Let the students do the work!

One of the classes I teach consists of a group of electricians-going-to-be-electronics-engineers - viz. very technically knowledgeable people (unlike me). Our English coursebook is not exactly the best I've come across (I'm being diplomatic here, it is really quite extremely dull, thankfully we've found a new one for next year), so I have struggled to come up with good texts as additions to the ones in the coursebook. Not being particularly interested in technical issues, I found it difficult to pick out which texts could be interesting and on a suitable level of complexity for the students. Then, lazy as I am, the idea struck me to let the students do the searching, so over the past couple of months, this is how we've worked: once a week, one student is responsible for 1) finding an article he (I'm not discriminating here, it's an all male class)thinks is interesting, on a naval or technical subject, 2)copy it and bring it to class where everyone reads it (so it can't be too long, a page or two), then 3) he goes through vocabulary, focusing on the naval/technical words of the text, and 4) tries to get a discussion going in class about the topic of the text.
I must say the students have done a good job on this, we have read about global warming and the opening of the Northwest Passage; electron beam freeform fabrication; the expanding Chinese Navy; the surveillance capacity of air force drones; and advice on how to save energy at home, among other topics. We usually spend a 40-minute lesson on this, and it gives the student in charge of the article practice in both chairing a discussion, and selecting and explaining complex vocabulary. The rest of the class get to read an interesting text, chosen by a peer, learn new words, and discuss. Nice work indeed.

The Junior Officers' Reading Club

I just finished reading young ex-officer Patrick Hennessey's bestseller The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, with a view to using it as a set text for our first-year cadets. Unfortunately, I don't think it is well suited to our needs; the language is quite complex, and it presupposes quite extensive knowledge of the British military organisation and culture, so I guess we'll stick with the old memoirs from the Falklands War, One Hundred Days and Four Weeks in May.
(Aside: what we definitely could use is a new little naval war involving at least one of the English-speaking states of the world, and someone writing a whopping great book about it, complete with a lot of mesmerising navy and ship facts. That would both modernise and fancify (is that a word?) our curriculum.)
I don't think this book was quite as impressive as the reviews suggest, although it is interesting that a very young officer writes about his very recent experiences in a conflict that concerns us deeply. The title of the book is rather misleading, the Reading Club plays a very small part, and he writes mostly about training at Sandhurst, boredom in Iraq, and exhausting operations in Helmand.
What I found quite interesting is that his descriptions of his thoughts and feelings about being a soldier, like the yearning to see action, to prove himself, the intense feeling of being alive (the adrenalin-kick) during combat, and the feeling of being out of place when he is back home in London on leave for a few weeks, correspond very closely to observations made by historian Joanna Bourke in a 2001 Guardian article.
Comradeship, the craving for real action, the joy of destroying the enemy - these are ingredients in the life and experiences of soldiers that set them apart from "normal" civilian life, as Patrick Hennessey confirms in this interview: