Friday, 27 April 2012 08:05

Written by Opelika Observer

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by the Opelika Observer staff

Justin Bieber. The Twilight saga. Basketball.

Students in Zach Thornton’s seventh grade English class at Drake Middle School were pleasantly surprised Monday to learn that their pen pals in Nepal weren’t all that different from themselves, enjoying many of the same activities and entertainment.

“Yes, I have heard of Beyonce. I know many of her songs,” one Nepalese student wrote back.

Thornton’s students, along with kids from four other Drake classes, wrote letters to pen pals at the Neric Academy, an English learning school located in Nepal’s capitol, Kathmandu. The academy is a boarding school, housing students varying in age from the elementary to the high school level. The school is a 10th of the size of Drake Middle, according to Thornton.

Thornton taught briefly at the Neric Academy two years ago, retaining a close friendship with one of the school’s administrators. When Thornton was hired last year as an English teacher at Drake, he saw an opportunity to allow his students access to a part of the world they may never get to visit.

“I loved my experience in Nepal, and felt like it was a truly enriching experience to learn from their culture, and I wanted to share it with my kids,” Thornton said. “This was my first year teaching, and these kids were going to leave a lasting mark on me, so I wanted to see if I could try to do the same for them.”

Thornton’s students wrote their pen pals at the beginning of this semester, and the responses took several months to arrive back to Auburn from the Himilayan foothills. The envelope was addressed to the state of “Albama.”

Students were somewhat struck by the differences in language usage in the letters from their new Nepalese friends. Instead of asking about their American friends’ future goals, the Nepalese students asked the Auburners about their “aims” in life.

“They have been taught the Nepali language for most of their lives, so, to some of them, English is a very new language,” Thornton said, explaining to the class why some phrases are different.

Overall, students were pleased with the responses they received, gushing over photos sent by some of their new pals.

“It’s been a really good experience,” seventh grader Maddie Sims said. “It’s cool to know that we’re not that different from them in most ways.”

Thornton said he hopes to make the letter exchange a permanent part of his curriculum, and hopes it will show students a new and a different view of the world.

“It’s about realizing there’s a lot of similarities from there to here,” Thornton said. “We all like to have fun and make new friends, no matter where in the world we are.”

Friday, 20 April 2012 00:00

Written by Opelika Observer

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Special to the Opelika Observer

The Lewis Cooper Jr. Memorial Library is the recipient of the book: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann.

The book was donated by the Alabama Forest Owners’ Association.

In making its donation, the Alabama Forest Owners’ Association seeks to provide sound information about forests and forest history to current and future forest owners in Lee County.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus has been described as a “groundbreaking work of science, history and archaeology ... In the last 20 years, archaeologists and anthropologists equipped with a battery of new scientific techniques have made far-reaching discoveries that have completely changed their understanding of what the Americas were like before Columbus’ arrival.

“Most of us learned in school that Indians crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago, that they were few in number, and that they lived so lightly on the land that much of the Americas were essentially a wilderness. Most researchers now believe that every one of these statements is wrong.”

“Indians were here far longer than previously believed, they lived in vastly greater numbers than had been thought, and they transformed the American landscape thoroughly.

“Not only has this fascinating new knowledge vastly altered our understanding of our history, it has enormous implications for today’s environmental disputes.”

“Charles Mann illuminates all of these issues and reports on how these discoveries were made in this enthralling journey of self exploration.”

The Alabama Forest Owners’ Association (AFOA) is a non-profit association dedicated to providing management and ownership assistance to current and future owners of the 23 million acres of forested land in Alabama.

More than 6,500 members participate in a wide variety of association activities throughout the atate.

To learn more about the association or about events of interest to forest owners, call AFOA at (205) 987-8811 or visit the Alabama Forest Owners Assocations’s website at www.afoa.org.