1. Read information about the author of the story you are going to read. What is he famous for? Do you know any of his songs? What facts from his life do you know?

STING “BROKEN MUSIC”

1. Read information about the author of the story you are going to read. What is he famous for? Do you know any of his songs? What facts from his life do you know?

Sting

Sting (born Gordon Matthew Sumner) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, activist, actor and philanthropist. He was born on October 2, 1951, in Wallsend, England into a family of Audrey and Ernest Matthew Sumner. His father was a milkman and engineer, and his mother was a hairdresser. Young Gordon would often assist his father with the early-morning milk-delivery rounds, and by age 10 he became obsessed with an old Spanish guitar that had been left behind by an emigrating friend of his father. He attended St. Cuthbert's Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne.

After jobs as a bus conductor, a construction labourer, and a tax officer, he attended Northern Counties College of Education, (which later became part of Northumbria University) from 1971 to 1974 and qualified as a teacher. He then worked as a schoolteacher at St. Paul's First School in Cramlington for two years. Sting performed in jazz bands on evenings, weekends, and during breaks from college and from teaching.

He first rose to fame as part of the legendary rock group The Police in the 1970s and 1980s before becoming a successful solo artist. He earned his unusual nickname from the black and yellow sweater he used to wear during his early days as a musician.

Sting has varied his musical style throughout his career, incorporating elements of jazz, reggae, classical, new age, and worldbeat into his music. As a solo musician and member of The Police, Sting has received sixteen Grammy Awards for his work, three Brit Awards – winning Best British Male in 1994, a Golden Globe, an Emmy Award, and several Oscar nominations for Best Original Song. He is a member of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He worked on soundtracks for such films as The Mighty (1998), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and The Emperor’s New Groove (2000). Sting found chart success with such singles as Englishman in New York, If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, Fields of Gold, Fragile, Shape of My Heart, Desert Rose. Along with his musical exploration and experimentation, Sting found time for acting. He appeared in several films.

Sting is also famous as an activist. With his wife Trudie Styler and Raoni Metuktire, a Kayapó Indian leader in Brazil, Sting founded the Rainforest Foundation Fund to help save the rainforests and protect the rights of the indigenous peoples living there. In September 2001, Sting also took part in the post-9/11 rock telethon America: A Tribute to Heroes singing Fragile to help raise money for the families of the victims of terror attacks in the United States. In February 2005, Sting performed at the Leeuwin Estate Concert Series in Western Australia, with the concert raising $4 million for the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami relief efforts. Among the projects he participated in are Feed the World, Live Aid, Earth Aid, Hope for Haiti.

2. a) Read an extract from his book Broken Music.

Even from the earliest days of my education, I never had much of a liking for maths. Numbers were cold and cruel abstractions whose only seeming function was to torture unfortunate souls like me with their strange, puzzling tricks and pointless adding and subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and extrapolating to fearful infinities. I feared them instinctively the way wild animals fear sprung traps. No one in my entire school career so far had ever managed to demonstrate the beauty of an equation to me, or the elegance of a theorem, nor had anyone had the foresight to point out the clear parallel between numbers and my passion for music.

My scholarship exam had fortunately concentrated on general intelligence and not math skills, and I'd survived from year to year in a kind of secret dread of each new mathematical instrument that seemed designed for the sole purpose of tormenting me with its abstract and baffling technology.

Bill Mastaglio had taught maths in the school for enough years to be considered a legend. Of Italian extraction, he had the face of a tough Roman centurion or a Neapolitan boxer, with his broken nose and his sleek black locks combed back severely from a receding hair. Bill, and we always called him Bill, tested the whole class at the beginning of the autumn term. He hadn't taught any of us before and wanted some guide as to the problems he would be facing in the coming terms. I struggled through the paper and waited anxiously with the rest of the class for the results at the end of the week.

Bill walks in on Friday morning with a face like a burglar's dog, throwing the pile of papers onto his desk with a resounding slap, as if he is delivering a fiat from Rome announcing a mass execution. This is not looking good. He proceeds, with an increasing vein of irony, to read out the percentages achieved in Monday's examination.

