Tras haber creado mi anterior blog cecilmundo varias personas, muchos de ellos mis alumnos, me sugirieron que creara una secciòn dentro de cecilmundo para publicar mis obras de docencia de idiomas. Dado que la cantidad de documentos de explicaciones, ejercicios y exàmenes de inglès son muy numerosos porque tengo màs de 30 años del ejercicio de la docencia, preferì estrenar blog con mis alumnos a como ellos realmente merecen. En este blog planetcecil no solo iràn mis documentos didàcticos de inglès, sino tambièn la producciòn literaria de varios alumnos que se destacan en las letras. Tambièn darè oportunidad a aquellos que tienen excelentes obras pero que no han logrado publicarlas ya que en mi paìs Nicaragua todo se mueve por la marrana polìtica, y si una no pertenece a determinado partido no verà jamàs publicado su opus. Tambièn tenemos la desgracia de contar con seudoeditores quienes al no conocer verdaderamente de literatura se convierten en mercenarios de la imprenta solo para llenarse ellos mismo de dinero y fama a costillas de los escritores. Todos aquellos que deseen participar en este blog, denlo de antemano por suyo. Aunque lleve mi nombre en un arranque de egolatrìa, yo soy sencillamente vuestra servidora.Cecilia

Las alas de la educación

Las alas de la educación
La educación es un viaje sin final.

La lección de física

La lección de física
Casi aprendida

martes, 29 de julio de 2008

the unbelief of beliefs



27 entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
July 27th
born
1768 Charlotte Corday , the naïve and pretty Norman assassin of Jean-Paul Marat 1801 George Biddle Airyy 7th Astronomer Royal, always with his head in the sky1824 Alexandre Dumas fils France, playwright/novelist (Camille),great rake
1867 Enrique Granados Lèrida ,Spain, composer (Maria del Carmen, Playera)this elegant pianist was bound to die with his wife when the Germans torpedoed the ship Lusitania during WWI
1877 Ern” (Ernst von) Dohnnyi Hungary, composer (Msg to Posterity)great among greats
Dies
1980 Shah Mohammed Reza Pahavala of Iran, dies in Cairo at 60, after having been kicked out of Iran along with his stiff wife and his kids

Events
1501 Nicholas Copernicus formally installed as canon of Frauenberg Cathedral 1586 Sir Walter Raleigh brings 1st tobacco to England from Virginia, starting thus the nicotine invasion of Europe.Yuck

July 28th
Births
1922 Jacques Piccard Switzerland, undersea explorer (bathyscaph Trieste)What did he find down there that he never told us about?
1929 Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis 1st lady of USA through her marriage to rakish John F.Kennedy, then soiled herself by marrying a Greek gold-plated gnome Ari Onassis (1961-63)
Deaths which occurred on July 28:
1540 Thomas Cromwell King Henry VIII's chief minister, executed for having told his king that the lady to become Henry`s fourth wife Anne of Cleves was sexy when it was a big fat lie1655 Cyrano de Bergerac French dramatist/novelist, dies in Paris,and his nose didn`t go in another coffin,please
1750 Johann Sebastian Bach German composer who worte the music that most exasperates me due to its mathematical precision (Art of the Fugue), dies at 65 completely blind 1794 Maximilien Robespierre French revolutionary/avocat who deemed himself icorruptible (1781), guillotined by his own.Died a virgin. 1794 Robespierre & 22 other terrorists executed to thunderous cheers by their ex correligionaries.Lesson to be learned.

Events

1586 Sir Thomas Harriot introduces potatoes to Europe, the best thing he ever did 1588 Spanish Armada sails to overthrow England's Queen Elizabeth I, unknowing that they will be olympically defeated by this grand dame`s navy.So cometh the pride afore the fall, said Shakespeare.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF BELIEF

