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Today we read a fascinating text about an iconic chair. If you were absent today, read the text and to the tasks on pages 68-69.

Also, at home watch the TED talk about houses made of bamboo.

I did get a couple of articles in today. I expect to get some more on Monday.

On the topic of chairs, there's a great video by one of my favourite Youtube creators (who, sadly, no longer produces anything) 'in praise of chairs'. It's about what chairs might represent in film and it's only 5 minutes or so long so check it out!

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A reminder to you all to hand in your articles on Wednesday, as you promised.

We started the final unit of the semester, the topic is design. we talked about what makes for good/bad design using a Vox video as inspiration. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI)

If you even slightly interested about design as a topic, I suggest listening to the podcast 99 percent invisible which covers a range of design based topics.

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99% Invisible with Roman Mars is a tiny radio show about design, architecture & the ninety-nine percent invisible activity that shapes our world.

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I'm not sure why some of my Padlet's don't seem to be saving... well, I hope this one doesn't disappear.

So apparently the most interesting thing about this lesson was the word 'kerfuffle':
noun: kerfuffle; plural noun: kerfuffles

1. a commotion or fuss, especially one caused by conflicting views. "there was a kerfuffle over the chairmanship"

Google reckons the origin is early 19th century: perhaps from Scots curfuffle (probably from Scottish Gaelic car ‘twist, bend’ + imitative Scots fuffle ‘to disorder’), or related to Irish cior thual ‘confusion, disorder’.

It caused something of a brouhaha, foofaraw, splaw, williwaw, ballyhoo, and even a bit of bubbery and pandemonium,

Besides that, we looked at why we use the passive voice - and I must say I'm rather surprised this didn't interest you as much as kerfuffle did, but there you go.

I set you some homework - to write an article to (mis)inform. You should think about the audience, style of writing, content and any useful ways to engage the reader. You can use the template to write this article - or one you construct yourself.

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Today, you first tried to negotiate your way out of being slaves (some of you were kind of successful).

Then you listened to and reproduced a text about 'eggcorns'. I was happy that you reproduced a few of the most common ones ('doggy-dog world', 'wet your appetite') and had a stab at some strange ones ('damn squirrel'?).

I got much of the information from here:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/most-misused-phrases-words-english-language-uk-revealed-to-be-pacific-a8098791.html
With another list of commonly misused phrases can be found here: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/phrases-that-people-get-wrong.html

You can find the Quizlet set for the phrases we looked at in class in the link below.

If you want to look further, there are other types of errors, spoonerisms and mondegreens. You can read about hose here:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/spoonerisms-mondegreens-eggcorns-and-malapropisms

I find all this very interesting - getting things wrong in fact led to how we actually use a lot of language the way we do now, as you can find out here:
https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/43shjw6596t9yn52lwypddy37wlpeg
- in fact I find this so interesting we may come back to this on Wednesday...

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We did our presentations. Generally, they were very good and highly rated by all (despite the lack of jokes by Olek). However, we could all do with thinking about how we end any presentations we give.
Here are a couple of websites which give ideas on how to end presentations effectively:
https://www.dummies.com/careers/business-communication/public-speaking/public-speaking-and-stuttering/
http://totalcommunicator.com/vol3_5/concluding.html

we then started to look at negotiating, which we will continue on Monday. we read the text on page 47. Here are a couple of other blogs giving suggestions:
https://www.brodow.com/Ten-Tips-For-Negotiating
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/top-10-negotiation-skills/

Have a nice weekend!

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Today we watched a fairly simple video about how carrier pigeons/pigeon post works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pXelEAXuPo

The object was not just about finding out about this system, but also to think about how you can use this to plan your own educational talk.
We looked at how you needed to consider content, style, language and other things to produce a successful piece of work.

You then planned and prepared a talk which you will give on Wednesday.

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On these days we started to look at human communication.
On Monday, we had a debate about whether we can change our character just by changing our body language and you had to watch the TED talk by Amy Cuddy on that topic - the questions are on page 42-43. We also looked at some idioms connected to communication - you can find the Quizlet set here: https://quizlet.com/_6lb916

On Wednesday, we critically evaluated Cuddy's research through the lens of science vs. pseudoscience. we watched a short video on the subject (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X8Xfl0JdTQ&t=477s) and then you had to consider whether Cuddy's research could be considered 'science' or not according to Popper's theories.

