![]() ![]() In our monastery, everyone lived under the rule of silence.Īs for why we wanted to be silent, that relates to the nature of monastic life itself, which is to be apart from the world and to have an opportunity for reflection and meditation, activities that are “inner” and require quiet. Also, when no one is speaking, it is much easier to be quiet than if some people are speaking and others are not. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that once I went into the silence, I was not interested, most of the time, in speaking. Their eyes seem to ask: How can anyone live in silence for a year? Even if it were possible to live in silence, why would anyone want to do it?īeing silent was not difficult for me. When I tell people that I spent an entire year in silence, their expressions usually stop cold, waiting for their minds to catch up with the novel information. We studied the Rule of Saint Benedict, formulated more than a millennium ago as a blueprint for the monastic life. Called the novitiate or canonical year-from canon, or Catholic Church law-it was a period of intense concentration on how to live as a monk. The first year of my life as a monk was a time of training and instruction, preparing me to live outside the monastery and teach in the Brothers’ schools. We wore plain clothing, ate humble meals, and, at night, retired to small individual rooms that were furnished only with a bed, sink, desk, and chair. We grew our own food in the fields around the monastery, which was in a remote farming area in the American Midwest. I was part of a community of about 60 monks, ranging in age from 18, like me, to 80. Within the walls of the monastery, my life was not much different from the life of a monk of the Middle Ages. For the next eight years, I lived the life of a monk-a solitary life of prayer, work, contemplation, fasting, and silence. A few weeks after I graduated from high school, I left home and went away to a monastery. Their partners listen to them, take notes and then summarise what they said using reported speech. They work in pairs, choose two out of six statements related to silence and in turns express their opinions. Finally, they get to practise reported speech orally. First, they look at the sentences from the video and change them into reported speech. The last two exercises allow students to focus on reported speech practice once again. They watch it for the first time to answer a general question and then watch it again and complete seven sentences with one or two missing words each. Afterwards, they engage in a discussion about silence and how it’s related to being successful. They look at eight gapped sentences and complete them with one of the words/expressions from the box. The in-class part of the lesson starts with the vocabulary box students already worked on in the pre-class part and a gap-fill exercise. IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES Further listening & reported speech practice Their task is to study eight sentences and change them into reported speech. The following exercise allows them to check what they remember about reported speech in English. Next, they watch the video about the benefits of silence and list six ways that silence can change a person’s life for the better. ![]() PRE-CLASS ACTIVITIES Listening practice & revision of reported speechīefore the lesson, students on their own look at a box with words and expressions which they’ll later hear in a video and check if they understand their meanings. Learn more about flipped classroom and how we implement it in these lesson plans in our post. ![]() In a nutshell, it means that the first part of the lesson needs to be done by students at home.
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