Today's (Wednesday) 10.50 am Class Canceled

The replacement CLASS timing will be announced later today. Fahad will kindly suggest me a replacement class date. I was supposed to distribute THREE reading materials tomorrow. Please arrange for 300/- BDT for the purchase of following books.

1. Sophie's World
2. Great Gatsby
3. FSD-3 Handbook 

These books are subsidized. There will be a seller at the entrance of the class to hand over the books. Those who have difficulty in purchasing, should write an application explaining financial difficulty. They will get all the items free of cost. 

OSL Students' Job Hunting Exercise - Skill Development Goals

Dear FSD-3 Students,
Before you look out for what an Employer is looking for in a candidate thorough a real-life job-posting, go through this Top 10 Hard & Soft Skills that Employers look for. Here is the link for Top 10 Skills for Jobs

Here is a Job-posting Advertisement from OSL page [Slightly edited for clarity]

Job Title: Management Associate | Sr. Executive / Asst. Manager, Marketing & Strategy [Fresh BBA / MBA Encouraged to Apply]

Hi everyone. I am looking for two (1) dynamic professionals to work directly with me in (2) strategic marketing role in bti, a premier real estate company in Bangladesh. I can assure a great work culture that is constantly striving for excellence. The incumbent will be groomed for leadership roles quickly. Hence, this will be a (3) demanding cross functional role. Essentially, the person needs to be (4) agile, (5) analytical, (6) high on emotional intelligence, and have (7) enterprising attitude. (8) Excellent communication and (9) report writing skills are also expected. If you think you are the right fit or know someone who is, please mail your/their CV to outreach@btibd.org by September 30, 2018.
Executive Director, Sales & Marketing

Find Out the Meanings of Following Terms used in the above Post Advertisement

1. Dynamic, 2. Cross-functional, 3. Agile, 4. Emotional Intelligence, 5. Enterprising

5 Talkative Persons Needed

I want 5 persons who can give me a very clear idea about (1) what (2) how of just concluded Annual Women Entrepreneurship Development Fair and Seminar 2019. I will only need ORAL talk, no writing needed. Fahad, will you please arrange this after our class on coming Wednesday? I will take 30 min at best.

Annual Students' Get-together: Report for Prize

Report on OSL Annual Student Get Together 2019 is invited by the student OSL 2nd Batch. The report should have following elements. The best report will be published on our BLOG with editing. Group submission is also encouraged. The writing MUST be accompanied with ONE photograph Only. The best writer(s) will receive a 1000/- Taka Aarong Gift Voucher. The deadline for submitting the Write-up is 20th March (NO extension of deadline.) Minimum 2000 - Max 5000 words. You can also see the painting titled "Picnic" by 19th Century British painter Henry Nelson O'Neil.

1. Introduction
2. Preparation (give funny incidents - collect stories from others)
3. Before the preparation (talk of initial trouble)
4. What happened on the way
5. The Last Man Arrives (Saikat)
6. Interesting Incidents
7. Who said what
8. Happy Disasters!
9. The Food Line
10. Gamers and Losers
11. Meeting New People (this part can be based on interview of others)
12. Cultural Show (Everything that happened inside and outside the Show. No Negative Incident!)
13. Lottery Episode 
14. The way back
15. Positive Lessons from the day.
16. What preparation do one needs on a day like this?
17. You can also mention anything that comes to your mind.

The SINGLE Most important thing in the writing will be to create a FUNNY and Memorable Text for future readers. 

Our Reading Reasources

From coming Week till the end of our Course, we shall work with the following materials.

1. Handbook on Professional and Academic English prepared for FSD-3 Course students.
2. History - a 56 page book encompassing the entire history of world in less than 60 pages. 
3. Sophie's World - the Bestseller novel for young adults. 
4. Great Gatsby - Novel of American Industrial Society.
5. I also proposed an 18th Century Poem (Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock) based on life of upper-class people of England. This would have prepared you for an understanding of thought process of these elites, alienated from the working class. This was also the beginning of the modern Industrial Society. But, I did not receive as much response as I expected. Which is, I think alright for the moment. 
6. In the class the following day, I did a full review of different eras in world history and some of the students did excellently in presenting the Handout Materials. 

How to Read a Novel like Metamorphosis

We started off with a general review of the exam held yesterday. This review is already posted on the previous blog-post. Today we read first few sentences of the Novella titled "Metamorphosis" and tried to understand how this novel depicts the social-psychological reality of the post-war Europe. We also made a quick reference to the Excellent collection of topics included in XI-XII English for Today series. We looked into the 'colonial' perspective of the dictum "Knowledge is Power" and tried to see how it works on a colonizer-colonized relationship. I am sure that this class is FULLY Prepared for a mode detailed discussion of HOW Knowledge is Produced, Distributed, and Consumed. The final part of the class was based on a very primary discussion of the seminal thinkers of 19th century who helped begin modern man's complete separation from the old Victorian world, where everything made a logical-rational sense. We tried to see how these three thinkers made a sharp break with the past world of 19th Century correctness and 18th Century rationalism.

As part of our understanding of how 20th Century was different, we also brought out the Surrealist art of Salvador Dali.I am posting a picture of Dali himself, but it is much better to look at Dali's paintings which was a response to Freud's concept of repressed desires that surface through coded language.

Here is the photograph of Dali which was promised in the class. 

Mayday , Mayday

This is a mayday call for everyone. 

I roughly went through ALL the answer-scripts of our yesterday's class. It seems that there is a General lack of understanding about what makes a good answer script. I also woke up into the horrific realization that students do not share a sense of responsibility about the way they belong to one of the top public schools of higher learning in the country. There is a prevailing sense of nonchalance regarding the cost of their working behaviour. After this comment, I shall now identify certain observation that led me to these comments.

1. Writing quality is at a very preliminary stage. There are just a couple of exceptions, none of who show absolute control of language. 
2. There is a false sense of what makes a GOOD Script. 
3. Analytical ability is almost absent - again with a couple of exceptions. But even these exceptions are not of the finest brand.
4. Quality of handwriting is absolutely substandard. 

If you people want to move forward, you MUST be able to invest the remaining time of FSD-3 by engaging in good amount of Reading and Writing. Here is the first TEXT for you to read in the next 24 hours. Please invest your time and energy. 

Clear Link for Metamorphosis
Illustrated Metamorphosis = you can find a good amount of picture and a short intro for Kafka.