You can find out more about the reaction to Cuddy's research here: https://theskepticalchemist.com/authority-pseudoscience-amy-cuddy/ (which outright labels Cuddy's research 'pseudoscience')
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2018/04/03/power-posing-is-back-amy-cuddy-successfully-refutes-criticism/#3d856f3f3b8e (which claims that Cuddy has 'successfully' proved power posing to be beneficial)

Next week, we will continue with communication through the ages. See you there/then!

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Max asked me today that you mentioned there won’t be a lesson on Wednesday, but what about Monday lesson? Is it same as regular or is it cancelled?

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It seems as if we only meet each other once every month...

well today we talked about making a good first impression. You watched the introductions of a few travel vloggers to see if they made a good first impression (spoiler alert: they didn't):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpxE0noTR1o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3P_eUFxaQE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=salEVVKMA_I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKC_x93vs-s

You then read an article on how to make a good first impression online - it turns out you felt the advice was not so useful because it's too obvious. Anyway, for those who were absent - I've attached it to this Padlet.

We also looked at the grammar on page 34/35 - simple vs continuous tenses.

For those of you who enjoy the vlogs by Casey Neistat, here's a vlog about what makes him so unique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbiJqTBCQuw&t=3s - I'm a big fan of the channel Nerdwriter, so check out other video essays by the same guy if you found this one interesting.

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I came back...

much of this lesson was catching up with what you'd been up to, but we need to finish off the writing task from a couple of weeks ago - I returned what you'd done so far so that you can remember what you'd done and on Wednesday yuo can finish it off.

Also, Wednesday will be counselling day, so make sure you come along ready to reflect on your progress so far.

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Today, we looked at some ways to use adverbs to add extra detail to your writing. In the lesson, I got much of the info from these websites:
https://guinlist.wordpress.com/tag/comment-adverbs/ (ignore the stupid cartoons at the start, it's got some useful stuff)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/flatmates/episode85/languagepoint.shtml
https://www.ef.com/wwen/english-resources/english-grammar/viewpoint-and-commenting-adverbs/

We also began to write an account of an incident. You can find the model text on page 26-27 in the students books. We will finish them on Monday, but for those of you who were absent, you should make a start as they will form part of your assessment for this course.

You can find the task attached to this post.

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We started to look at things that can go wrong when travelling. WE decided that it's a forgone conclusion that I'll be chopped up and smuggled in a suitcase or it's quite likely that I'll be forced to work unpaid...

On Wednesday we will be looking at writing an account of an incident.

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Today we read some classic short sci-fi stories as they tied into the topic of 'future' and 'hopes and fears' which we have been embarking on recently.

We read 'I have no mouth and I must scream', 'Flowers for Algenon' and 'All Summer in a Day'. I found some of the texts through this website. Perhaps you'll be inspired to read some other stories while you're at it.

Other short stories I would recommend are:
Calved
So much cooking
Meshed

Let the class know on Monday

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Today, we started to look at a different topic - future optimism/pessimism.

It turns out that many of you are fairly pessimistic about the future, especially regarding the state of the environment.

We looked at the entirety of the future forms (SB p22) and discussed which forms were appropriate and where.

On Wednesday, we will continue to do this so be sure to do the grammar activity 5 at the top of on page 23. I also asked you to watch a sci-fi short perhaps off the Youtube channel Dust and/or read a sci-fi short story from the Clarkes World Magazine website (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/). We will discuss this on Wednesday.

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dust scifi shortfilms sci-fi technology "science fiction" filmmakers "scifi short films" watchdust robots "artificial intelligence" android space alien dystopia spaceships multiverse ftl rha wirecutters "a date in 2025" seam

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DUST presents thought-provoking science fiction content, exploring the future of humanity through the lens of science and technology. Welcome to our YouTube ...

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Today, we continued to look at the language in the text of the rap. We considered a translation of the text into an academic/formal style and which style you found easier to understand.
Consider what it is about that language which makes it easier to understand? If you need to reach a wider audience with your own messages, which style do you think would be most appropriate?

