to, 9th formers

Here are the poems and stories to be contestly translated! Demonstrate your talents! COME ON!

All the Colours Of a Rainbow?

By James Love

 

The scent of your love.

If I could, just transcend…

Those moments… to a colour

It might be…

The colour, of your eyes.

Of a morning.

Or perhaps…

The colour, of your lips.

Of a moonlit evening.

Or

The colour of… your blushes.

In moments of wanton… passion

Which lingered like a rainbow.

But is all gone now!

Causing my eye to jade.

I no longer know the scent!

Am therefore, am rendered…

Colour blind.

As while o forlornly search,

For that lover’s… litany.

And all the while I do…

My current colour, is…

A paler shade of blue.

 

 

Snow

by LOUIS MACNEICE

 

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

 

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

 

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes— 

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Roads

by Robert Frost

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

AND SOME PROSE< TOO! 

9-11 классы

1.      

Vaccines cause autism

This dangerous myth all started when a fraudulent study led by Dr Andrew Wakefield was published in the highly respected medical journal The Lancet in 1998. He studied children diagnosed with autism after receiving the combined vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). He claimed that the vaccine caused autism and bowel disorders. Parents quickly stopped vaccinating their children. Another theory falsely implicates the use of thiomersal, a mercury-based vaccine preservative, with autism.

In the years that followed, more rigourous studies found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism: Wakefield was wrong. Ecological studies looked at the numbers of vaccinated children versus the number of children with autism. In Canada, autism rates increased while MMR vaccination rates went down. Sweden and Denmark removed thiomersal from vaccinations in 1992, but autism rates continued to rise. Retrospective cohort studies looked back through medical records to find links. One Danish study analysed over 537,000 children but found no link between their vaccination date and autism diagnosis. Prospective cohort studies followed children after vaccination to see if they went on to develop autism. In Finland doctors found 31 children with symptoms described by Wakefield but none became autistic. Then there was a meta-analysis conducted by Taylor et al that gathered results from more than 1.25 million children, they found no link either. Measles, mumps and rubella are dangerous infections that can cause deafness, meningitis, brain swelling and death. In 2010, The Lancet retracted Wakefield’s paper, with the UK’s General Medical Council striking Wakefield off the medical register for serious professional misconduct in the same year.  

Why was Wakefield’s research eventually discredited?

Statistics. There were only 12 children in Wakefield’s study – not enough to draw a firm conclusion.

No control data. The children in Wakefield’s study weren’t compared to children who hadn’t had the MMR vaccine.

Memory. The paper relied on parental anecdotes, which are not a reliable form of evidence.

 

2.

Three Weeks with My Brother

N. & M. Sparks

I work out of the house as many authors do, but that’s where the resemblance ends. My office isn’t some upstairs, out-of-the-way sanctuary; instead, the door opens directly onto the living room. While I’ve read that some authors must have a quiet house in order to concentrate, I’m fortunate that I’ve never needed silence to work. It’s a good thing I suppose, or I never would have ever written at all. Our house, you have to understand, is a whirlwind of activity literally from the moment my wife and I get out of bed until the moment we collapse back into it at the end of the day. Spending the day at our home is enough to exhaust just about anyone. First off, our kids have energy. Lots and lots of energy.  Ridiculous amount of energy. Multiplied by five, it’s enough energy to power the city of Cleveland. And the kids somehow magically feed off each other’s energy, each consuming and mirroring the other’s. Then our three dogs feed off it. And then the house itself seems to feed on it. A typical day includes: at least one sick child, toys strewn from one end of the living room to the other that magically reappear the moment after they’ve been put away, dogs barking, kids laughing, the phone ringing off the hook, FedEx and UPS deliveries coming and going, kids whining, lost homework, appliances breaking, school projects due tomorrow that our children somehow forget to tell us about until the last minute, baseball practice, gymnastics practice, football practice, Tae Kwon Do practice, repairmen coming and going, doors slamming, kids running down the hallway, kids throwing things, kids teasing each other, kids asking for snacks, kids crying because they fell, kids cuddling up on your lap, or kids crying because they need you RIGHT THIS MINUTE! When my in-laws leave after visiting for a week, they can’t get to the airport soon enough. There are deep bags under their eyes and they carry the dazed, shell-shocked expression of veterans who just survived the landing on Omaha Beach. Instead of saying good-bye, my father-in-law shakes his head and whispers, “Good luck. You’re going to need it”.

My wife accepts all of this activity in the house as normal. She’s patient and seldom gets flustered. My wife seems to actually enjoy it most of the time. My wife, I might add, is a saint.

