SAT preparation for the week

Dear All,

We have already planned that this week we will have three Mocks. But since the mornings are quite rush - everyone is of the opinion that the mock should better start from 9.00 am.

In the last 4 classes we have covered the following.

1. Sentence completion from Critical Reading Sections
2. Critical Reading passages selected QA reading
3. SAT-I Essay Writing strategies
4. Maths problems discussion
5. Vocabulary

Please note that for the vocabulary follow the following order for revision:

1. 100 Words list
2. Princeton HIT Parade (Is it still available on the net)
3. Official SAT list
4. 144 Words List
5. 430 Words List
6. Word Smarts List [Use this document to revise the words in word clusters]

The best place to start is to go with nos - 1, 3, 5 of the above list.

At the same time please revise the reports that you sent me over the last few months. Recalling the title of the book and the Author's name is sufficient. However, giving the name of the characters is recommended. Choose not less than 10 different NOVELS, Plays, Historical Characters and revise for a total of 3 hours. You will be surprised to see the result while writing your SAT Essay.

If there is any query - please mail me. 

Recommended minimum MOCK performance for October exam. If things go wrong - we will have the December exam waiting.

Please bring your OWN Calculator and 2B Pencils [at least 5 in numbers] for the Mock Exam. 

Mock exam paper will be provided in the class.

A Man for All Seasons

Prachyanat is going to present A Man for All Seasons tomorrow at 6.30 at the National Theatre Auditorium. Everyone is requested to attend. We are not going to have any class tomorrow. Instead the performance shall be preceded by a short briefing session on Theatrical Illusion, Concept of Art, Nature of Aesthetics, Realism V. Illusion, Aesthetics of Composition, Minimalism in Art, History and Fiction, Private V. Public life ETC.

Briefing Session:             30 Min
Performance duration:    2 Hours [Play starts at 7.00 pm]

During the briefing session only the SAT Students and Anglophiles Alumni shall be allowed to enter the auditorium and attend the briefing. 

Thursday whole-day class Shifted for Hartal

So, we can not have a whole-day class on Thursday. We will have it on Sunday instead. Please find the weekly schedule below.

Saturday: SAT-I Essay Writing Day 12.00 am to 4.00 pm

Sunday: Full day class from 8.30 to 4.00 pm

Monday: Watch performance of A Man for All Seasons from 6.30 to 8.30 pm at Shilpakala Academy, Shgunbagicha, Dhaka

Tuesday: First Mock 7.30 am - Second Mock 12.30 pm

Wednesday: First Mock 7.30 am - Second Mock 12.30 pm

Thursday: First Mock 7.30 am - Second Mock 12.30 pm

Friday: HOLIDAY

Saturday: SAT-I Exam

Official SAT and Princeton 11 Tests - Review Tomorrow

We will have class tomorrow at 9.00 am. Everyone is advised to take the entire 8 hour class. We can finish the two important books along with all the critical reading passages.

Additionally, we will also discuss SAT Essay and Writing Problems.

If you can not attend the entire 8 hour class then attend for half the time - either 9 am -1 pm or 1 pm -5 pm.

I will also sit individually with 6 more students with whom I did not have any talk last week - regarding SAT and Application Preparedness. I hope that you will all be doing WORD Smarts at home.

Our BLOG is active again

Due to technical problem I could not post in the last 7 days. From today I will keep posting new and important items.

First, along with those who were present in the class today - we decided that in the coming week our schedule will be like the following:

Friday:             No Class
Saturday:         No Class
Sunday:           No Class
Monday:          Class from 9.00 am to 5 pm
Tuesday:          No Class
Wednesday:     No Class
Thursday:         Class from 9.00 am to 5 pm

On both days we shall solve

1. Critical Reading Problems
2. Essay Writing [today Thursday we already discussed at least 10 Essays and assigned marks] and 
3. Writing Problems  

Students who have more specific problems should mail me and ask for appointment [preferably morning].

Look for more BLOG-posts in the next 24 hours.