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First of all today we got our writing assignments back. Generally, our language was fine - although there were a few issues here and there with articles or word order. The main issue was not enough expansion of ideas or clarification of the points you are trying to make.

We then moved on to look at the usefulness of hip-hop in learning a language. I shared some data which suggests that hip-hop tends to be very lexically diverse, with a wider range of language than other genres (although some artists are 'better' than others). You can find the sources here:
http://lab.musixmatch.com/vocabulary_genres/
https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/index.html

We focused in on one track listening to the song, and looking at the language. Yuo can see some annotations of the references he makes using the 'genius' webite:
https://genius.com/1785103

On Wednesday, we will be turning this into an essay to help you to think about how to include additional details and examples in your own writing.

Oh yes, I forgot about the presentations so hopefully we will have time for that as well.

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Jehst - England (Censored/Clean) [Produced by Beat Butcha] ᴴᴰ

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As a few people hadn't watched the TED talk, we watched the first part (up to the song). We discussed whether she had a genuine 'idea worth sharing', and few of you thought she did. Perhaps the lack of viewers shows data is on your side?

Your homework is twofold:
1) Prepare a 2-minute presentation about overcoming a fear. Use the tips and ideas on page 21 to help you. You will deliver this on Monday.

2) Listen to a song in English and think about the language they use. we will be looking at using music and language on Monday as well.

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I listen to a lot of podcasts and find them both entertaining and informative.  I especially love ones connected to true crime, science, or history.

I recently came across one about language; especially the English language. The episode 'to Err is human' was kind of behind the malaphor part of the lesson, and gives some insight to why English spelling is so unusual as well as how other mistakes have entered common usage.

Give it a listen

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It occurs to me that I forgot to create a padlet for Wednesday's lesson last week as well as today's.

Last Wednesday, I set you guys some homework to write about how one of the internet, movies, fashion, modern music or computer games were good for learning or made you smarter.

Today, we discussed the importance of being creative with language. We listened to a short interview about this topic, and learned about 'malaphors' - you invented some of your own. While the point was made that by mixing your metaphors in such a way might make you difficult to understand, the point is that any time you are creative with language, you are sharing an 'in-joke' or reference which you expect the other person to get - this is why it develops and maintains relationships: you are telling the other person 'I understand you, and here's something we share'.
Think about any comedy show. Rick and Morty, for example bases a lot of it's humour on references to Sci-Fi, science or other concepts (as well as referencing itself) and trusts that its audience will understand them. The audience, in turn, feels the show 'gets them' and they feel connected to it. Although this does run the risk of resulting in 'toxic fandom'.

Anyway, perhaps we can return to this later.

For homework I asked you to watch the TED talk for unit 2 and we shall discuss it on Wednesday.

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Today, we had a debate about whether TV makes us smarter. There were a few areas where we could stand to expand our lexicon:
train (enhance/develop/build/etc) our critical thinking skills
there's a lot of this cr** (shows of low quality/poor standard content/etc) and not worthy programmes
fake (unreal/fraudulent/faux/misleading/counterfeit) news
tip -> you can (and should) use the 'thesaurus' function in Word or otherwise (https://www.thesaurus.com/) to avoid unnecessary repetition

Last lesson, I briefly touched on using corpus data to help us understand the language we use. You can find the one I use here: https://www.english-corpora.org// - first, you need to choose your data set and then search for your word or phrase. Play around - it's free to use and you can register for free as well.

Your homework is to write an article about how something is beneficial for education (X makes you smarter) and using the strategies the text from Monday used:
repetition/using language from other people or places/addressing the reader/etc

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Today we dissected a text from the Electric Typewriter about how watching TV makes you smarter. We didn't read the entire article so I've linked to it below. Have a read and see what you make of the author's arguments.

I hope you enjoyed discussing the choices the author made as it is here where you will need to show your proficient level of language: it is not enough to be good at using the language, but you need to be able to choose the appropriate type to have the appropriate effect on the reader. (http://www.criticalreading.com/choice_of_language.htm) We will engage in more of these types of conversation as the course progresses which will help you to become better language experts.

