Start of Term

Boarders return tonight (Eyjafjallajokull allowing), and classes start tomorrow. As always, in English this is a busy term - the Leaving and Junior Cert exams of course, but also:- results of the Poetry Prizes, the Shakespeare Prize, theatre visits (starting with Macbeth at the Abbey on Wednesday evening), the Transition Year English Evening (IV formers will be starting term with plenty of essay writing for their Work Portfolio), more reviews of iPhone apps useful for English, the Actiontrack showbuild week, the Voices of Poetry evening and much more. As ever, we'll be posting lots of pupil work. And our Twitter feed tweets away, highlighting interesting sites and work on the web and much more: thanks to the 229 followers we currently have. Join the conversation...

Coming shortly, too, King Lear revision podcasts on the line of last year's well-received Macbeth podcasts for the Leaving Cert.

Finally, perhaps the biggest and most exciting thing for the site this term will be the publication of our second book, selecting highlights from SCC English from 2008 to 2010, following Going Places which we published two years ago. Plenty more in due course.

Hilary Term 2010

After a delayed start due to weather (pictured, the Chapel three days ago before the thaw), we're underway today.

In English and Drama terms, ahead are: the posting of lots of pupil work from last term, especially TY Extended Essays and book reports; the Mock Leaving and Junior Cert exams just after half-term; the announcements shortly of the results of the Senior and Junior English Prizes; the launch of the Senior and Junior Poetry Prizes; several new podcasts, especially on Leaving Certificate poetry work; the Junior Play, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole; the II form Actiontrack workshops; the TY Academic Prize; several theatre and cinema outings; more Poems of the Week; World Book Day, and some technical goodies...

Busy, busy, busy...

Christmas Holidays

We end the Michaelmas Term today, and come back on Monday 11th January 2010. So it's time for lots of reading during the festivities. There will be some more automated posts on 'Christmas Past' as we complete our series leading up to Christmas itself. It's been another extremely busy blogging term, and in January we'll be posting lots of work by pupils - particularly Extended Essays and book reports - that got backed up towards the end of this term.

A final reminder of the Edublog Awards vote - last day today. And Happy Christmas to all our visitors.

Exodus

Exams end at lunchtime today, and then we're on an Exodus, restarting school on Wednesday morning. After that, a very busy time generally in school, and a particularly busy time for this blog as we start posting TY Extended Essays, junior book reports, another Everybody Writes day, and lots more on the run-in to the end of term.

Guerrilla Poet Strikes Again

Recently we published a 'poem' by one Charmaine Munch (Trelawny), which the Librarian had found lying around the Library. Now another poet, with suspiciously similar nomenclature, has deposited another piece in the Senior Reading Room. It's called 'An Irish Scientist Foresees his Test', and was clearly written immediately after the famous 'Hand of Frog' in Paris. You can read the whole moving work by 'Seosamh Plantagenet-Truce (Billabong)' here.

We suspect that the mystery author may be one of the froggy types lurking in the Science Block, especially since they responded very quickly to Monsieur Henry's perfidy here.

Edublog Awards

Nominations for the the 2009 Edublog Awards have opened (we were delighted with last year's results...), the premier educational internet awards, and we'd like to nominate in these categories:-

• Best Group Blog: The Frog Blog
• Best Individual Blog: The Frog Blog
• Best New Blog: SCC Art
• Best Educational Use of a Social Networking Site : English Companion
• Best Teacher Blog: The Frog Blog

SCC English on Twitter

Our Twitter page is here (and in the sidebar); we'll be using it mostly for posting interesting links to all things English.

Art Blog

A welcome to the latest blog to join the SCC 'stable', from the Art Department, here. Featured, 'Printed Landscape' from Molly Maire of I form.

Frog Blog

Good to see that our colleagues over on the science Frog Blog are mentioned very favourably in the press, as they've hopped onto the Blog Digest in today's Irish Independent, re Science Week (that's enough 'hopping' comments. They're really lame - Ed.)

Spookily enough, in the latest 'Teaching English magazine (see today's earlier post), Oliver Glenn-Craigie's poem on page 9 is beside one by Sinead Kilgarriff of Our Lady's Bower called 'Frogs', adorned by a particularly splendid photo of one of the creatures. This prompted us to wonder about the interface between science and literature in this admittedly specialist area, and to search for more examples. Sadly, it seems that few writers have been inspired by the topic, and so, to fill in this gap, we've written our own contribution.

