Pig Sty Avenue

The Old Man has for years followed his own stable of horses: those whose names refer to our family's names, especially his grandchildren. I follow them too, on-and-off. We never back more than fiver each, normally a couple of quid. Anyway, here's a new member of the stable I found yesterday in the racecard at Yarmouth, Suzy Alexander . As you can see, it didn't cover itself in glory, exactly . Anyway, he and Mam are on a bus trip to Scarborough, and I rang him up to tell him about this horse. He was in the local British Legion club and went outside to talk to me. The old club doorman had heard the conversation, and realized it centred around a horse. So he asked, half-jokingly, with his gambler's eye to free information, "Was that a tip you were getting?" Now, the Old Man could hardly say, well, not really, it's just a bit of horse-related family humour, because he would have looked a bit cagey, as if he was holding back, so he said it was and gav...

Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall This would be good for teaching tenses. Or maybe just reviewing them in an end of term lesson. The way different tenses are used throughout. You could teach the concept of aspect with it: where's he standing as the narrrative progresses. And how his tense use depends on the question prompt at the start of each verse. Here's the text of the lyrics . EDIT: you could use a power point or wtf to look at a time line. Image of Bob, different points on the time line. Images to illustrate the lyrics.

And here's another Holga site .

I read on the lomography site (I think... it's a commercial site so I'm not giving a link to the buggers), that Holga is an anglicization of ho gwong which, they said, means bright light . Hmm. One of my Mandarin speaking students discussed it with her Cantonese speaking chum, and they agreed it actually translates into something like you have a bright (healthy looking) face . Which is much nicer. The gwong syllable is pronounced in a charming way, reminiscent of the ringing of a bell or, well, gong.

I'll buy the Tetenal kit to get me started, but I want to make my own in due course: here's a starting point from the DIY Color group on Flickr . There's also the Dignan Divided C41 Recipe . And here, God bless him, someone called Ahock has done a lot of work and set it out nicely .

I've shopped around and this seems to be the best price . I'm budgetting on £20 with P&P. I'll need a new thermometer, too. I'm also thinking, we just don't have the room at home to do enlargements, so I'm going to compromise and get digital enlargements done. I can seek out somewhere to do proper wet darkroom prints in due course: I have, as they used to say in the films, the negatives.

Just a link , note to self.

Is what I've got, the doctor told me today. It's not rocket science, she kept saying, it's about diet. Hmm. The veg you buy in shops is shite. So I need to get an allotment, exercise and proper vegetables. A bike. Go fishing. Take the Holga. Less drink. Less pies. A proper job nearer home would help these plans.

It's all just gotten on my nerves. I'm going to have a holiday from it. Life's too short. In-jokes and arseholes. Etc. Mind you, I'm really looking forward to getting the Holga. I'm a hopeless romantic for cameras: maybe this will be The One? It's been a long journey so far, from Brownie Reflex when I was 8, via SLRs, a point and shoot, DSLR, one of the original SLRs, a FED2, a Leica, several Ilford Sportis, several folders, to a Holga. Which is not a million miles from the Reflex, except for the built in flash. It's the vignetting and the spontaneity I'm after. I can get a flash on the Agfa, but by the time I open it, put on the flash, do the settings, cock the shutter... It's a great camera, and I'll use it for set-up or formal situations, but it's not down and dirty. Whereas, a Holga, just carry it around, the flash is built in, away you go if you meet someone or something happens or wtf. And there's the possible effects of ...

I've been meaning to get a copy of Macdonald's Revolution in the Head since it came out. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was only £3 in HMV yesterday, and I got a copy. Later I realized that the price drop is no doubt connected to the release of the remastered albums coming up on 9th September (9/9/9, geddit?) Hmm. So I've also pre-ordered the remastered Please Please Me, as the first step in another collection. Much more than that, if one was born in 1960, this formed a big part of that soundtrack of childhood. And The Beatles phenomenon was always at the interstices of musical genius and capitalist greed. The 60s nostalgia has been going on for a week or so: I've been listening a lot to the BBC Hendrix CD. Probably not the best performances, those sessions didn't have the thoroughness of a full studio recording or the energy of a live one, but they're great fun nontheless.

