Primary, I, II form plays

Rehearsals have started for the first drama productions of the year, which are traditionally by the most junior pupils. This year we're going to see adaptations of two literary classics. Primary and I form are taking on Treasure Island (directed by Mr Patterson), and II form are showing The Tell-Tale Heart (directed by Mr McCarthy). Both performances will be in the BSR on the evening of Sunday 18th October. More then.

All's Well That Ends Well

The College Shakespeare Society was founded to promote Shakespeare's work within the College; we've put on productions of the plays, and try to see anything good that's on in Dublin (including, last year, The Winter's Tale and The Comedy of Errors). We're planning a trip to the National Theatre of London live telecast of All's Well That Ends Well at Dundrum cinema on Thursday 1st October (above the whole text seen via Wordle. Click on it for a closer look). Pupils, please give names to Fiona Boyd.

Read reviews from the Guardian, the Times and the Evening Standard here at the NT site.

Poem of the Week 54 : 'Brown Penny'

Our 54th Poem of the Week is W.B. Yeats's 'Brown Penny'. Yeats's poems again feature in Poetry Aloud this year. And again, both the exhibition itself and the website in the National Library are highly recommended.

I whispered, "I am too young,"
And then, "I am old enough";
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
"Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair."
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

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.

Going Places

In May 2008 we published our first book, Going Places, a selection of writing from this blog in its first two years. It can be bought from the printers, Lulu here; below, you can read it online for the first time today via Issuu ... (click below on the pages for a larger view, and again to zoom.)

... which is a way of saying that we're now half-way through another Lulu cycle, as it were, and hope to publish another book in May 2010, collecting the best writing from SCC English from 2008 to 2010.

Open publication - Free publishing - More poetry

Salve!

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

Poetry Aloud 2009

The Poetry Aloud competition for this year has just been launched, and over the next two weeks we'll be holding our own internal auditions and competitions to select candidates to go forward to the first heat.

The set poems by Yeats are 'Who Goes with Fergus?' (junior), 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death' (intermediate) and 'What Then?' (senior), and the second poem is to be chosen from The Rattle Bag or Lifelines. Pupils can borrow a copy of The Rattle Bag from their teachers. Full details here.

The Man Behind the Spoon

Back in March, colleague Ronan Swift was on our first podcast, an interview about his new album Farewell Future Wives (listen again via the player at the bottom of this post). It's taken a little while, but the launch concert is on Thursday, and all are welcome. More here.

Details : Unitarian Church, St Stephen's Green, Dublin. Doors open at 8pm for a prompt 8.30 start. €10 in (and the same price for the night for the CD itself). And a wine reception thrown in too in the Damer Hall afterwards.

See you there.

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You can also listen to our podcasts via the 'widget' on the sidebar to the right, or by visiting our podcast page here (if you have iTunes on your computer you can also subscribe by clicking here, and so download our episodes to your MP3 player, or by searching for 'SCC English' in the iTunes Store).

Web 2.0 links

For tutors at the NCTE course today in Tallaght, this is the link to the summary sheet for Web 2.0 tools used by SCC English, including links to the Wiki and Netvibes.

Man Booker Prize shortlist

On Tuesday the annual Man Booker Prize shortlist was announced in London. Many thanks to our former colleague, John Fanagan, who was at the occasion, and has written this account for us (go here for an earlier recommendation of William Trevor's Love and Summer):-


Much comment in the Irish media about this year's Man Booker shortlist centred on the failure of Colm Toibin and (Old Columban) William Trevor to make the cut. I have just finished reading both books and felt that they are very fine works. Not having read the six that the Man Booker jury chose, I can't say (yet) if their choices were justified.

On September 8th I was at the reception to announce the short list in the Orangery of Kensington Palace. It was a very convivial occasion, with everyone mingling and chatting on a beautiful, warm evening. I bearded the jury chairman, James Naughtie, about the Trevor/Toibin exclusions and he sighed with a world-weary “if only we could have” bit of flannel. Another jury member, Lucasta Miller, said something similar when I met her later. She has young children (her husband is the singer Ian Bostridge) and she was very interesting on the whole process of reading so many books while running a family home.


