Will's Class
Announcements
Important! My Students Please Note . . .
- I will not be in class on May 19. Please come anyway, Mary and Kia will be leading an all-class evening, and we very much want the new students to see, and meet, our most experienced students. There may also be activities where you can do a bit of mentoring for our new recruits. So make an effort to get to class that evening.
- A Summer Project For You: I have arranged to use our usual location at Hamline Midway Library for most of our summer class sessions (schedule below). But there are two Mondays where the room is not available: July 14 and August 11. I plan to leave it up to the students in my class to come up with solutions for those nights -- locations and some activities. This would be a field trip, either a public place, or something related to your work or a hobby. Or it could be in someone's home, watching DVDs, etc. I'll help, but I don't want to solve those two dates all by my lonesome, so I'll be waiting for others to step in and sort out something for those dates.
Summer Meetings -- at Hamline unless marked with *:
- June 2* is our last in Central
- June 16 & 30
- July 14* and 28
- August 11* and 25
Moodle: Dictation Activities!
If you've missed class lately -- or you would just like the practice -- you can try out some of the recent dictation exercises on the moodle.
Accessing the moodle
You can find the "moodle" at www.gaelminn.org/gmmood/ . Some activities are available to anyone, but you'll need a "key" to enroll in the "course" that supports our Spring activities. I've e-mailed you that key separately.
Once you're registered, you'll see my course for Spring of 08, enroll and try things out.
- Students got to work on their homework for the first half-hour, as I was covering another class.
- We did the "Parody and Poetry" handout. The first part covered events in Napolean's youth (Ó Cúnasa, not Bonaparte) from An Béal Bocht.
- And then we did the Ó Ríordáin poem, Cúl an Tí. We listened to a reading of it, and also compared our translation with another English translation I found (we liked ours better).
- After that, we shared a scéal or two -- a number of cultural activities seemed to be entertaining our merry band. We have reports from the art museum, from a couple of concerts and performances, and from the world of drama . . . oh, and, of course, the acme of culture, hockey . . .
For Next time . . .
May 12:
- The new handout deals a bit with marriage, usually the result of matchmaking. Our Blasket sources didn't know whom they were marrying until just before the blessed event.
- The handout also included a dictation exercise, although the downloadable version here has the blanks filled in. But you can do the original dictation activity on the moodle.
- We did the "Home, Sweet Home" handout, working through the descriptions of houses on the Blasket and in Dún Chaoin.
- And we also did the Ó Ríordáin poem, Ceol Ceantair, from that handout.
- We also quickly ran through the translation of the excerpts from Peig we had used for our dictation activity last week.
- Besides that, we had some conversation about our field trip to see the movie Kings.
- I handed out, just for fun, some clippings from Foinse. Those are not available for download.
Comments and questions are welcome
via e-mail
(our e-mail address, broken down to reduce spam from 'spambots', is info at gaelminn dot org)
(back to top)