbein to Hockney.

Moral Dilemmas

A moral dilemma arises when we have to choose to do one of two equally unpleasant things. To be in a moral dilemma is to be faced with a situation in which no matter what you do, you think you do wrong. Thankfully, most of us do not come across dire situations that present a moral dilemma, but we all have experienced the bitter feeling of having to take hard decisions in our lives, haven't we? In these situations it is never easy to tell right from wrong. Let us see one experiment in ethics, aimed at studying people's feelings and reactions:

 The cave explorers:

"An enormous rock falls and blocks the exit of a cave you and five other tourists have been exploring. Fortunately, you spot a hole elsewhere and decide to let "Big Jack" out first. But Big Jack, a man of generous proportions, gets stuck in the hole. He cannot be moved and there is no other way out. The high tide is rising and, unless you get out soon, everyone but Big Jack (whose head is sticking out of the cave) will inevitably drown. Searching through your backpack, you find a stick of dynamite. It will not move the rock, but will certainly blast Big Jack out of the hole. Big Jack, anticipating your thoughts, pleads for his life. He does not want to die, but neither do you and your four companions. Should you blast Big Jack out?"

 We will discuss this moral dilemma in class next week... But meanwhile... Do you guys remember the movie Se7en? This very famous film from the 90s, about two homicide detectives on a desperate hunt for a serial killer who justifies his crimes as absolution for the world's ignorance of the Seven Deadly Sins? Well, its very last scene depicts one moral dilemma Brad Pitt's character apparently is having: Should he kill the deranged serial killer who has decapitated his wife, even if this means the serial killer triumphs from beyond the grave? Does he really want to spend the rest of his life trapped inside the logic of the killer's warped, psychopathic system? But could he live without avenging his wife's death?

US Election System

Last week we learned how the US election system works. As you could see, it differs considerably from a system based on the popular vote. As a matter of fact, four presidents in the history of the US took office without winning the popular vote, Mr. George W. Bush included. Watch the video again, so that you can review the vocabulary for electing a president, and maybe you can write and share your reflection on it with the class.

So what's up with Maine and Nebraska?

Maine and Nebraska both use an alternative method of distributing their electoral votes, called the Congressional District Method. Currently, these two states are the only two in the union that diverge from the traditional winner-take-all method of electoral vote allocation.  

With the district method, a state divides itself into a number of districts, allocating one of its state-wide electoral votes to each district.  The winner of each district is awarded that district’s electoral vote, and the winner of the state-wide vote is then awarded the state’s remaining two electoral votes.  

This method has been used in Maine since 1972 and Nebraska since 1996, though since both states have adopted this modification, the statewide winners have consistently swept all of the state’s districts as well.  Consequently, neither state has ever split its electoral votes. 

Although this method still fails to reach the full ideal of one-man one-vote, it has been proposed as a nationwide reform for the way in which Electoral votes are distributed.

How optimistic are you?

Some people are always thinking about the worst things that can happen to them... Some other people are constantly wearing these rose-tinted glasses that make them totally oblivious to possible dangers, and most of us prefer to see the glass half full most of the times, while staying on the realistic side of life.   

Tali Sharot is a researcher who after conducting several lab studies believes that we are born to be optimistic, and that we are actually biased to look on the bright side of life. 

Click on the link below to review vocabulary and expressions, and get ready to watch her talk again. Next week I would like you to share your comments and ideas in class, so click on the open questions to get started!

Tali Sharot's vocabulary and expressions

Open questions on Tali Sharot's talk

It's all about taking risks...

You have probably realised by now that learning a second language means taking risks, and regaining your own creativity! You need to be creative, imaginative and, above all, you need to lose your fear of being wrong! 

Here follows the talk Kevin Robinson gave at TED several years ago, where he speaks about our current education system, and some things that we should change if we want to make the most of our human capacities. 

But first, before watching the video, review the list of vocabulary and expressions he uses, which a) I think you should know, and b) are gonna help you follow the thread of the story, ok? 

                                         Click here to see the vocabulary list 

Click here to see the vocabulary list

And now enjoy the lecture! I tell you, he's definitely a fun guy!

Now, could you please answer these open questions about his talk? We'll be discussing his points of view in class next week! Cheers!

Click here to answer the open questions
Click here to answer the open questions