“Two kinds” by Amy Tan – analysis

The short story “Two kinds” is written by Amy Tan. The story is set back in the late 80`s in the American city, San Francisco. This was a time where everyone hunted for success, especially for the mother in this story. She immigrated from China to America because of the chance of success.

In the story, we meet a few characters: the daughter, mother, father, piano teacher and the other family. But in my opinion, the story is mostly based on the daughter and the mother. The story itself is told from the daughter’s point of view. Since there is such a huge dialog between the daughter and the mother it`s easy for the readers to understand the tension between the two. The daughter is a normal teenager who is in the age where everything teenagers do is to ignore their parents. Everything she does in this story is resisting her mother. The mother is fairly similar to her daughter because everything she does is arguing and pushing on her daughter. The author hasn’t described the characters in their physical appearance. The reason behind this is to put all the attention on the mental tension between the mother and the daughter.

The main plot is as I`ve said: the tension between the daughter and the mother. The reason for this conflict is an argue between them. The mother wants the daughter to take piano lessons because she sees a talent in her daughter, but all the daughter can see is a zero in herself. The more the mother pushes the daughter into piano lessons, the more the daughter purposely sabotages her talent because she doesn`t want to succeed big time. The plot is quite chronological because it doesn`t jump in different time occasions. The plot jumps from time occasions in a chronological way.

After some observation, I think the story has a climax. I believe the climax takes place when the daughter brings up the mothers two dead babies. It`s only now the mother gradually starts leaving her daughter alone.

The theme in this short story must be something similar to “choose your own path”. I think this because despite all the nagging from her mother, the daughter still chose to resist it and choose her own path in life.

 

 

 

 

How we can improve our English

In our English classes today we usually write different sorts of blog posts. We mostly write reflected texts based on a theme we have discussed previously. In my opinion, this will improve our English writing skills, but not good enough.

No one in my class has perfect in Englis and every one of us can improve their skills. So how can we all become better in English? My number one priority is to read better-written texts. If we all read well-written texts we will certainly improve our texts because our brain will observe and learn from the better texts. By reading more well-written texts, we will capture knowledge from professional writers. Our new knowledge based on professional texts will make our texts better. Another option is to do grammar tasks because it will basically improve our grammar. We also need to improve our oral skills. As we speak more English our pronunciation will improve. When I`m in an English-speaking country I want my pronunciation to be perfect and therefore, we need to speak more English.

During my first semester at Sandvika, I have noticed a better vocabulary. The reason is all the blogging, it makes me more aware when I write my texts. I think we should continue all the blogging, but we should also manage to read more in our lesson.

In addition to what we usually do in English class, our teacher Ann has handed out several different websites to us. These websites contains information and tasks about how we can improve our english. One of the websites, who is called The study zone, contains different tasks in three different subjects-Grammar, Reading and Vocalubary. And she also gave us a website called NDLA and on this website we could read a more theoreticly way to achieve better both our oral and written English. I really loved the NDLA site because it contained so good information and I think this is the best website for me. Ann also posted two websites wich were based on adjectives and nouns. These websites were full of tasks based on adjectives and nouns. I personally don`t like this sort of work, but it are effective. These were some of the websites, but there are som more! If you want to visit all these website check out my teachers blog to find them – http://annmichaelsen.com/2016/01/12/teaching-language-learning-for-english-as-a-second-language-esl/

Movie Project

As you have read in one of my previous posts we use a lot of technology in our class at Sandvika high school. Today we used it in a way we never have done before. In today´s english class we received a task were we had to make a movie. We have worked with films at Sandvika before so it was a lot of planning to make it perfect. We split the class in two and the two groups would make a different movie. My group chose the task “make a video about how we work in class”. My job was to be the script writer and sort of a director so I was the man behind the story in this movie. Everyone in the group participated, some more than others of course, and together we made a solid and serious movie to represent our school. We even used a professional digital camera to film with and that was pretty cool. It was really fun to visualize the way we work at Sandvika for other people and schools to see. I hope other schools will use this as an inspiration in the way they work in class, because technology can bring learning to new heights.