Either that, or maybe she is insane.

 

3.

The Language You Speak Influences Where Your Attention Goes

It’s all because of the similarities between words

By Viorica Marian

 

Psycholinguistics is a field at the intersection of psychology and linguistics, and one if its recent discoveries is that the languages we speak influence our eye movements. For example, English speakers who hear candle often look at a candy because the two words share their first syllable. Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers not only look at words that share sounds in one language but also at words that share sounds across their two languages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word marker, they also look at a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is marka.

Even more stunning, speakers of different languages differ in their patterns of eye movements when no language is used at all. In a simple visual search task in which people had to find a previously seen object among other objects, their eyes moved differently depending on what languages they knew. For example, when looking for a clock, English speakers also looked at a cloud. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, when looking for the same clock, looked at a present, because the Spanish names for clock and present – reloj and regalo – overlap at their onset.

The story doesn’t end there. Not only do the words we hear activate other, similar-sounding words – and not only do we look at objects whose names share sounds or letters even when no language is heard – but the translations of those names in other languages become activated as well in speakers of more than one language. For example, when Spanish-English bilinguals hear the word duck in English, they also look at a shovel, because the translations of duck and shovel – pato and pala, respectively – overlap in Spanish.

Because of the way our brain organizes and processess linguistic and nonlinguistic information, a single word can set off a domino effect that cascades throughout the cognitive system. And this interactivity and co-activation is not limited to spoken languages. Bilinguals of spoken and signed languages show co-activation as well. For example, bilinguals who know American Sign Language and English look at cheese when they hear the English word paper because cheese and paper share three of the four sign components in ASL (hand shape, location and orientation but not motion).

What do findings like these tell us? Not only is the language system thoroughly interactive with a high degree of co-activation across words and concepts, but it also impacts our processing in other domains such as vision, attention and cognitive control. As we go about our everyday lives, how our eyes move, what we look at and what we pay attention to are influenced in direct and measurable ways by the languages we speak.

The implications of these findings for applied settings range from consumer behavior (what we look at in a store) to the military (visual search in complex scenes) and art (what our eyes are drawn to). In other words, it is safe to say that the language you speak influences how you see the world not only figuratively but also quite literally, down to the mechanics of your eye movements.

 

4.

Gretchen: A Thriller

by Shannon Kirk

Mom and I are living in our tenth state. Some middle state in the Midwest, and I don’t even care to remember the name of the specific one we’re in right now. I feel the pattern calling. I just know we’ll be running toward our eleventh state soon.

I never know when it will set in, what triggers the drop in my stomach, the sudden glaze of black that envelops my guts. Heavy curtains falling in my brain. But when dread comes calling, it’s like a predictable pattern, some wheel Mom and I are stuck on. Us two, a couple of spokes.

Someday, I hope we can break this pattern and stay in one state. But I’m fifteen, living in our tenth state, in my third high school already, and I felt it this morning. I felt the dread calling again, the click gaining closer to reset the pattern. Again. Again, again. Again. Around the loops and voids of our lives.

When the click happens in our pattern, it’s a variation of the same theme: Mom or I think someone recognizes her or me, or goddess forbid, both of us. A woman pumping gas lets it overfill because she’s staring too long at Mom, seemingly trying to place her. Or the cashier in a pizza place says, while handling a large pepperoni over the counter, “You remind me of … hmm … someone.” Or I’m grocery shopping and run into a bunch of kids from some new school, and one says to another as I pass, “The new girl looks like … who’s she look like? An actress? That actress? I know I saw something … a picture, a movie? Right?” – a throwaway line to anyone else, but to us, a red flag. We are rarely together in public, so one always reports these red flags to the other. It’s how we’ve been able to stay on the run for thirteen years.

Because I don’t look like anyone in any school I’ve ever attended, and I don’t know of any actresses who do either. Also, Mom makes me wear colored contacts to hide my violet eyes.

I felt the pattern turn turn turn this morning. All I was doing was regular, a collection of meaningless morning actions: making toast – from bread I baked homemade – and steeping French-press coffee. Standing by the open window of our latest rental cottage, the bright morning sun heralded heat for the day. The sill was warm, so I set my hand there as I waited for the toast to pop. Something about my hot palm, the morning sun’s brightness, the scent of baking bread, the cozy closeness of the pantry’s galley counters … maybe all of it together conjured a buried memory. Whatever clicked the dread to descend, I felt the distinctive drop in my stomach, an acknowledgment that led to my heart racing. I saw the whole day roll out before me  and held my breath – and this sickening anticipation always makes me want to hurl.