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The usual counterargument here is that what media have lost in moral clarity, they have gained in realism. The real world doesn't come in nicely packaged public-service announcements, and we're better off with entertainment like "The Sopranos" that reflects our fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it's not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. There may indeed be more "negative messages" in the mediasphere today. But that's not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important -- if not more important -- is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible.

Televised Intelligence Consider the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers. With many shows that we associate with "quality" entertainment -- "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Murphy Brown," "Frasier" -- the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters on-screen. They say witty things to one another and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom clichés, and we smile along in our living rooms, enjoying the company of these smart people. But assuming we're bright enough to understand the sentences they're saying, there's no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge your body watching "Monday Night Football." The intellectual work is happening on-screen, not off.

But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.

According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of "Hill Street Blues," the Steven Bochco police drama invariably praised for its "gritty realism." Watch an episode of "Hill Street Blues" side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades -- "Starsky and Hutch," for instance, or "Dragnet" -- and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every "Dragnet" episode, and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case. A typical "Starsky and Hutch" episode offers only the slightest variation on this linear formula: the introduction of a comic subplot that usually appears only at the tail ends of the episode, creating a structure that looks like the graph below. The vertical axis represents the number of individual threads, and the horizontal axis is time.

A "Hill Street Blues" episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands -- sometimes as many as 10, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters -- and not just bit parts -- swells significantly. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end. Charted graphically, an average episode looks like this:

Critics generally cite "Hill Street Blues" as the beginning of "serious drama" native in the television medium -- differentiating the series from the single-episode dramatic programs from the 50's, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But the "Hill Street" innovations weren't all that original; they'd long played a defining role in popular television, just not during the evening hours. The structure of a "Hill Street" episode -- and indeed of all the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from "thirtysomething" to "Six Feet Under" -- is the structure of a soap opera. "Hill Street Blues" might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that "Guiding Light" and "General Hospital" mastered long before.

Bochco's genius with "Hill Street" was to marry complex narrative structure with complex subject matter. 'Dallas" had already shown that the extended, interwoven threads of the soap-opera genre could survive the weeklong interruptions of a prime-time show, but the actual content of "Dallas" was fluff. (The most probing issue it addressed was the question, now folkloric, of who shot J.R.) "All in the Family" and "Rhoda" showed that you could tackle complex social issues, but they did their tackling in the comfort of the sitcom living room. "Hill Street" had richly drawn characters confronting difficult social issues and a narrative structure to match.

Since "Hill Street" appeared, the multi-threaded drama has become the most widespread fictional genre on prime time: "St. Elsewhere," "L.A. Law," "thirtysomething," "Twin Peaks," "N.Y.P.D. Blue," "E.R.," "The West Wing," "Alias," "Lost." (The only prominent holdouts in drama are shows like "Law and Order" that have essentially updated the venerable "Dragnet" format and thus remained anchored to a single narrative line.) Since the early 80's, however, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to date, "The Sopranos," routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters. An episode from late in the first season looks like this:

The total number of active threads equals the multiple plots of "Hill Street," but here each thread is more substantial. The show doesn't offer a clear distinction between dominant and minor plots; each story line carries its weight in the mix. The episode also displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from "Hill Street": a single scene in "The Sopranos" will often connect to three different threads at the same time, layering one plot atop another. And every single thread in this "Sopranos" episode builds on events from previous episodes and continues on through the rest of the season and beyond.

Put those charts together, and you have a portrait of the Sleeper Curve rising over the past 30 years of popular television. In a sense, this is as much a map of cognitive changes in the popular mind as it is a map of on-screen developments, as if the media titans decided to condition our brains to follow ever-larger numbers of simultaneous threads. Before "Hill Street," the conventional wisdom among television execs was that audiences wouldn't be comfortable following more than three plots in a single episode, and indeed, the "Hill Street" pilot, which was shown in January 1981, brought complaints from viewers that the show was too complicated. Fast-forward two decades, and shows like "The Sopranos" engage their audiences with narratives that make "Hill Street" look like "Three's Company." Audiences happily embrace that complexity because they've been trained by two decades of multi-threaded dramas.

Multi-threading is the most celebrated structural feature of the modern television drama, and it certainly deserves some of the honor that has been doled out to it. And yet multi-threading is only part of the story.

