My name is Patrice Honnef
and I've been teaching English for a number of years
at Gordonvale State High School.
I teach all English classes.
I have five English classes, ranging this year
from Year 9 through to Year 12.
I've been teaching the novel 'Then' to my Year 9 students
and the main themes of the novel are war, loneliness,
persecution and racism.
Many of the characters in the novel die,
so I thought I could use this context
to teach the students how to write and present a eulogy.
So what are our learning intentions for today?
Very simply, they're to explore the conventions of a eulogy.
What are conventions? They're ways of making things work.
My goal was to teach the structure
and language conventions of this text type
and focus particularly on generic features and nominalisation.
So what I'm going to do today, Grade 9,
is I'm going to show you a little bit about my own life,
and from then you're going to write a eulogy
on the life of a character from our book.
Because many students would not be familiar with this kind of text,
I decided to model and present a eulogy I wrote for my grandmother
and have the students analyse the language conventions
as I move through the text.
"It has been said that grandmothers and roses are much the same.
"Each of them can be described as God's masterpiece
"with different names.
"This analogy is exactly how I would define my grandmother,
"a masterpiece who was a delightful blend of sharp wit,
"wonderful stories, laughter and love."
What is the purpose of me writing this?
You can see on the side I've given you some key questions.
The purpose is to tell people about who my grandmother was,
to fill in the gaps they may have.
OK, the very first thing I want you to do, Grade 9,
is I want you to pick a character
you're going to write the eulogy on from the book.
So number one, I want the name of your character.
Think about the characters we could do a eulogy on,
just from our own experience.
-Genia. -Genia. Genia would be great. Zelda.
But I want you to please do a PMI on my eulogy that I wrote,
so that is something positive about it, a minus about it,
and something interesting about it.
OK, the next thing I'm going to ask you to do, please,
is I'm going to ask you to create biographical details
of your character.
Who have you decided you'll do?
Amon or Chaya.
I would suggest you do Amon.
So why don't we get it... Think about a surname for Amon.
Oh, we know Amon's surname. Who remembers it from the book?
-CHILD: Kurtz. -Amon Kurtz. Very good.
I'm going to do Mr Krol.
So Jacob Krol. He's 54, born in 1888.
He has a Jewish wife and she was taken away to a concentration camp,
and Mr Krol takes all his anger out on the Jewish children
because the Nazis come and take the children away.
Yeah, it was really good because, like, it can give us a good idea
of, like, how we need to put it all together
and, like, what parts of their life we need to write about and...
I have been to a few funerals before
and I sort of had an idea what a eulogy was,
but I've never sort of seen one, like, visually seen,
like, the write-up of it and that sort of...the structure of it.
Yeah, it's pretty fun because we get to, like, learn more
about the characters
and, like, write about who we want to choose and...
Yeah.
Yes, I was pleased with the lesson today.
I was a little bit worried about the length of the eulogy
because I know that, really, it should have been longer,
and I was quite mindful and I kept trying to look up
and watch that the kids were following the script,
and from what I could see, they all seemed to be.
I didn't have to speak to anyone
about, you know, being distracted or talking to anyone else.
So, yeah. I was happy with it.
I could see that they were genuinely...
They seemed to be quite excited about embracing the next task
and that was a really... that was a really nice feeling.