Chaos and order

It is always tempting to build lessons around the opposites, even though, it is, apparently, not a very good idea to learn/teach a language using antonyms. For a teacher, however, it looks like a very neat way of organising things.

This year I have had an idea of doing a lesson on chaos and order.

The warming-up exercise is a bit complex, so hold tight:

Each student is given a list of words (all mixed up) related to the two categories, i.e. chaos and order. The words may include "higgledy - piggledy, jumbled, shipshape, dishevelled, askew, neat, dot the "i"'s and cross the "t"s...

Personally, I used this exercise as a pretext to revise the material we have seen so far. 

Each student is given a piece of paper with a question and an answer to it, students are supposed to go around and ask each other questions. Finding the correct answer allows them to win one word and place it in the correct category. 

Once all the words have been placed where they belong, we move on to a short discussion on chaos and order as well as on one of the most chaotic painters in the history of art - Jackson Pollock.

If you are short of ideas, here are some possible questions;

1. Which one are you - an orderly or a messy person?
2. What attracts you more in art chaos or order?
3. Do you agree with the statement: - "The task of art today is to bring chaos into order"?
4. What is your opinion on Pollock's paintings? Art/nor really?
5. Are order and chaos really so different from one another?

To make sure that students have an opportunity to speak, I tend to do this sort of activity as a pair work. Students ask each other questions and then present the opinions of their neighbour orally.

OK, let us move on to some action now,
here comes a video on Pollock, fractals and the idea that we can indeed find order behind chaos.

The video is followed by comprehension questions, for example,
what makes Pollocks's works so appleaing?, What did Richard Taylor do?, What characterises Pollocks's patterns? moving on to fractals...

if you want to linger a little bit over the topic of fractals, and encourage a discussion, or, at least incite students' interest in this phenomenon, here are some images which can be of use:

Here comes the surprise element, which brings us back to the topic of chaos and order, and introduces another lexical topic - binomials.


It is a TED video of Ursus Wehril and his idea of Tidying up Art. Hopefully, it will put a smile on your students' faces. It has got two major advantages: Wehril is not a native speaker of English; which makes his English easier to understand, and secondly, it contains a nice binomial "topsy-turvy", which lets me make a link between chaos and order and this linguistic phenomenon. 

I only show the first few minutes of the video, and do a gap-filling exercise (see below, the underlined words are the ones students have to find).


  .....And I think he looks now less miserable. And it was great. With this experience, I started to look more closely at modern art. Then I realized how, you know, the world of modern art is particularly topsy-turvy.

And I can show here a very good example. It's actually a simple one, but it's a good one to start with. It's a picture by Paul Klee. And we can see here very clearly, it's a confusion of color. (Laughter) Yeah. The artist doesn't really seem to know where to put the different colors. The various pictures here of the various elements of the picture -- the whole thing is unstructured. We don't know, maybe Mr. Klee was probably in a hurry, I mean -- (Laughter) -- maybe he had to catch a plane, or something. We can see here he started out with orange, and then he already ran out of orange, and here we can see he decided to take a break for a square. And I would like to show you here my tidied up version of this picture. (Laughter) We can see now what was barely recognizable in the original: 17 red and orange squares are juxtaposed with just two green squares. Yeah, that's great.  

So I mean, that's just tidying up for beginners. I would like to show you here a picture which is a bit more advanced. (Laughter)

What can you say? What a mess. I mean, you see, everything seems to have been scattered aimlessly around the space. If my room back home had looked like this, my mother would have grounded me for three days. So I'd like to -- I wanted to reintroduce some structure into that picture. And that's really advanced tidying up. (Applause)
 
Ursus Wehrli tidies up art

As I said earlier, the next point on the agenda are binomials. We rarely deal with them, even though they are all around. I suppose we don't have to know that they are called binomials to use them, but giving a short exercise to do can bring some order into chaos that may exist in students' heads concerning all those creepy crawlies, give and take, and give or take, prim and proper, wine and dine, down and out, odds and ends, rant and rave, spick and span, nitty-gritty... there are so many of them. Binomials are a fairly easy way of adding a bit of value ("value-added" as one of the favourite marketing phrase goes:) to a sentence.

If you are looking for exercises on binomials, I recommend the following books:

Test Your English Vocabulary in Use - upper-intermediate PDF

(have a look at Test 72)

and  

In So Many Words from Amazon

...If you manage to find it, as it is currently unavailable. It is a really good idea to take a  peek at it, especially if you are looking for something for advanced students, or even for yourself to brush up on less often used words.