How to find a college/Univ that gives Financial Aid to Intl. Students

Search the top 100 colleges individually - go to their web pages and find the admissions page. Then find out whether they give aid to international students. Alternately, the colleges/univ shall include a link to Financial Aid Form for International Students - an indication that it does give financial aid to international students.

Notice that beyond the first 100 there will hardly be any coll/univ that offers fin aid to international students.

SO, there you go.

The Yellow Wall Paper - report by Zarat

“The Yellow Wall Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman is a fascinating short story. Going through her essay “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”, I realized her motive behind such a creation. She claims to have written it to help women who were on the verge of insanity to cope with the male chauvinistic world.

“It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

The story draws from her experience of ‘rest cure’. Suffering from chronic depression, she was prescribed by a renowned doctor to live a “completely domestic life”, and forfeit all intellectual activities. She suffered in this way for three long months before waking up from the nightmare—she was going insane because of this so-called cure! She rejected the prescription and took up her pen. She came back from the doors of insanity and it was time to call back the others. She hoped after reading her book the doctor would change his way of treating patients.

The story is mainly a series of journal entries of a woman who was being treated by her husband through the ‘rest cure’. For most of the time, she was locked up in a room, away from her newborn child and the rest of the family. Here we see the husband is in control as he forces this unreasonable practice on his wife. Locked in the room, the woman slowly sinks into the depths of insanity. We see a hint of rebellion as she keeps on writing in her journal, hidden from her husband. With nothing else to keep her intellectually stimulated, the woman becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper of the room.

She writes about the wallpaper obsessively in her journal, mentioning its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck" scrawling pattern. At first she finds patterns in the wallpaper which later seem to shape themselves into a woman crawling on all fours.  She thinks that a woman is trapped behind the wallpaper and feels it her duty to help her. She scratches at the patterns, tearing off the wallpaper. At this point, she is seriously losing touch with sanity and seems to be the climax of the story. Finally, she tears down the wallpaper entirely and locks herself up in the room. When the husband comes to check on her, she pretends that she was the one trapped beyond the wallpaper and starts crawling on all fours. The husband faints when he sees this and the woman crawls over him. 

The woman, although mentally affected, seems to realize her imprisonment in the male-dominated world. Hence, she imagines that a woman was trapped beyond the wallpaper. It could be her representation. The fact that she finally tears off the wallpaper can be seen as her victory—she is finally able to extricate herself from the tangles of the male-dominated world. However, in the process, she has to sacrifice her sanity. From a feministic point of view, her crawling over her husband’s body is accepted as her victory—she could finally rise above the husband.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ can be considered an epitome of feminist literature. It had huge impacts in the society although a group clamored its potential harm on the female mind.

"The Distant Near" in Oxford University

Theatre Folks, Oxford presents an invited show of one act play 'The Distant Near' for the first time in Oxford after being featured in Edinburgh Fringe and Brady Arts centre, London. This play features prominent theatre actor, director and writer Mamunur Rashid from Bangladesh.

Place: St. Hilda's College Auditoriam, Cowley Place
Oxford OX4 1DY
Date : Monday , September 12, 2011
Time : 7:30pm (Door opens at 7 pm)
Tickets: £3 (Pay at the door)

Saturday [tomorrow] Class Content

Saturday [tomorrow] we will start the class with writing of an essay according to the latest suggestions. This session shall take 30 min - it will be followed by a long session on Critical Reading Strategy Review.

Everyone is requested to attend - class starts at 10.15 am. Those with whom I did not have a chance to sit in person - will get a hearing.

Edinburgh, Fringe, Polish Theatre, Bangla Theatre, Ravi Sanker in his 90s playing unearthly music of the spheres, Italian Opera - Don Giovanni, Inverness - Macbeth's Castle and Loch Ness Monster, Aberdeen, Dundee - the RRS Discovery - Arctic Exploration Ship, Inchcolm Island - WWI and WWII bunkers-tunnels - 12th century Abbey meticulously preserved - relief work on wall - seals [north sea animal floating on water, the 4th Bridge [completed in 1860 and most important Scottish Landmark - largest cantilever bridge till 1917], R. L. Stevenson,  Daniel Defoe [not a Scottish], Scottish Highlands, Spring Water, Fish & Chips, Social Clubs, wonderful Scottish Hospitality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z713CeCEL_A&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruGb26xSXIk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3vHdJv8zdk&feature=youtu.be

Everyone - those who DID send report and those who did NOT send reports - MUST attend the class on the 6th morning.

