Sunday School: VCE English texts with Libbi Gorr - ABC Melbourne - Australian Broadcasting Corporation English teachers join Libbi Gorr to give you a head start with VCE English by looking in-depth at a book from the VCE English Syllabus. Building on the VCE reading list from 2012, throughout 2013 Libbi will regularly add podcasts of conversations with teaching experts about new additions to the English syllabus; you can access and download all the segments on this page via audio on demand. Throughout the year, we'll be ticking each new text off and letting you know during the Sunday program on 774 ABC Melbourne each time a new podcast is available. Of course, you will still be able to access all of the conversations we prepared for you last year. If you're a VCE English teacher and you want to be a part of the program as an expert guest to share your knowledge, or if you'd like to nominate a particular English teacher you think would make a great guest to discuss the week's text, please email us. You can download a pdf of the full list of VCE English texts.
In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar - Reviews - Books It is this platitude that Hisham Matar, a Libyan exile, confronts in his debut novel, which chooses to remember the brutality of Libya under Gaddafi. "The country of men" is inhabited by torturers and their victims. The former, guardians of the 1969 revolution, are bent on closing down anything pleasurable and free. The latter are Libya's intelligentsia, people like the boy narrator's father, Baba, and his best friend Ustath. Baba is an urbane and widely travelled businessman, an avid reader who tries his hand at translating foreign texts into Arabic. He is jailed and tortured by Gaddafi's men for inciting a student revolt. In killing Ustath, Gaddafi is severing links with the outside world, and with Libya's history - so as to re-write it. The political world of male violence is paralleled in the domestic sphere, where women are the property of men. This time there is no severing of links between past and present; nothing has changed. And yet he will not surrender.
Eureka! Lab Robijanto Soetedjo can’t stop playing with electricity. At work, this neuroscientist at the University of Washington in Seattle studies the electrical properties of cells in our brains. At home, he has used his knowledge of electrophysiology to develop a new toy. This “Bioelectricity Toy Set,” allows kids to discover the electricity in their own bodies. Soetedjo nabbed second place and $25,000 in the first annual Science, Play and Research Kit — or SPARK — contest. Sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Society for Science & the Public (this blog’s parent organization), the contest searched for next-generation “chemistry sets.” “I wanted to get the children to know how cool neuroscience is,” Soetedjo says. Attach an electrode to your arm. Soetedjo hopes his invention will help kids eight and up discover the electricity in their bodies. Right now, Soetedjo is reaching out to toy companies who might be interested in producing this science toy set on a larger scale.
Global Warming and Climate Change skepticism examined