New born blog

About a year ago, I started this blog with a picture of Eros, in Picadilly Circus. It seems his power of attraction captured me and now I have moved to London for a year to take part in a new project.

This blog was originally created for CAL students and it worked well (or that is what my students and other colleagues told me) so I would like to keep it going. However, I will use it as a diary of my stay here and it will not be specifically designed for a profile of students.

But I want to keep the spirit of the original blog in this re-birth, so here is the first entry again:

Teaching is a difficult task. Teaching your subject in English to Spanish students means adding more difficulties, especially if you are Spanish and have to "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous" English.

This blog tries to offer some help in that task and provide some "arms to oppose" those difficulties. Let Eros (or Anteros?), the Greek god of love assist us with his arrows in this act where love and affection also play an important role.

Now here I am, "trying to" teach Spanish to students of other nationalities and polishing my English. Welcome everybody and , to those who follow the blog, welcome back!

Summer Holidays

Feeling nervous about the exams?

Slow Movement

This time I will insert a video about the Slow Movement before working on the topic in class. It is a bit long (almost 20 minutes), but worth watching. The paradox is that the talker, Carl Honore, speaks really fast.

If you want to listen and read the subtitles, go to 

and click on the subtitles bar under the main window.

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

On Wednesday 6th May we had a lesson in which we talked about different aspects of "The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Night-Time". The debate was very interesting and many ideas were expressed. The general opinion about the book was very positive. Here I leave you a video of a "rapid review" which reflects some of the things we mentioned in class (we dealt with many many more aspects):

We also learnt that  autism and Asperger Syndrome are not exactly the same thing although they share many common features. We finally watched and discussed some videos from a campaign in the UK which is trying to make us aware of the existence of people with behavioural differences caused by this syndrome.

One aspect we mentioned is how some scenes and ideas might seem comical in the book when that is not the intention of the main character, something which is clearly reflected in some of the videos too.

These are the videos:

Finally, here is an interview with the author of the book, Mark Haddon, which is worth reading.