"Hanlon 75 percent, Berryman 72, Taylor 69. Hornsby 25, Elliot 23 … and lastly, Sumner 2 – yes, that's right, 2 percent.”

"Do you know why you got 2 percent in the maths exam, lad?"

"Er, no, I don't, sir."

"Because you managed to spell your bloody name right."

"Thank you, sir." There are some titters from the back of the class.

"Would you mind telling me how someone like you could have survived in this bastion of academic excellence with such a paltry and pitiable knowledge of basic mathematics? I have a cat at home who knows more than you do. How have you survived?"

"Native wit, sir?" There are more titters from the back of the class.

“He survives by native wit” was the phrase that my previous teacher had used to describe my faltering progress through the school in my last report. I took it as a kind of compliment and had even shown it to my mother, who gave me one of her wry smiles.

To Bill's credit and my eternal gratitude from that day on, he literally took me under his wing. Perhaps he saw me as some kind of tabula rasa upon which he could inscribe the unique signature of his craft, like a missionary teaching a savage to read the word of God. Or perhaps he was just a damned good teacher with a job to do.

Once he had set the other geniuses in the class to work he would call me over to his desk, sit me down, and painstakingly, day by day and week by week, reveal the hidden magic of the logarithm tables, the balanced perfection of quadratic equations, and the graceful logic of the theorems. A whole continent was revealed before me, until then concealed under a dense cloud.

As well as being a fine teacher, Bill was also a hell of a storyteller. When things were going well in class, it wouldn't take much of a hint to start him on one of his sagas. He had fought with the eighth army in North Africa, and marched with Field Marshal Montgomery fighting Rommel, the Desert Fox, and his Panzer divisions from Tobruk to El Alamein. He had changed his name from Mastaglio to Massey in case he was ever captured by the Italians and shot as a traitor. I think Bill taught us almost as much modern history as he did mathematics. Two years later I managed to achieve a surprisingly decent pass in a subject where I had expected to fail miserably, and I owe that to Sergeant Massey, aka Bill Mastaglio, or just Bill.

b) Find the words in bold which mean:

* also known as

* of a good enough standard or quality

* to make smth known to smb, disclose

* strong

* a person who is unusually intelligent or artistic, or who has a very high level of skill

* the human mind as it is at birth, with no ideas or thoughts in it

* to mention smth in order to give smb information about it or make them notice it

* to succeed in doing smth, especially smth difficult

* feeling that you want to thank someone because of something kind that they have done, or showing this feeling

* an amount of money given to smb by an organization to help pay for their education

* skills needed for a particular activity

* the ability to say or write things that are both clever and amusing

* something that gives you enough information to be able to make a decision about smth or form an opinion

c) Answer the questions:

1. Was the teacher happy about the results of the test?

2. Is he being polite to Summer when he announces the results? Explain your answer.

3. Is Summer afraid of the teacher?

4. Why did the other children laugh?

5. What did Bill do to help Summer?

6. Did Bill have an outstanding personality? What was unusual about him?

7. How many ‘mathematical’ words can you find in the story?

c) Discuss in pairs:

1. How does the author describe mathematics at the beginning and at the end of the story? What words does he use?

2. Why do you think Bill took the boy under his wing? What does it mean?

3. What was the teacher’s secret?

4. Bill had an extraordinary appearance. Why do you think the pupils didn’t give him a real nickname but called him by his first name? What names do you give your teachers? What their qualities do they describe?

5. What does Sting feel for Bill? What are you grateful to your teachers for?

Compare your ideas with the whole class

3 a) Read the following quotations. Which of them can be used to discuss the story?

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic. – G.W. Leibniz

Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies. – Jamie Murphy

A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful? – Martin Gardner

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. – Pythagoras

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. – Albert Einstein

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein

Nine-tenths of education is encouragement. – Anatole France

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. – Chinese Proverb

Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher. – Japanese proverb

When a teacher calls a boy by his entire name, it means trouble. – Mark Twain

b) In one of his interviews Sting said: “ Gratitude is the fundamental emotion that one should feel in a state of grace. ” What do you think gratitude is?

grace – the state of someone's soul when it is free from evil

---

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04