Assignments for the 6th September

Everyone is requested to come on the 6th September with a thorough reading knowledge of our BLOG's posts in its entirety.

I will ask questions on certain matters and you must be able to respond to these queries.

Eid and the Aftermath

Eid Mubarak to all of you.

Please get ready for a super-stormy, tempestous, week of work - frustration - headbanging - redeyed - frothy DAYS starting from the 6th of September. I am returning with tales - strange and wild - comforting and emancipating - true and fictitious - with method and madness.

I do wish we all survive the great calamity awaiting us. We meet on the morning  of 6th September - suspend all other engagements. It is going to be a DAY.

"Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

Writer and Reader Praxis

Sir,

I read the essay "Where to Begin" from Granta.

Here the author, Nadeem Islam, explains how a writer connects to his readers by sharing his own views of life, and when a fiction writer lacks this quality he fails, i.e when he burdens his work with unnecessary identities and surrounding information of the characters. In doing so he is unable to connect all the information to flesh and blood human being and thus the book fails as the people are not real. According to the author, his writings are an exploration of his own world- an attempt to discover his true self. He always begins with the conviction that there is nothing extraordinary or special about him, and that he is just a mere part of billions of people. So whatever is true to him would be true to them too. And in doing so, without even realizing and making an effort to connect with the people, he does so. A writer is heavily influenced by his surroundings and environment. He observes everything around him but later when he writes, his own culture subconsciously reflects in his writings. While writing his novella, the author resisted his thoughts on Leila and Qes legend but he found it inevitable that they should affect his writings.  it enters my thinking automatically each time my heart beats and the blood is sent to my brain. Thus what makes up a writer is his perception of his culture and motherland, and it is the basis of what motivates him to write. A writer is portrayed as the spokesman of the society overall. He/she possesses the ability to convey radical social messages which acts as an eye-opener for its people, and initiates them to think differently and question conventional social laws. Due to this they are feared by the politicians and some of them even had to escape from their own countries such as Qurratulain Hyder. Her novel "River of Fire" questioned the Islamic fundamentalists who regarded that Pakistan was all about Islam and the Islamic world. It dared to trace back the ancestry of its characters back to Pakistan's Buddhist past and more shockingly, back to Hinduism. 

When you are writing you see your own very ordinary ‘face’ behind the words. But when you finish and hand it to the reader, the reader sees his or her own ‘face’ behind the writing. 

Thus the author concludes that the writer and the reader are linked by their basic human concern and that is where the connection occurs. Thus whether it is writing about Iran, Spain, Argentina or Uk, the basic essence of it all is the same. good writing is writing on a mirror. 

Sukanya

A progress report! Identity undisclosed

Sir,

I just wanted to let you know my progress. My math sections are going well, the raw score almost reaches close to the maximum and i am able to maintain mistake counts of 2 or 3. After doing some princeton's 11 test my writing section has improved, even though the time management is pretty much the same but the frequency of mistakes has decreased.

Unfortunately in the critical reading section the part where we have to choose appropriate words is not much improving as it requires a very strong and wide vocabulary. Even though in some sentences I am clearly able to predict what word should fit in but the lack of knowledge of the words given causes me to skip those unless I can make an educated guess. The comprehension always varies, if it is easy or anyway related with science then I am able to achieve good scores but whenever the passage is tough my scores drastically drop and mantaining within the time frame becomes extremely tough. Up till now I have not been able to finish the whole critical reading section nor the writing sections within the time limit even if they are easy. I am hoping more improvements are yet to come through the SAT tests.

SAT Registration - My return to Dhaka - Meeting Parents

As it appears that SAT Registration this year is US$ 78. I would also like to know who are still to register for SAT as the deadline is on the 9th September.