Of the two Irish novels, I felt that Trevor's

II Form reading list

Yesterday we posted the III Junior Cert reading list. Now here's the II form one for this term, with plenty of good suggestions of books available in our Library. II formers will write reports in their exam in November based on some of these books. Included are books such as Anthony Horowitz's Raven's Gate, Karen Levine's Hana's Suitcase, and Siobhan Parkinson's Something Invisible.


Pupils: you can read the list here, and always find it by clicking through to Department Documents in the right-hand sidebar.

Junior Certificate reading list

The day after last year's Junior Cert candidates got their marks, we're posting this year's III form reading list. Each year in the first term, III formers write a long essay comparing books, which goes towards 25% of their exam marks. An earlier version of the list of choices from our Library collection was published in the Spring 2007 edition of the Teaching English magazine, and can be read by clicking the Issuu version at the bottom of this post.

Included in the list are novels such Teresa Breslin's Divided City, M.T.Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing and Margaret Bechard's Hanging on to Max. Pupils - you can read the entire list here, and also always under Department Documents (scroll down for the link on the right).

Open publication - Free publishing - More blog

Junior Certificate results 2009

Congratulations to our Junior Cert candidates this year, who have just received their results. There were some very impressive overall performances.  In English, 83% of all our candidates gained A, B or C at Higher Level. No national statistics are available for 2009 yet, but this compares with 52% of all candidates in 2008.

Poem of the Week 53 : 'Leaving School'

Our 53rd Poem of the Week (and our first this term) is 'Leaving Home' by Hugo Williams, in which the eight-year old Williams is bewildered by all the strange procedures and customs of his new boarding school. Maybe an appropriate start to the new school year.

On the Poetry Archive site, you can listen to Williams reading four other poems - 'When I Grow Up', 'Dinner with my Mother', 'Prayer' and 'Her News'. The site points out that :-

The quality of the writing itself embodies a similar tension, employing an informal diction, but subject to rigorous re-drafting. Like the casual elegance he was taught to emulate as a boy, Williams's own reading of his work is an artless art, his precise tones providing enough context to illuminate the poems but without adding to their creative autobiography.

Read a recent interview with Williams in The Guardian here.

We post each Poem of the Week around the school, and use them in English classes too. See a post here about the beginning of the idea.

Transition Year Course 2009-10

Our Transition Year are now setting off on our successful TY course, which we've been running for about 15 years now. Over the coming week or so they will be selecting the books for their Extended Essays, and we'll be posting plenty of recommendations in the next few weeks as they get into their reading, as we've done for the last three years.

Pupils : your advice sheet is here, and always available under 'Department Documents' on the right, as is the course summary.

Web 2.0 links

For tutors at the NCTE course today in Limerick, this is the link to the summary sheet for Web 2.0 tools used by SCC English, including links to the Wiki and Netvibes.

New Library Books

New pupils were introduced last night to our superb central resource, the College Library. With 10,000 books in a beautiful space, it is an exceptional place in which to read and study. Over the next few months, we'll have plenty of book reviews and recommendations here from pupils about their discoveries from the shelves. And, of course, there are lots of new books at the start of the school year.

Included in the newest batch are two novels recently recommended here - William Trevor's Love and Summer and James Lever's Me Cheeta (both Booker long-listed). In Junior Fiction, there's Elizabeth Laird's Lost Riders (read an enthusiastic review on The Book Bag here) and Sinead Moriarty's The Right Fit. In Non-Fiction we have William Fiennes's evocative autobiography The Music Room: in the Guardian, John Burnside writes:-

That Fiennes is an unusually skilled writer is already evidenced by The Snow Geese, a work in which, time and time again, he conveys not only the incandescence of life in the quotidian flow of events, but also the richness of the idea of home, a richness that is, perhaps, only fully appreciated after long absence.

Read the list of new books 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.