#its like being obsessed with someones emo poetry from when they were a kid

[technicolorxsn]

I wanna learn today by ghost on guitar but like. I doubt there's sheet music or tabs or anything for it bc 1 old and deleted 2 niche but I'm also terrible at transcribing music so. I will probably not learn it

[bellakitse]

you've been on my mind like a drug (heaven help a fool who falls in love)

Day 1 Fic prompt: Welcome to the Party @michaelguerinweek

They park down the road from the isolated ranch house that is practically vibrating with the thumping music playing inside. It makes Michael flinch as they make their way out of Max's car and up to the house.

“This was a mistake,” he says to his siblings, eyeing all the cars around the house with contempt. He recognizes more than a few of the flashier, newer cars that belong to the ‘A’ crowd. “Can’t we do something else for our birthdays?”

“No!” Isobel snaps at him, her eyes mean as she continues to walk ahead of them in pointy heels. “We went to that science expo like you wanted, and Max’s boring as hell poetry reading. I want to go to a party like the only normal one of us.”

“But it’s Valenti’s party,” Michael all but whines, looking at Max for support; knowing his brother dislikes the guy too. Max makes a face but doesn’t do much more than that, having accepted his fate of having to socialize with the meatheads of their school.

Isobel stops and turns to look at them. “It’s the best party of the school year,” she starts, giving them a warning look, her mouth tight. “So, you two will not embarrass me,” she points at Max. “Or start trouble,” she turns to him. “You don’t like Kyle, that’s fine. Drink his beer, eat his food, and go find someone to make out in a corner with, got it?”

Michael waits a moment to agree, letting her sweat it out before giving her a begrudging nod of agreement. In return, she rolls her eyes at him and turns around, sure that they’ll follow her.

Michael makes another pained face when they make it inside. He knows it’s not possible, but it looks like the whole school is there and not just the seniors class. The volume of the music is so loud that he can’t make out the lyrics through the noise. Isobel spots her clique and without so much as a wave back at them disappears through the crowd to join them.

“So much for being together for our birthday,” he shouts in Max’s ear and gets a chuckle from his brother. He points towards a table in the corner with red solo cups and starts to make his way to it, Max following behind him. He reaches for two, passing one to Max.

“We should have put a time limit to this before Isobel disappeared,” he says, taking a sip of stale beer. “There is only so much torture I’m willing to put myself through, even for her.”

Max takes a mouthful of his drink, making a face. “It’s what she wanted, Michael, don’t complain so much.”

“It’s just so vapid,” Michael argues. “These people aren’t our friends.”

“To be fair, we don’t make it easy to be friends in the first place when it’s always just the three of us,” Max points out, and Michael doesn’t bother answering, hating when Max has a point.

Okay, so he prefers it when it’s just the three of them, sue him. He’s never felt comfortable around people. He’s painfully aware that he’s not like his peers and not just because he’s from a different planet. Even if he were from earth, he’d still be different.

He’s a foster kid, in ratty clothes with a huge brain and no mouth filter, he might as well have a bullseye on his back. He gets ready to tell Max all of this when he sees a pathetic lovesick look cross his face. He sighs resigned and turns to look in the direction Max is staring at, knowing what he’s going to find and -yep, Liz Ortecho straight ahead with Maria Deluca and a bored-looking Alex Manes.

‘Well, maybe this party won’t be so horrible after all,’ he thinks as he stares hard at Alex. Biting down on a grin when the dark-haired boy turns and catches his eye, raising an eyebrow when Michael doesn’t break his gaze.

Michael nods in the direction of an open door that leads to the back of the house and waits for a response, letting out a  victorious smirk when Alex sends him a subtle nod after a moment of hesitation.

“I’m going to go take a piss,” he turns to Max, who continues to stare stupidly in the distance. “Are you going to be okay gawking at Liz Ortecho, or do you need a napkin to catch the drool?”

“I’m fine,” Max mumbles distracted, and Michael shakes his head, amused at how infatuated his geek brother is with the pretty Spanish girl.

“Okay buddy, you keep doing what you’re doing,” he says as he tracks Alex making his way out the back. He follows a couple of feet behind, letting people move around him. His focus is Alex’s snug black tee. He gets outside where it’s quieter and a whole lot emptier than the house, with just a kid or two lingering around. He spots Alex leaning against the side of the house at the far end of it, away from prying eyes.