It all started in a very simple way. Tell me of a teacher who wouldn`t do anything short of murder or arson to get their language students to speak, scream ,debate or write in the language they are learning. The lesson for today was animals-the question if they had a soul
So we got sidetracked so awfully we landed as-first head up into beliefs, reincarnation and all sort of stuff my boss would probably not deem fit for a classroom. It was when I realized that beliefs are the twilight zone in our heads and lives that can bring us together or rip us apart mercilessly.
IN first place we have to talk about the soul, something meaningless for a Marxist. Where in the body lies the soul? Did pianist Enrique Granados`soul also drown,at least leaving us drenched in his lovely Playera? When you die, some say you lose a few grams of weight. Logically,when you die you piss and shit,sorry for the sordid details.I explain the weight loss as due to what you expel. O angelbreath there for me,please. Religious people say the soul just got out in a hurry. Why doesn`t the soul appear in any x ray we may be taking of our bodies?Supposedly god gave us a soul from the moment he made Adam out of clay, giving it with “life`s breath”. One of my student believes in the Bible letter by letter, so he is shocked when I tell him that since the first guy was Adam and god gave him life`s breath, ever since men have been foul players because god had fetid breath. And the reason why women are still imperfect-although much less than males-is because god was lazy and took a bad raw material-a man`s rib- to confection us out of it. Then another of my students says that god`s worst mistake was to make man on the sixth day, having made the animals one day before, so the animals are our older brothers and sisters but as siblings they don`t get much respect from us because we hurt them,eat them and even used them against their own will for scientific experiments. Which brought us to remember that Thomas Aquinas, the great philsopher, said,”Beware humankind, now you are the strongest but on Judgement Day who will judge you will be the animals.” This makes many look at each other in dismay, and probably remember how many fried chickens he has eaten or how many cockroaches she has stepped on in her life. Last but not least I question aloud why if god was going to enjoy the seventh day as a break and never work again for the ages, why didn`t he act smarter and workl on the seventh day to better fashion the world and then he could have napped and snored all he wished to forever and ever.
The funny thing comes up when we remember the dinosaus without having to go into Jurassic Park details. If dinosaurs came first and then mankind, and man was fashioned in the image of god, then who the hell made the dinosaurs...until someone gets frightened and says that god could be a dinosaur disguised as a human, and the dinosaur in him is reflected in the monsters we all carry inside althopugh he was mean enough to eliminate the dinosaurs because he wanted no evidence of his real portrait and of all the meanness he carries within him.
Handling people`s beliefs is a tough job, my ever present muse. You might as well be appalled while reading this, your dark hair standing on end as if I had passed a direct current through you. How the hell did she become such a galloping heretic, you may ask. Not even heretic,which is worse. A nihilist?I don`t know. Sometimes labels shoo us away from meanings. When we got away from the religious topic because many were starting to roll their hands into fists and hell could break loose(once 2 years ago it did, my ninth-level English students were debating about religion versus scientific beliefs and my star student in that group,Mario Leonel,wanted to smack a chair as a hat on someone who had all the looks of a religious bigot), we went into reincarnation and that is where ypou stepped in wearing your full colors. I swallowed Gibraltar so I wouldn`t mention your case and the strange feeling I have of having met you long time ago in the whirwind of time. I categorically said it was a pile of codswallop and the cases of dèja vu, premonitions and presages started pouring in. How could I talk about the strange ESP that like a an umbilical cord made of gossamer ties me to you? How to explain in plain grammatical English words that we might b so many miles away but like an antenna, your skin captures every move I make? Why do we ask the same questions and expect such similar things? No,ladies and gentleman, rather be caught by a troop of marauding macaques than having to admit this stuff of reincarnation has been giving me everyday trouble.I cannot go back on my word!
The master planner, the hard pragmatist who believes in her uniform because she is wearing it, who trusts that her San Juan River exists just because she loves it and can dip into it...believing in reincarnation because it may have been true for her? No way,my dear!
Rather dead in public than reincarnated in private, but still I look beyond my epaulets with the stars now more in my eyes than on my shoulders, and I feel tempted to say like Tweety when he sees Sylvester,”I believe I saw it.It`s true,it`s true!” That is what you get from too much Cartoon Network and Boomerang, the same channels I warned my kid not to overwatch if she wanted to keep her 100 gold plated average in school.
I have to admit the 2 hours of my lesson went so fast. An atom in the huge mass of time. Everyone yowled,yelled,laughed and got shocked in English. That was the goal, it was achieved. But who would give me an A or an F for my case? I am still unsolved.I have no explanation for the sense that I have lived before being the humble,overweight war vet I am now. My cats know it but refuse to say anything, because they already know who they were on their own and expect me to do the same, understand with wisdom what I was and what I can be with or without you. Life is a lesson, and flesh is one of the exercises it must carry out. We lived and we died,and probably came back again. Even old Thomas Cromwell who lost his head over someone else`s botched ladylove. The rest of us still navigate through the ocean of circumstances, and continue until we find the lighthouse emitting a beam from the eyes of someone we probably knew better than ourselves...in another place,another time, in the huge and endless ocean of history.







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