Saturday, September 25, 2010

Aisha´s Biography

On our second lesson, I asked the students about the most relevant news in the world in the summer. Needless to say, most of them wrote about the FIFA World Cup in South Africa and how proud we all are of being the champions; some students wrote about the gypsies who were expelled from France; one or two wrote about the natural disasters in different countries, mainly about the floods in Pakistan (click here to see some impressive photos, from "The Big Picture", my favourite page to find pictures of current events), but I chose Aisha´s story. I prepared a couple of texts, one from TIME, Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban and the other from the Newsletter of Women for Afghan Women an organization made up of admirable volunteer members.

Half of the class got the first article and the other half got the second. They read it, talked about it, and answered some questions I had prepared about it but they could only find all the answers when they read both texts. We haven´t finished the activity yet but I know it is an impressive piece of news, therefore, I want to show the "positive" side of all this horror: Aisha, who is 19 now, is in the US where she will go through reconstructive surgery to get a new nose. Read about this here; at the end of this article you can read the comments about this piece of news; if you write a comment, please let me know about it (it will get you an extra point for optional work!)

You can see Aisha and the women who are helping her in this CNN video. This is one of the photos from the interview.

For the final task, writing Aisha´s Biography, I want you to consider the following questions:
  • In what ways is Aisha´s life remarkable or admirable?
  • What qualities were most influencial in shapping the way Aisha acted?
  • What are the lessons you might learn from Aisha´s life?
  • Religion, politics or a personal philosophy often dictate the way people act. To what extent did Aisha act by one of these codes-or did she act independently of any set of beliefs? What about her relatives?
  • Would you consider Aisha a heroine? Why (not)?
And now... Have a nice weekend! If you should at any time think you are not having a nice time or things are not going as you would like, think of Aisha and I´m sure you´ll feel better.

4 comments:

  1. this woman is impresionant

    ReplyDelete
  2. I know what you mean and I agree with you but "impresionant" is a false friend; you mean "admirable, amazing, impressive".

    ReplyDelete
  3. This story is really horrible, I can't think that things like that happens...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi, anonymous writer 2! I agree, life is no bed of roses for some people (probably for more people than we could imagine...)

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...