Quarantine Classworks

INTRODUCTION

Hi! Welcome to my book.

Since the pandemic began we started to have lessions from home, and it was difficult to adapt to such a weird situation.

This book is a homework our teacher gave us for the summer holidays. Basically it’s a summary of everything we’ve done during the period we stayed home, it’s not one of the classic homeworks a teacher gives to the students, but for the fact that we were in that situation due to COVID-19 we all had to adapt quickly to what was basically a brand new scholar system.

So our english teacher taught we should have done something funny to distract ourself from the bad events that are happening in the world right now. and this is also the motivation for this whole “book project”.

So without further ado, let’s begin.

THE FIRST WORK

The first thing we did during the pandemic was learning something about what a storytelling was and try to do one ourselves. This argument was really funny to do, also for the fact that it’s an argument related to our school address. The main exercise consisted in telling shortly the story of the “Wife of Bath” and how she became half deaf, telling why she got slapped right on the ear by her husband. It was funny making this storyboard but I didn’t quite enjoyed the website, it was called storyboard that, we used to make it since I couldn’t really express what I wanted to, but it was quite simple and easy to use so I can understand that we couldn’t use something much complicated and it had to be affordable for everyone.

We did a power point about Chaucer and the “Canterbury tales”.

The story behind Chaucer was very interesting, he was born in 1343 and was the son of a wine merchant. He was lucky as he recieved an excellent education, and his skills in writing and his clever mind helped him to raise his social status. His new modern English became the standard English, just like Dante did for the italians, and thanks to his poem “Canterbury tales” we have an idea about what society was like at his time.

I will not describe every argument we’ve done about Chaucer, also for the fact that this should be a summary, but we had studied it deeply.

My opinion about the Canterbury tale is that, despite being a massive piece of english history, is also a good example about what the freedome of speech is, because Chaucer is not afraid to write what people would consider “Weird” and “dirty” things, he just wrote what he liked, without caring about pubblic opinion, at least this is what I felt reading part of it.

THE SECOND WORK

The second works our teacher gave us to do was doing a video about stereotypes, with my class I recorded a video where I explained why “I stand with my school” basically it was a cool idea where everyone said what kind of stereotypes there are in my school and why we stand against them. I personally said that I stood with my school because it’s not true that every person in it is a drug addict, thing that is absolutely true, and it makes me a bit sad knowing a lot of parents won’t let their child go to an artistic school because they are afraid that they could become drug addicts.

Back to the main argument, after we recorded all the videos, we put them togheter and my classmate Riccardo took the responsibility to edit it. The video came out pretty well, but it was difficult to make due to the fact that we were all separated and stuck in our houses.

If you want to watch what came out, click here for the video: video.

THE THIRD WORK

Some days after we did some listening and reading exercises, helping us to improve our english comprehension. At the same time we studied a bit more deeply Chaucer and the “Canterbury tales” by watching funny and interactive videos. To improve the comprension we used a website to help us, called britishcouncil.org. It’s a really helpful site that we used to  exercise ourself with song like “Erased” by Ed Sheeran, making us complete the song’s lyrics it really helps you improve the listening understanding of english, making you really pay attention to what the singer says because then you have to complete the blank spaces. Then we did a listening exercise that our teacher gave us, I personally find the listening exercises the most interesting and funny ones, as they are interactive and I can challenge my skills in understanding what they say.

THE FOURTH WORK

As the fourth exercise we used one website in particular, called “Classtools.net” we analyzed the panel of the Canterbury cathedral. In this site there is an high definition image of the panel with some clickable dots on it, if you click on these dots a text with some information about the panel pops out, this happens for each dot, I don’t really found this much uselful since they could’ve just post the image and link the text near it, but I guess this makes it a bit more interesting and entertaining.

Here’s the link of the image by the way: link.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, this pandemic for me, brought us to a period where we understood how important is the social interaction and how we would all be left alone without the invention of internet. I really hope this period will go off soon, and that we can go back to our normal lifestyles.

the end.