The Case for Confusion

Shortly after the arrival of the first-generation slasher movies -- "Halloween," "Friday the 13th" -- Paramount released a mock-slasher flick called "Student Bodies," parodying the genre just as the "Scream" series would do 15 years later. In one scene, the obligatory nubile teenage baby sitter hears a noise outside a suburban house; she opens the door to investigate, finds nothing and then goes back inside. As the door shuts behind her, the camera swoops in on the doorknob, and we see that she has left the door unlocked. The camera pulls back and then swoops down again for emphasis. And then a flashing arrow appears on the screen, with text that helpfully explains: "Unlocked!"

That flashing arrow is parody, of course, but it's merely an exaggerated version of a device popular stories use all the time. When a sci-fi script inserts into some advanced lab a nonscientist who keeps asking the science geeks to explain what they're doing with that particle accelerator, that's a flashing arrow that gives the audience precisely the information it needs in order to make sense of the ensuing plot. ("Whatever you do, don't spill water on it, or you'll set off a massive explosion!") These hints serve as a kind of narrative hand-holding. Implicitly, they say to the audience, "We realize you have no idea what a particle accelerator is, but here's the deal: all you need to know is that it's a big fancy thing that explodes when wet." They focus the mind on relevant details: "Don't worry about whether the baby sitter is going to break up with her boyfriend. Worry about that guy lurking in the bushes." They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to do to make sense of a story. All you have to do is follow the arrows.

By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. If narrative threads have experienced a population explosion over the past 20 years, flashing arrows have grown correspondingly scarce. Watching our pinnacle of early 80's TV drama, "Hill Street Blues," we find there's an informational wholeness to each scene that differs markedly from what you see on shows like "The West Wing" or "The Sopranos" or "Alias" or "E.R."

"Hill Street" has ambiguities about future events: will a convicted killer be executed? Will Furillo marry Joyce Davenport? Will Renko find it in himself to bust a favorite singer for cocaine possession? But the present-tense of each scene explains itself to the viewer with little ambiguity. There's an open question or a mystery driving each of these stories -- how will it all turn out? -- but there's no mystery about the immediate activity on the screen. A contemporary drama like "The West Wing," on the other hand, constantly embeds mysteries into the present-tense events: you see characters performing actions or discussing events about which crucial information has been deliberately withheld. Anyone who has watched more than a handful of "The West Wing" episodes closely will know the feeling: scene after scene refers to some clearly crucial but unexplained piece of information, and after the sixth reference, you'll find yourself wishing you could rewind the tape to figure out what they're talking about, assuming you've missed something. And then you realize that you're supposed to be confused. The open question posed by these sequences is not "How will this turn out in the end?" The question is "What's happening right now?"

The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well. Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues -- whether they are the intricacies of passing legislation, or of performing a heart bypass, or of operating a particle accelerator -- conventionally switches between two modes of information in dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince the viewer that they're watching Actual Doctors at Work; substance is the material planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs make sense of the plot.

Conventionally, narratives demarcate the line between texture and substance by inserting cues that flag or translate the important data. There's an unintentionally comical moment in the 2004 blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow" in which the beleaguered climatologist (played by Dennis Quaid) announces his theory about the imminent arrival of a new ice age to a gathering of government officials. In his speech, he warns that "we have hit a critical desalinization point!" At this moment, the writer-director Roland Emmerich -- a master of brazen arrow-flashing -- has an official follow with the obliging remark: "It would explain what's driving this extreme weather." They might as well have had a flashing "Unlocked!" arrow on the screen.

The dialogue on shows like "The West Wing" and "E.R.," on the other hand, doesn't talk down to its audiences. It rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high-speed tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms. The characters talk faster in these shows, but the truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a matter of speed; it's the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won't understand. Here's a typical scene from "E.R.":

[WEAVER AND WRIGHT push a gurney containing a 16-year-old girl. Her parents, JANNA AND FRANK MIKAMI, follow close behind. CARTER AND LUCY fall in.]

WEAVER: 16-year-old, unconscious, history of biliary atresia.

CARTER: Hepatic coma?

WEAVER: Looks like it.

MR. MIKAMI: She was doing fine until six months ago.

CARTER: What medication is she on?

