Resources to be trusted?

When working on a topic and searching on the internet for information, one page leads you to another, and almost by coincident you can come across many interesting sites and articles. But sometimes, I wonder about the quality of what I find on the web. This morning, I just very quickly needed to check the years of the Anglo-Irish War, and a google search led me to some BBC-pages on the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish War of Independence. The pages seem to be written according to the "Wikipedia principle". I would like to know more about these pages, as they promise to be "your guide to Life, the Universe and, well, Everything". Does anyone know anything more? Has anyone used these pages in their teaching, or maybe someone has actually written on of the articles? I would be happy to get some comments.

Photo: "Wired"

In between correcting papers..

There has not been a whole lot of time for blogging lately. I guess all teachers recognise the feeling of despair when you have too many papers to correct and simply not enough time to get your head above water? I really hate those weeks (and there seems to be more of them every year!) when I have to spend every night and every weekend correcting termpapers! However, it can also be kind of an inspiration when I see that some of my students have actually taken the advice I have given them, and really done a great job on their all-day tests.

I guess correcting papers would not be such a burden if I did not have to plan all my lessons and teach the entire week at the same time, but that is life. Some weeks ago I told about planning how to deal with the troubles in Northern Ireland in class, and that I find it quite hard knowing where to put focus. Due to various circumstances, we have not come around to teaching this topic until this week, and in the last minute I made some adjustments to my original plan. Teaching English in the same group for five hours (5 x 50 minutes to be accurate) in one day, means that I have to make sure the activities are varied and that the students are given "food for thought" in various ways. As an introduction to Northern Ireland I played Sinead O'Conner's This IS a Rebel Song to the class, and asked them what they knew about Northern Ireland and the conflict there. Most of them knew quite a few things, and it felt great to see that they actually tried to explain what was going on, even if they really did not understand it all (who can blame them...). The students were then to work in pairs with the text called "13 questions on Northern Ireland" and U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (see here for more details on the activities), before I gave them a short lecture on some central historical events.

We finished off by reading the short story "The Sniper". I have used this text in class the last four years and it works every time. It might be that it appeals more to the boys than other stories and that they get more talkative, or it might just be that the students find the ending surprising and perhaps even shocking. Anyway, my exerience is that they really like to talk about this short story, and when asked to pick any story that they have read in school, quite many pick this one.

So much for Northern Ireland and this week's teaching. Sometimes when I correct papers Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by woods..." comes to my mind:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

I am looking forward to running around in the woods soon!

Photo: "Leave me alone, I know what I'm doing!"

Northern Ireland - trouble once again

The last couple of days we have seen that the conflict and the trouble in Northern Ireland have not come to an end. Since Saturday two soldiers and one policeman have been murdered, and there is much unrest in the Ulster region. The Continuity IRA, a dissident republican group, today claimed responsibility, saying that "as long as there is British involvement in Ireland, these attacks will continue."

For years I have tried to really understand what this conflict is all about, and though I believe I have managed to see some of the lines, I find it really hard teaching this to my students. First, I find that they do not have enough knowledge of British history to understand how the problems could have started in the first place. Second, I believe that most Norwegians think that the conflict is just about religion and that you can simply say that Catholics and Protestants disagree on how Northern Ireland should be governed. How much should we teach them? Do Norwegian students have to know all the details about the conflict, or should we just try to give them a simplified version of Irish history? I have often used the textbook Passage's "Thirteen Questions about Northern Ireland" to be a good starting point when teaching this topic. This text gives answers to many of the questions that the students have, and it helps correcting misconceptions. I like to present more facts than there is in this text, but for some students these thirteen questions will suffice. For those who really want to go in depth on the topic, I believe this BBC page is a place to start. Here you find information on all the central events and people involved, and the page is well structured, so finding what you are looking for should be fairly simple. I have also browsed through a couple of pages on the internet, and I guess both BBC's history page and infoplease.com can be used, at least when preparing for the lesson.

I still have a few days left before putting focus on Northern Ireland in class. I guess I must wait almost until the last minute before I decide my approach this year. After all, it would not make a whole lot of sense talking about history only when the situation is as it is in the region at the moment.

PS! Please take the time to listen to Sinead O'Conner's beautiful song "This Is a Rebel Song". It is really worth the time!