You left me

You faxed me
Away to another world
Far from here

You e-mailed me to a forlorn PC
Where I am stored
Amidst unknown messages
Inside strange folders
Copied and cut and pasted
By an ambiguous file system

I hear you chatting on
In hilarious chatting rooms
But I can’t log in
I’ve forgotten my password
And have no recovery software

I can only see mysterious asterisks
Filling up the text field
Of a hostile dialogue window
And reaching to the sky
And filling it up
Like alien stars from a gloomy world

While the dialogue window
Does not give any answer
But keeps on requesting queries
For which the only answer is:
File not found...

Witchy, 11th June 2006

Witchy's notes for teachers:

1st activity: (warming up, before reading the poem)

The teacher asks: "How many English words do you know which relate to computers?"

  • Students write down all the words they know and, when they finish, the teacher brainstorms by writing on the black (or white)-board all the words suggested by the students.
  • Students make up a spider diagram of the words. The biggest most colourful items of the diagram are sticked up on the classroom walls (Witchy says: "To be seen by all those envious colleagues who say you are a lazy teacher and spend your time reading the newspaper instead of teaching..." )

By the way, this is NOT a spider diagram!!

THIS IS a spider diagram!!!

2nd activity: still PC words...

And then students can get into the poem. The teacher says:

  • "Read the poem and look for words taken from Computer Science. Add the ones you didn't know to your personal spider diagram".

3rd activity: glossary

Using the spider diagram the students build up a glossary of Computer Science words. They can look up a dictionary or another glossary found on the Internet. The most important thing is that they learn the definitions and try to make new ones.

4th activity: a contest

In groups of three: the student a asks the student b what a technical word means and the student c gives the definition. The student c plays the role of referee, controls the regularity of the game (the student who has to answer the questions must not read the definitions) and writes down the scores. The students take turns. The one who has answered most questions correctly is the winner!!!

Bye bye

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