ST. VALENTINE'S BALL

On Friday, February 13, in an ambitious attempt to start a new tradition, the Lycee's Senate organized a ball to celebrate the coming St. Valentine's Day. The Hyde Park bulletin has just published an article about that event containing some students' impressions. If you haven't read the article on the bulletin, you can do it by clicking HERE .

How to write a Letter of Application

Attention,4th course students! One of the possible writing tasks at the External Independent Assessment is to write a letter, applying for a job. However, our current coursebooks do not show its layout. So, learn how to do that by clicking HERE . Use it as a sample, write your own data, don't make mistakes. Good luck!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Wish you happy St.Valentine's Day, the day which celebrates love. Do you know what love is? Some clever individuals gave the following definitions (and if you know why I've just used Past Simple instead of Present Perfect although there's result in the Present - e-mail me or find me in my classroom and get your reward). So, the definitions:

*"Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies."
- Aristotle
*"Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable."
- Henry Ward Beecher
*"Love does not dominate; it cultivates."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
*"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place."
- Zora Neale Hurston

WELCOME TO AUSTRALIA!

Attention 4th-course students! Here you may see the first part of the material about Australia. The topics it does not cover are: Australian Ways, Australian English and Aborigines. Those will be included in Part 2. To reach the text click HERE .

MARMOT'S DAY

If a marmot (or a groundhog)came out of his burrow in Kyiv yesterday, he would go back to sleep, as it was sunny, but frosty. We seem to have about six weeks of winter left. I came to this conclusion after reading Vlad Kuzmenko's article in the Hyde Park. You can do the same by clicking HERE .

US History in Brief

Attention 2-course students! Here you can find a VERY abbreviated version of the history of the USA. To see it click HERE . The most difficult thing was to squeeze all that into a four-page format. So, there isn't a single unnecessary fact. Enjoy and learn.

Oh, Obama. O-B-A-M-A...

Quite unusual, though not totally unexpected. I have been studying English for about forty-some years, and I have never come across such an Anglo-Saxon name as "BARACK". The other day one of my 11-grade students while doing a routine excercise composed the following statement:"What's ridiculous is that an Afro-American lives in the White House." Isn't it amazing that a normal UKRAINIAN student cares about the one who sits in the Oval Office across the ocean?

LIVE AND LEARN:

1. That's how stereotypes work. America is NOT a WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) country any more.

2.That's how globalization works. The decisions taken in the White House are REALLY important here, in Kyiv.

If I were a US citizen I would definitely vote for McCaine. You know, somehow I trust a person who has some experience in confrontation with the global plague armed with all sorts of modern weaponry. I trust fighter pilots who have survived: all their decisions had been the right ones. I trust men who know the practical meanings of the words "duty", "dignity" and "responsibility". And who is that Barack Obama?

The answer is very simple: the 44th president of the USA. The nation's choice, God bless them.

I may not trust Obama. I may not trust the voters. But I trust America as a system created more than 200 years ago. It has unique built-in mechanisms of turning all its wrongs into rights. So, CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT!

To read the Hyde Park article created by Ann ATAMAS (Group 23-E) and Vlad KUZMENKO (Group 22-E) click on OBAMA ARTICLE .

To see some funny cartoons from Obama's presidential campaign click HERE .