Well, I managed to write much more than 1500 words, in particular an outline, much of which will serve as the introduction, and note on the methodology. It also meant I had to think it all through, the bigger picture, and I've done that now so I'm about ready to rock and roll with serious work on it. So I won't be blogging much for a couple of months. Meanwhile, I treated myself to that Holga, which will probably take several weeks to arrive from Hong Kong. And here's a rather wacky Holga site . In just over two months I will be free of evenings and weekends of study, and I can have lots of family time, photography, gardening, cycling, walking... I swear I will never again set about studying something formally in my own time.

When you've set aside the whole day, it seems a bit daunting. So amidst the mostly mindless surfing and noodling around, I spent a bit of time back in my old playground, DMU, in particular this thread . It quickly goes off-topic, of course, but the start of it got me thinking again about getting a Holga. A wee bit of research this morning tells me I want an FN, that is, 120, plastic lens, built-in flash but no silly colours. Less than £25 on eBay, with free postage from Hong Kong. All of which got me thinking, when I was first starting on the MA, more than four years ago now, I told myself, when I'd finished it, and got a good full time job as a result, I'd treat myself to a la-di-da camera, which at that time I imagined as a semi-pro DSLR. How things have changed, because I'll settle for the Holga now. Not that the MA has produced the full time permanent job yet. Here's a carrot for today, then: If I have 1500 words by the end of the day (that's 10% of th...

Provisional thoughts on methodology: The students have nine pieces of assessed writing over eight weeks. These range from 1 hour timed writings to a three thousand word essay. Teachers are paired. I've already secured the co-operation one pair, I'll get another pair at the staff meeting tomorrow. For the first (timed) essay, teachers have been asked to select their class's top, middle and bottom essays to pass over to their co-teacher for double marking. They are the ones I'll select for data, (two pairs, three per teacher, so that's 12 examples, times nine over the whole course, that's 108 examples of writing and marking. [Too many?]). And I'll stick with those twelve students throughout, whether or not they lose their high/middle/low status. That should give the data continuity. And the marking of four teachers will also guard against anomalies. Four teachers and twelve learners will also be good numbers for other data: interviews and questionnair...

I've never heard of this until tonight . Where blueprints come from. I'll have to give it a go. This explains how to .

Hmm. Lot of psycholinguistics in the library here.

Working Title: Adapting the CEFR for Assessment of Academic Writing Ability I won't use the phrase in the actual dissertation, but there could be the start of a paradigm shift here. When I applied to NEECU for their pre-sessional last year, they turned me down: "...you do not appear to have the relevant experience or qualifications. EAP is very different from ESOL (and also very different from IELTS) and we require experience of the former, preferably in a higher education context." I was a bit narked at the time, but now I can see that there was a conscious effort going on here to separate their EAP from IELTS. It's a rather bold move, because on pre-sessionals throughout academia everyone is focussed on getting their magic 6.0. 6.5 or 7.0. (Well, I'm saying that... But I have no data for it. It was the situation at Glasgow. A survey of practice across UK Universities might be a good idea for a future study). I still need to read up on the details - I...

L. Ravelli, & R. Ellis (Eds.), (2004) Analysing academic writing in context: Contextualised frameworks London: Continuum Coffin, C., Curry, M., Goodman, S. et al. (eds) (2003) Teaching Academic Writing, Routledge, London.

I'd never heard of the TESL Canada Journal until this morning. It's a bugger to get access to. This article on faculty involvement in testing might be useful. The European Framework of Languages: A Piloting Sample of Cross-curricular Strategy might be good stuff, too, if I can only get access.