MRS. MIKAMI: Ampicillin, tobramycin, vitamins a, d and k.

LUCY: Skin's jaundiced.

WEAVER: Same with the sclera. Breath smells sweet.

CARTER: Fetor hepaticus?

WEAVER: Yep.

LUCY: What's that?

WEAVER: Her liver's shut down. Let's dip a urine. [To CARTER] Guys, it's getting a little crowded in here, why don't you deal with the parents? Start lactulose, 30 cc's per NG.

CARTER: We're giving medicine to clean her blood.

WEAVER: Blood in the urine, two-plus.

CARTER: The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot.

mrs. mikami: Oh, God. . . .

CARTER: Is she on the transplant list?

MR. MIKAMI: She's been Status 2a for six months, but they haven't been able to find her a match.

CARTER: Why? What's her blood type?

MR. MIKAMI: ab.

[This hits CARTER like a lightning bolt. lucy gets it, too. They share a look.]

There are flashing arrows here, of course -- "The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot" -- but the ratio of medical jargon to layperson translation is remarkably high. From a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line arrives at the very end: "AB." The 16-year-old's blood type connects her to an earlier plot line, involving a cerebral-hemorrhage victim who -- after being dramatically revived in one of the opening scenes -- ends up brain-dead. Far earlier, before the liver-failure scene above, Carter briefly discusses harvesting the hemorrhage victim's organs for transplants, and another doctor makes a passing reference to his blood type being the rare AB (thus making him an unlikely donor). The twist here revolves around a statistically unlikely event happening at the E.R. -- an otherwise perfect liver donor showing up just in time to donate his liver to a recipient with the same rare blood type. But the show reveals this twist with remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last "AB" line -- and the look of disbelief on Carter's and Lucy's faces -- you have to recall a passing remark uttered earlier regarding a character who belongs to a completely different thread. Shows like "E.R." may have more blood and guts than popular TV had a generation ago, but when it comes to storytelling, they possess a quality that can only be described as subtlety and discretion.

Even Bad TV Is Better

Skeptics might argue that I have stacked the deck here by focusing on relatively highbrow titles like "The Sopranos" or "The West Wing," when in fact the most significant change in the last five years of narrative entertainment involves reality TV. Does the contemporary pop cultural landscape look quite as promising if the representative show is "Joe Millionaire" instead of "The West Wing"?

I think it does, but to answer that question properly, you have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early 70's -- invoking shows like "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "All in the Family" -- they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade. If you're going to look at pop-culture trends, you have to compare apples to apples, or in this case, lemons to lemons. The relevant comparison is not between "Joe Millionaire" and "MASH"; it's between "Joe Millionaire" and "The Newlywed Game," or between "Survivor" and "The Love Boat."

What you see when you make these head-to-head comparisons is that a rising tide of complexity has been lifting programming at the bottom of the quality spectrum and at the top. "The Sopranos" is several times more demanding of its audiences than "Hill Street" was, and "Joe Millionaire" has made comparable advances over "Battle of the Network Stars." This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve theory: even the junk has improved.

If early television took its cues from the stage, today's reality programming is reliably structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play.

On a show like "Survivor" or "The Apprentice," the participants -- and the audience -- know the general objective of the series, but each episode involves new challenges that haven't been ordained in advance. The final round of the first season of "The Apprentice," for instance, threw a monkey wrench into the strategy that governed the play up to that point, when Trump announced that the two remaining apprentices would have to assemble and manage a team of subordinates who had already been fired in earlier episodes of the show. All of a sudden the overarching objective of the game -- do anything to avoid being fired -- presented a potential conflict to the remaining two contenders: the structure of the final round favored the survivor who had maintained the best relationships with his comrades. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to have clawed your way to the top; you had to have made friends while clawing. The original "Joe Millionaire" went so far as to undermine the most fundamental convention of all -- that the show's creators don't openly lie to the contestants about the prizes -- by inducing a construction worker to pose as man of means while 20 women competed for his attention.

Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings. That's why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode: why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?

When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us -- the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression -- scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the characters, but those connections don't have the same participatory effect, because traditional narratives aren't explicitly about strategy. The phrase "Monday-morning quarterbacking" describes the engaged feeling that spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We absorb stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around social dexterity rather than the physical kind.

