Lost in Pride and Prejudice - The Ultimate Nerd Collection

Forget about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Yay for Austen purists!

Okay, enough ranting.

I have found the ultimate nerds' edition of Pride and Prejudice:

In this annotated edition, you get the text on the left-hand page, and lots of notes on the right-hand page, e.g.:

This guy must really love the book to annotate every single page! There's lots of useful notes on things like social conventions, clothing, carriages, and furniture, as well as useful stuff, like maps.

And if that doesn't satisfy your Darcy-lust, check out this sticker my friend brought back for me from England:

Do I dare to put it on my car??



The ABC is currently replaying one of my favourite Austen-related series, Lost in Austen. For those who haven't tasted its delights, the show is about Pride and Prejudice devotee Amanda Price, who one day finds Elizabeth Bennet in her bathroom and a gateway into the novel through the back of her bathtub.

Great hilarity and plot twisting ensues as Amanda tries desperately to make the action follow the course of the book. A fun series and a great way to teach intertextuality, as the show also references the well-loved BBC series which featured Colin Firth and that wet shirt. The Lost in Austen spoof can be viewed here.

Episode one is on iview.

Traditional Bookshops Bordering on Extinction?

This is the question being posed in recent days as Borders and Angus and Robertson announced they were going into receivership, with the rising popularity of internet bookshops thought to be a major contributing factor.


Angus and Robertson Armidale franchisee Paul McManus told The Armidale Express that it would be "business as usual", because the A&R's franchising system offers protection to some extent.


Meanwhile, Dymocks is trying to take advantage of the situation by enticing Borders and A&R rewards card holders to transfer their allegiance. Those who are willing to surrender membership cards of the troubled chains will be given a Dymocks Booklovers card with 1000 points. See their website for details.

In other news, no doubt people in the US are preparing to camp outside Apple stores in anticipation of the release of iPad Mark II, expected out on March 2 (later in the year for Australia).

I've also been trying out Zinio, a site which allows you to buy digital copies of the latest magazines from all over the world. The software was a bit problematic to download, but seems to be working fine now.

I bought the March 2011 issue of InStyle UK, and although the pages are a little slow to load, it was easy to browse - helped by having a clickable contents page which takes you straight to the bits you want, and a zooming tool. All of this for AUD$5, and knowing that I'm not contributing to landfill or the dusty pile of old magazines in the corner of my room!

Do these developments signal the death of physical bookstores and hard copy texts? Consider this: no matter how hard you sniff your computer, you will not be able to get that new book smell or the whiff of perfume samples in your favourite magazine...

The Future of Girls' Education in Afghanistan

A thought worth pondering from The Courier-Mail yesterday - the withdrawal of foreign countries from Afghanistan may endanger recent gains in the number of girls receiving education there.

Here is an excerpt from the article, "Girls' education threatened in Afghanistan":

"The number of girls in education has risen from 5000 in 2001 when the Taliban were ousted, to 2.4 million today, although many do not attend regularly and are forced to drop out early, the study from groups including Oxfam said...

"...Abdul Waheed Hamidy of Afghan NGO Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance added: 'It's crucial that donor governments sustain their support for development, especially education, even once their troops leave the country.'"

The plight of girls under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was memorably depicted by Khaled Hosseini in his acclaimed and engrossing novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

As we well know, education is an important stimulus for change, and it would be terrible to see a return to the days when the Taliban actively attacked schools and persecuted young women who wanted an education.

Love, Love, Love

Yes, Valentine's Day has passed us yet again, and I meant to post some teaching ideas up before the event, but...anyway, better late than never!

It's always good to reflect on the notions of love with teenagers and get them to consider how love might be viewed differently from different perspectives, such as secular, Christian, Muslim, etc. This is particularly relevant for teenagers as they are going through an important phase in their lives when they try to figure out how relationships work.

The following activity could be done at any time of the year, not just Valentine's Day:

Love and Spiritual Food
This year, I found this rad t-shirt at Kmart:

It appears to be a crossword made up of random words/thoughts/concepts to do with love. I used it as a lesson hook with my pastoral care class, to see who could work out the most number of words.

We went on to brainstorm the Fruits of the Spirit, as found in the Bible (Galatians 5:22-26): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness and self-control (whew! Thank God for Sunday School songs that helped with memorisation!).

I then got them to answer 2 questions as a means of self-reflection and to help with caring for others in the class:

1. Which fruit(s) do you think you possess the most of?
2. Which fruit(s) would you like more of?

NB: another additional hook to this activity is to get the kids to name as many songs as they can think of with "love" in the title, and then get them to collate their results and conclude what impressions of love are presented through music (passion, lust, jealousy, etc.).

National Professional Standards for Teachers

In case you haven't heard, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) released National Professional Standards for Teachers on February 9.

According to their website, the standards aim to "promote excellence in teaching and provide a nationally consistent basis for recognising quality teaching. They make explicit what teachers should know, be able to do and what is expected of effective teachers across their career".

There are 7 standards:
Standard 1: Know students and how they learn
Standard 2: Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3: Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 4: Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments
Standard 5: Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Standard 6: Engage with professional learning
Standard 7: Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

These standards are arranged around 3 domains:
Professional Knowledge (1, 2)
Professional Practice (3, 4, 5)
Professional Engagement (6, 7)

And recognise 4 career stages:
Graduate Teachers
Proficient Teachers
Highly Accomplished Teachers
Lead Teachers

Apparently, these standards are part of a push towards greater acknowledgement of teachers' work, particularly as many leave the profession because of the lack of career advancement.

Teaching Teens

A thought-provoking article written by Herbert Puchta was published recently in The Guardian. Puchta, who is president of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, claims that teachers of teenagers should spend less time trying to find trendy teen pop culture artefacts to engage students and more time on what he calls "emotional engagement".

He cites a book called Romantic Understanding by Kieran Egan as a source for this claim:
"According to those insights, teens – as cool as they may seem on the surface – often feel, deep down, threatened by the world. One reason for their insecurity is caused by the fact that they ask themselves questions that are of an existentially threatening nature, because teens cannot find any answers to them: Will I be successful in life? Will I be able to find a good job and earn good money one day? When will my parents die? When will I die? What happens when I do? Who will miss me when I die? etc.

"Although the world of teens is basically a contact culture, they hardly ever share their real fears with others, and this often leads to a feeling of loneliness and the assumption that they are the only ones in the world suffering from such problems. The only way out of this situation seems to lie in trying not to be an individual – not an easy task given the particular phase in their lives is also about developing their sense of self, their identity – and so they engage in copying each other: wearing the same brands of T-shirts and trainers, adoring the same kind of heroes and heroines, and finding the same kind of things either 'awesome' or 'gross' (current UK teen expressions for good and bad).

"Such behaviour, together with their choice of heroes, often seems to suggest superficiality to the adult observer. But it's anything but that. When teens choose their idols – the likes of Lady Gaga and Jay-Z maybe – they do so because they intuitively feel connected with what they perceive as the best human qualities through their heroes, whereas for adults every single one of those stars may well be representative of a tinsel world."

One method proposed by Puchta of emotionally engaging students is to spend more time discussing moral dilemmas/scenarios. He gives the example of "Subway Hero" Wesley Autry, who had to decide whether or not to rescue a man who had an epileptic fit and fell onto rail tracks, just as a train was approaching. {Another one might be that of Jews in hiding during the Holocaust, where a crying baby threatens to give them away, and the mother has to decide whether to kill her own child to save them all}

Food for thought.