Thursday, December 11, 2008

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

For me it’s a very strange way how the took is written. The sentences are short and its structure very simple. I think that using simple sentences Christopher tries to communicate and order his own world. Harder, the writer tells the story with a delicate sense of humour and even with tenderness making us see and understand Christopher’s problems. All Christopher’s conversations, feelings, experiences and events are explained from his own point of view, so the reader can easily enter to the Christopher’s private world ant try to deal how difficult is living in this world.

The story starts with a simple event, the killing of a dog, but it’s only an excuse to develop a more rich and complicated plot. Christopher ends the novel being a much mature child than he was when the story began.

In my opinion the book depicts perfectly the way people with Christopher’s illness, a kind of autism (Spargle) act. For example, Christopher’s obsession with tidiness, with mathematics, his insensitiveness regarding to feelings in other people, even with his father.

I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for parents to cake care of children with this problem.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The planet languages




Since 2005 I am studying at the EOI of Esplugues, according to our teacher the most beautiful school in the world. In 2005 I tried to start studying English. I wasn’t lucky with English, but I got place in the first course of French.

The following year I tried again with English, and this time I achieved it. Therefore, I have been studying English and French at the same time since 2006. It means a lot to me given my limitation to study languages. But well, I have arrived at this point, and I expect to continue with the experience even though sometimes I still say “yes” instead of say “oui” and mispronounce some words. There is a class that it is special for me in the first floor. This class has a big balcony. My English time is usually from five to seven. I love the view I can see in winter from this class. We can observe a wonderful sunset from this class. I contemplated the garden and a marvellous horizon, the clouds were coloured slightly orange because it vas nearly evening and the sun was going down. After finish my English class I went up to the second floor to start my French class, another different world, and then when I have finished the class the sunlight had disappeared and it got dark.

Last year when I was studying French we had to do a dossier, very similar to the blog this year. We had to do things related to the knowledge of the language: going to conferences, watching films in French, reading books, and writing, writing, but especially about all the things that we had watch, listen too or read. My French teacher, an intelligent and charming woman, did not force us to read any given books, the final choice was ours. I didn’t choose very extensive books, because even though I really love read, doing it in a language different to mine, is very hard to me. When I read books in English or French I spend a lot of time looking up words in the dictionary, so it takes me a long time to finish reading a book. I suppose that to advance in the reading it’s better to be left to guide by the context. One of the books I read last year in French was “Soie”, "Silk" in English by Alessando Barico. This book is very well-known, I think it was a best-seller and It has been translated a lot of different languages.
I am thinking now that there are a lot of people who choose the Official School to learn different languages. The most important are from the big Europeans countries (English, German, Italy and French). This variety of languages demonstrates that the diversity in the education it should not be a problem, but rather a pedagogic advantage.