The Rewards of Smart Culture

The quickest way to appreciate the Sleeper Curve's cognitive training is to sit down and watch a few hours of hit programming from the late 70's on Nick at Nite or the SOAPnet channel or on DVD. The modern viewer who watches a show like "Dallas" today will be bored by the content -- not just because the show is less salacious than today's soap operas (which it is by a small margin) but also because the show contains far less information in each scene, despite the fact that its soap-opera structure made it one of the most complicated narratives on television in its prime. With "Dallas," the modern viewer doesn't have to think to make sense of what's going on, and not having to think is boring. Many recent hit shows -- "24," "Survivor," "The Sopranos," "Alias," "Lost," "The Simpsons," "E.R." -- take the opposite approach, layering each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.

Of course, the entertainment industry isn't increasing the cognitive complexity of its products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there's money to be made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like "Lost" or "Alias" is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars. Finally, interactive games have trained a new generation of media consumers to probe complex environments and to think on their feet, and that gamer audience has now come to expect the same challenges from their television shows. In the end, the Sleeper Curve tells us something about the human mind. It may be drawn toward the sensational where content is concerned -- sex does sell, after all. But the mind also likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system.

In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch "Survivor" over "Fear Factor." If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage "24" over "Law and Order." If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.

Kids and grown-ups each can learn from their increasingly shared obsessions. Too often we imagine the blurring of kid and grown-up cultures as a series of violations: the 9-year-olds who have to have nipple broaches explained to them thanks to Janet Jackson; the middle-aged guy who can't wait to get home to his Xbox. But this demographic blur has a commendable side that we don't acknowledge enough. The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.

Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of "Mind Wide Open." His book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," from which this article is adapted, will be published next month.

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Steven Johnson article says that today's popular television programs have complexity that makes greater cognitive demands on viewers than shows had 30 years ago and that this phenomenon, which he calls Sleeper Curve, is enhancing mental development of young people, not retarding it, as television has often been accused of doing; says this applies not only to highbrow dramas like 24, The Sopranos and The West Wing, but also to reality shows like Joe Millionaire, Survivor and The Apprentice; drawings (L)

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If anyone is looking for a site where you can find extra reading material, you can find a collection of excellent essays, articles and other texts at the electric typewriter

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The Electric Typewriter - Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers.

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We continued to think about creativity to a certain extent, and then switched over to look at the present perfect tenses. Given we will be looking at language in depth this term, considering the choices people make about why they choose to use one way of talking/writing over another, it is useful to have a system to use where we are all able to have this discussion.

There was a bit of a debate about creativity and communism. If you want to see more about this, I found this Reddit discussion from about a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/78401j/did_communism_stifle_creativity/

From my (limited) perspective, there are a number of areas where you can find excellent examples of creativity in a Communist era. If anyone is a fan of sci-fi, you might find reading Strugastky's 'Roadside Picnic' an interesting read with an anit-communist subtext.

Your homework is to get through the workbook unit 1 within a week of finishing unit 1 in the coursebook. This is when the workbook completion will be checked.

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I found the article on 21st Century assessment!

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I found the article on 21st Century assessment!

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It's quite long and written in an academic style, but the 'fun' stuff starts on page 5.

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We began by talking about 21st century skills. I said I'd link to something which discusses exams/assessment of these skills, but it's hard to find something which isn't too academic or complicated. You can follow this link, if you're interested: https://www.slideshare.net/sweetsmiles/21st-century-learning-assessment we can think of how to incorporate ideas of formative assessment in our lessons over this term.

Your homework is to watch a film monologue and to try to understand as much of it as possible using the listening strategies we discussed today. Here's the Youtube link to the list of videos I found. Others are available. Use the attached file for making notes and stuff.

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We looked through the book we will use this term and evaluated how useful it will be.

I also showed you where to find the TED talk online resource: https://ngl.cengage.com/

We discussed schools and creativity ti begin the topic - you should re-watch the clip to make sure you understand the video as much as possible.

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US prof 1 lesson 2 book intro and schools create

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As agreed in our first lesson

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First lesson - Secondary  Koszykowa SPRING all courses 2019