Reading about the Financial Crisis

We are living an important moment right now. Our world financial system is in a crisis and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. Already the US market has dropped more than it did in the Great Depression. What does this mean for you? Find out by reading a story about the crisis in one of our newspaper links or in the new ESL BBC link below.

The British/Icelandic dispute over banking

The US rescue plan

After you finish, we'll take fifteen minutes to share some of the information we've found.

Book Reviews

Enjoy the reviews below. They were written by some of our Reading Workshop students reading longer novels in our class. Offer your constructive criticism in the Comments section below each.

chris

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Spokane Indian Reservation’s life can be unknown for us. Maybe we can think that they live with all their traditions like us. However the author, Sherman Alexie, tells us how miserable and hopeless is the situation there.
Children without enough food go to the school where a white teacher teaches them lacking a minimum of charity. Youngsters spend time in bars drinking a lot and dreaming to join the basketball team which can give them a new future. Unemployed parents get refuge in the alcohol, thus they open the way of a “new tradition” for their children. However, the imagination, an Indian resource, can help children and young people as Thomas Builds-the-Fire, to reread their lives in the context of Indian traditions. All those tales are dynamically interweaved with creativity and a strong sense of truth in the same time.
Irony and sense of humor are the elements that change a sad story into bearable one. And the author gets to use those elements very well in this book. In addition, he tries to approach to critical issues between “Indians and Whites” which can do us to think deeply about our historic responsibilities.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

In this mysteriously comedian short story Collected works, written by Sherman Alixie who truly explained about life of the Indian Reservations. The life of the Indian Reservations were very complex beacuse of the discriminations. The Author used different kinds of brilliant weaves momery, and fantasy to tell us what life was like in the Indian Reservations.



The life of the Indian Reservations was not typical because they did not have opportunity to make a living. The Indians were filled with passion, affection, and dream. Most of the parents were unemployed and they did not have enough money to send their children in private school. Even though, the children did not eat anything in the early morning they still go to school. They were living their life drinking everyday because they did not work. They were a big distances between Indians and Writes. Lets get along with each other like equals because nobody is better than anybody else everybody is equal. This book gave us a lot of lessons about how you must live our lifes in the Reservations. If you want to know more about life, we need to read this book.