I truly hope that you all enjoy your holidays and have some time with your family and friends. These holidays and your next three breaks need to be times when you unwind but must also stay focused on the task at hand. A two-week hiatus from your studies will wreak havoc with our carefully laid plains. Keep your work by your bedside, if it works for you, and just do fifteen minutes when you wake and fifteen minutes when you duck off to bed. That's your holiday work done!
Your tasks for the holidays (when completed) will position you all very well for not only this unit but also in terms of understanding the teacher-student relationship we will employ during the HSC to maximise our time together.
Without further ado...
- You MUST MUST MUST have read the first 19 pages of your yellow speeches booklet. It is not only of massive benefit in terms of understanding what will be asked of you in your HSC assessments, it will also - as we have done before - offer you a wonderful vocabulary - remember how we had a similar kind of list for Satire? Highlight the keywords, it will help you for the next 12 months.
- Moving now to the green booklet (pages 13-18) you MUST MUST MUST have read and understood all the concepts within these pages. A couple of you have spoken to me about "finding techniques difficult". Indeed, I agree with you. I remember finding them difficult myself. This six-page piece of perfection clearly outlines the purposes of and devices used in rhetorical language (the basis of all oral language) and will signpost them for you in our set speeches.
- Read (again, for some of you) the speeches by Paul Keating, Faith Bandler and Aung San Suu Kyi.
- Read (again, for some of you) the notes from our green book on each of these three speeches.
- Look at page 23 of your yellow booklet. This is (what we will call) a 'Table of Tidbits'. It will be your guide for each of the speeches. I saw Year 12 scholars studying these notes as they sat their trial HSC exams this year. They are gold-dust. Your penultimate task will be to fill out these forms for Sadat, Keating, Bandler and Suu Kyi. There is ONE table for each speaker. Please note that you will have these for the next 12 months - do them with diligence, precision and care.
- Pages 32 will help you understand the universality of some of the speeches' ideas.
- Pages 33-35 are past essay questions. The keener students among you may like to look at the sample answer (on pages 36-38) and write your own essay. I will be overseas all holidays but will mark your work upon my return.
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
See you in two weeks.
M
Its from, as you like it, by Shakespeare
ReplyDeleteI already won zanon...
ReplyDeleteIn Aung San Suu Kyis' speech would cooperation along with tolerance and equality be the themes. Is there any more that I may have missed, if so what are they and explain why.
ReplyDeleteAlex, Thanks for your input.
ReplyDeleteEquality for females is definitely her big one. She has been campaigning not only for women's rights but also for national equality for years (which is one of the main reasons why she was under house arrest for so long).
Her other key concern (theme, if you like) is political and social freedom. In this way, can you see how her speech is similar to Anwar Sadat's? This is the sort of similarity we need to start seeing.
Good start.
Where is everyone else, I wonder...
I found the major themes of Sadats speech to be unity and peace, similar to Bandler and Suu Ky. Throughout the speech, Sadat makes many biblical references, opening the speech with two paragraphs about God and peace, thus building his thesis off of this. I question the effect of his biblical allusions and wonder whether he uses them to make the audience feel guilty, particularly when they live in what Sadat calls "the land of God"?
ReplyDeleteWell done, Harry. You are indeed correct with the similarities between Bandler, Suu Kyi and Anwar Sadat. It is this sort of analysis that is needed.
ReplyDeleteCan you - or anyone else - find any textual similarities with the three? (ie - can you find three different quotes about peace or justice from the speeches that you could blend into a body paragraph?
i agree with dale
ReplyDeleteThanks Anonymous. Great insight. Powerful.
ReplyDeleteYes this is very true great insight
ReplyDelete