The Nokia C3 competition on this blog has come and gone. And the winner is none other than…
who not only got all the answers right, but sent it in on time sometime late in the afternoon.
You will be contacted by Nokia representatives in Lagos as soon as possible. I will also give you a call as soon as I can. Thank you for reading the blog and for participating. I hope you enjoy the Nokia experience.
CONGRATULATIONS!
“22 staff in Modern Languages at Swansea University are threatened with compulsory redundancy. A proposed restructuring announced by the University on August 6, with no prior consultation, would delete 40 academic jobs in all, in 9 departments, over the next three years. 95 people have been told that their jobs are at risk. Of the 40 redundancies, 11.8 are planned in Modern Languages, with effect from summer 2011. The department has 22 lecturing staff. Just 10 will remain. Its the swiftest, most savage cut proposed. Its also very bad news for education in Wales.”
This is an excerpt from the news of a horrible trend now sweeping through Universities around the world where departments of foreign languages are taking the brunt of a global economic instability. Swansea University in Wales is only one. We don’t know how many more will follow if this horrible experiment goes through, and we’re calling all lovers of language and the academia to take a stand and make noise about this, and write letters of protest to protect the jobs of these professors and the whole idea of foreign language literacy at large. Foreign Language departments are not useless, nor are they just decorative appendages of art faculties. They contribute to knowledge, the economy, and understanding across nations. Please lend your voice. Send a strongly worded letter to the Vice Chancellor at Swansea. It will go a long way in influencing their decision.
Read more about this unfortunate case and how you can help at Clarissa’s blog.
The evolution from picture books to text-only materials was gradual, but memorable. There seemed to have been an unwritten disdain for picture books that manifested after each birthday, each disposed oversized pyjamas and each replaced tooth. It wasn’t self-wrought however, but acquired, either from older peers with fancier stories of intimate relations with the written word resulting in inspiring encounters, or jealousy of even fancier ones with fantastic tales of their reading prowess. Something gave, however, for sure, little by little, and the young reader emerged, ready to take on the reading world without accompanying images.
The most memorable of such recollection could be the singular, but eventually impossible task of reading the first chapter of The Tiger by the Tail during a bus ride from home to school. It didn’t matter to him in the least that he couldn’t make any sense of it yet, never having even applied himself to more than just a few words on each page he flipped. It matter though that people saw him with a book that was bigger than a storybook, had no pictures in it, and moved from page to page as if passing through the patient and critical eyes of an avid reader. “Hey, nice book. How’re you finding it?” Someone would ask sometimes during the day, and he would respond: “Oh, very nice. Chase is such an exquisite writer”, and move on before the probing went far beyond the familiar. Oh the days.
The blog, now splattered with colours and images, flesh and blood, of ordinary and extraordinary people of various places, beliefs and convictions, could only remind of such trivialties; of days when colour meant ordinariness, and a lack of sophistication needed for the rites of adulthood. Now only a smile remains, and a longing for such a not so distant past of innocence and silliness.
Welcome September, and the year of birth.
By midnight today, the second third of this year will be gone for good and again we’ll wonder where all the time went. Just four months more and we’ll be in another year, making new resolutions and running after new goals. In some parts of the world, the harmattan season is beginning to gather and will gain force in a few weeks. In some other place like around my yard, trees will be crying their leaves into the river – to rephrase the line in Chris de Burg’s song.
In my case, I will be buried in books, research, (maybe) movies, and a series of other activities that may or may not take me away from this page. (I’ve always wanted to be able to take one month off this blog in order to do a few other things. I tried it in July but it didn’t quite work. Wonder if this might be a good time, especially at this beginning of serious classwork and other personal endeavours around the city. Hmm.
The Nokia competition is still on. The second question is already up where I promised it’d be. There will be another one tomorrow, and the last two on Thursday. The email address will be provided before noon on Thursday and you may send in your answers. You could be a lucky winner. The winner will be contacted via email on Thursday and announced on the blog either on the same day, or on Friday.
See ya around.
In response to a memory of faces and places, here is the (I hope) last installment of my summer people posts. Or not.
There’s Ayo, Prof. Banjo, Benson, Aunt Grace, Nikola, Niyi, Dr. Oha, Rahman, Sola, Yemi, and Yomi .