It's called 'Frog':-

A most intellectual frog
Was sitting astride a log.
"I'm tapping away,"
He said, "Every day,
On my amphibian blog."

Eircom Golden Spiders, 2009

We're delighted to be shortlisted again in the 'Best Blog' category in the 2009 Golden Spider Awards, sponsored by Eircom. And even more delighted to be joined this year by our hopping scientific friends over on the Frog Blog, which means that SCC has 2 of the 8 blogs shortlisted. The prize-giving is on November 19th.

We resume term today, and have a busy time ahead, with exams in three weeks, and plenty of blog activity, including soon a series of posts on Remembrance Week, and war in literature. More shortly.

College Newsletter

SCC is about to launch its new e-newsletter, replacing our previous colour magazine. All are welcome to subscribe via the website, by going here and typing your email address in the field on the right, 'Subscribe to College Newsletter'. You'll get a confirming email, and newsletters about twice a term, starting in a couple of days.

'Books' by Poppy Vernon

Above, a picture of prayer books - the evocative and beautiful photograph by Poppy Vernon which won her the youth category in the 2009 National Heritage Week Photography Competition. Well done!

Realex Irish Web Awards 2009

SCC English has been nominated in the 'Best Education and Third Level' category, sponsored by the National Digital Research Centre, in the 09 Realex Irish Web Awards. We're one of about 30 nominees, so we're not exactly preparing our acceptance speech quite yet, and there are definitely some big chaps in our category, including several universities' websites. Well done to Anseo, too, from the primary sector. The full lists are here.

Salve!

Greetings to the latest addition to SCC sites, the Latin Department, whose 'domus' is here.

Start of Term

All pupils are now in school, and our first classes are being held this afternoon. Since SCC English started in 2006, we've posted about 250 times a year, and no doubt this year will be no less busy. Last year we started podcasting, and have plans for plenty more podcasts in the coming months, including regular short sessions on individual poems on the Leaving Certificate course.

Ahead of us also are: the large amount of work done by Transition Year pupils on their Extended Essays (and lots of accompanying book recommendations), many of which we'll publish here later in the term, the Senior Play, the House Speech competition, Poetry Aloud, Poems of the Week, possibly another 'Everybody Writes' various theatre expeditions, and other projects. And of course there are bound to be things we didn't foresee.

So, keep watching... you can sign up to our email posts at the bottom of the sidebar on the right, and to our RSS feed too, to keep up to date.

Twitter

Many thanks to Adrian Weckler, tech editor of the Sunday Business Post, for his kind complimentary remarks on Twitter recently about this site and our podcasts in particular.

Wordle posters

We've used Wordle quite a bit over the last year. The UK-based Teachit ('English Teaching Online') is now selling ten posters for classrooms created using Wordle :

The featured texts are Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, Frankenstein, Holes, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Metaphors’, Of Mice and Men, John Agard’s ‘Poetry Jump-Up’, Romeo and Juliet, Skellig, The Crucible and Alfred Noyes’ ‘The Highwayman’. We’ve also given each Wordle-produced design a few tweaks, so that our posters capture something in the mood of each text.

Buy from Teachit here.

Language Blogs Voting Deadline

Monday is the deadline for votes for the 100 Top Language Blogs being run by Lexiophiles. Click the button on the right to vote, or go back here for more details.

Top 100 Language Blogs Voting

We're delighted to be in the running for the 2009 Top 100 Language Blogs (in the Language Learning category), and voting has now started (50% of the assessment is via public vote). We'd also be delighted to get your vote - so just click here or on the icon at the top of the sidebar on the right, both of which will take you to the voting page. Then scroll down (alphabetical order) to 'SCC English', click the circle to the left of the name, and go to the bottom of the list and click 'Vote'. Done! Should take 10 seconds. Please vote by the deadline, Monday 27th July.

You can read about all the nominations in the category here - with blogs in Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Hindi, French and lots more. There are also categories in Language Teaching, Language Professionals and Language Technology. The awards are being run by Lexiophiles.com and bab.la, both of which have lots of interesting material about language in its myriad forms.

The English Fuss

A month ago, there was a huge fuss in the national media about the rescheduled English Leaving Certificate exam. Our Head of Department has a piece reflecting on this on the Poetry Ireland guest blog here.