Please let me know through e-mails.

I am returning to Dhaka on the 5th Evening. I will definitely have class on the 6th from morning and continue throughout the whole day.

You are requested to keep the day free of all other engagements. Come equipped with Logbook-Laptop-Papers & Documents of any kind that you want to show me. Parents are requested NOT to meet me on this day. I will set aside another day by the 10th September for meeting parents who are interested to talk to me in person. However, let me make it clear that such parent-teacher meeting is not very necessary if the student can keep the parent well-informed. 

The issue of Rootlessness and Belonging - SAT item

Sir, 

I read the essays,  "missing out" from Granta.

I really liked the narrator's style of writing in "Missing Out". It is very realistic and life-like, and animates the reader by observing the simple things of life from an unique perspective. To sum up my emotions in one word- I found it really sweet. 

It basically depicts a person's longing for her own roots- her birthplace, culture, people, customs etc. It manages to convey a sense of belonging to the reader. When we are at our own country, say for example a third world country as ours, we usually complain about the miserable poverty-stricken conditions of the masses,  the dirty and chaotic streets, the horrifying traffic, and what not! But while living abroad, at a certain point, we tend to miss even the things we utterly despised at our home country. This is exactly the case with Samra who, after marrying Majdy and going off to London, could not cut off her ties with her homeland. At first Majdy regarded her behavior as "homesickness " but soon he realized that it was something more than that. It was her unbreakable bond and deep love for her homeland, whose memories followed her everywhere and they were, in fact, a part of her true identity. Majdy was well settled in London,and was reluctant to leave all its luxury and grandeur to go back to Sudan, his homeland. London for him was a place of opportunities, a dreamland compared to Sudan, devoid of all its political unrest and backwardness that hindered him from achieving his goals. He repeatedly tried to convince Samra to adjust to her surroundings, and take pleasure in London's modern lifestyle. But what she loved was Sudan's old, noisy fan, the old jar where her mom stored pickles for their neighbors, the sun lighting up their home's terrace, the uneven streets with all its puddles. 

It was no longer enough, as it once had been, that he was here, that he was privileged to walk London’s streets, smell the books of its libraries, feast his eyes on its new, shining cars.

He would walk on wet roads that never flooded and realize that he would never know what it would be like to say, ‘my ancestors built this, my grandfather borrowed a book from this library.’ London held something that could never be his, that was impossible to aspire to.

These lines show that no matter where we go, or how hard we try to shake off our so-called "embarrassing" homeland, we ultimately would end up embracing it as it is there that we truly belong, and it defines who we truly are. 

What NOW

All Students,

First, make sure that All the tests from Official + Princeton 11 + Barron's + 10 Real SAT are done.

6th September - Class Timing - 8 am to 4 pm.

During this time every student will have individual time. If necessary I will continue the class till 8 pm if more people are left.

7th September - regular class 8 am - 12 pm.

The Absconding Students

The following students are asked to contact me immediately. You are almost all but disappeared from my WORLD.

Radh - Rakin - Tanzid - Rizal - Samin - Serajul - Shanzat

You will NOT get any mercy when I meet you next time. If you do not want to make the situation worse PLEASE mail me NOW.

Priority - Urgent - Post

All attention. I am waiting to hear from Every One of you by Today. Please address the following items.


1. How many tests you are DONE with.
2. What are your plans in the next 7 days.
3. Have you been revising following vocabulary: the 100 words list + 430 Words List + Official SAT Words List + Words Smarts List
4. Have you COMPLETED your SAT Registration?
5. Have you short-listed at least 5 universities/colleges? [in the list put at least 2 NORMAL names] [Before you shortlist CHECK whether they have aid for international students.]
6. Get prepared for a LONG meeting with me. It shall run for whole day. Tentative date could be 1st September.


Sadia, Abanti, Sukanya, Lamia - thanks to you for responding to the queries so promptly.

Ravi Shanker

Just came out of LIVE performance of Ravi Shanker in Edinburgh Hall. Hope to write about more on it.