“Alex Manes at a Kyle Valenti party will wonders never cease,” he says as he walks up to the boy, taking in the ‘I’m not okay’ MCR shirt that is tight across his chest. His slim waist where a black studded belt hangs low with skinny black jeans ripped at the knees to finish the outfit. The guy is such an emo cliché but so ridiculously hot, with his eyeliner and black nails.

“I can say the same for you, Guerin,” Alex raises an eyebrow at him, and Michael has to curl his hands to keep from reaching out to touch him. “Liz and Maria dragged me here.”

Michael lets out an amused huff. “Same, Isobel wouldn’t take no for an answer until Max, and I caved.”

Alex shares his amused expression. “Don’t be best friends with girls; they bend you to their will.”

Michael shrugs. “It’s turning out okay. Max is in there gazing at Liz lovingly, his favorite hobby.”

Alex nods in agreement. “And you, Guerin?” he asks, something indescribable in his tone. “Are you getting anything out of being at the ‘rager of the year’?”

Michael doesn’t say anything; instead he stares at Alex’s face, his lips. He feels his pulse spike as he watches Alex run his tongue over his bottom lip, his ears catching the way Alex takes a sharp breath, and he looks away from Alex’s mouth to find wide eyes staring back at him.

“You can’t look at me like that,” Alex whispers.

“Like what?” he asks quietly, taking a step and then another, closing the gap between them until his front brushes against Alex’s. “How do I look at you?”

“You know how,” Alex complains. “Don’t play dumb.”

“Tell me,” Michael demands, his face closer to Alex, his skin tingles with anticipation. “Tell me.”

“You look at me like you know what I taste like,” Alex shoots back, his words sparking something inside Michael, and he flashes back to a month ago when they found themselves in the stalls of the Roswell public library. Strong hands holding on to his hair, the floor hard under his knees and an addictive taste on his tongue as he sucked Alex down. He remembers the look of bliss on Alex’s face as he swallowed around him and the pride he felt that he put that look on Alex’s face.

“I do know what you taste like,” he whispers, hardening in his pants, letting Alex feel it as he presses him into the side of the house. He’s unable to keep his hands off Alex as the boy lets out a soft moan and puts them on his waist. “I think about it nonstop, the taste of you, the sounds you made. I’m obsessed, and all I want is to do it again, and again, and again.”

Alex lets out a low-pitched whine. His hands, twisting up Michael’s flannel shirt. “You can’t say things like that,” Alex answers, his body going against his protest as he pulls Michael even closer, rocking into him when Michael pushes a knee between his legs.

“Why not,” Michael challenges, giving him a feather-light kiss below his ear, his mouth against the shell of it as he asks again. “Why not, Alex?”

“We said it was a one-time thing,” Alex says breathlessly, as he tilts his head back to give Michael room to leave a trail of open mouth kisses.

“You said it was a one-time thing,” Michael says, pulling back, he tries for a casual attitude, but even he can hear the hurt in his voice. Alex hears it too, and he pulls back to look at Michael, snapping out of his haze.

“You agreed,” Alex argues, now completely focused.

“What was I supposed to do?” Michael asks, pulling away, the mood dead. “I blow you; you give me a handjob and before we even pull our pants up, you tell me that I shouldn’t worry. That it doesn’t mean anything and that you won’t be catching feelings!” he finishes, now louder, angrier. The words have been echoing in his head since Alex uttered them.

“I was giving you an out!” Alex shouts back, not backing down. “Everyone knows you date girls, and then one day you corner me in the library, kiss me and next thing I know; we have our hands on each other’s dicks. I thought you were experimenting and I’m the only out guy at school,” Alex continues, his voice small, his arms going around himself. He looks so unsure and shy, so unlike school Alex, who wears his ‘fuck you world’ as a part of his emo-punk aesthetics. “I didn’t need you to tell me it didn’t mean anything, so- “

“So you said it first,” Michael finishes for him, his anger gone and in its place, a tender affection that he’s never felt for anyone but his siblings and he’s filled with a need to pull Alex close and protect him from the world.

Not one for impulse control he does exactly that, he pulls a tense Alex close and holds him to his chest, his face tucked in his shoulder. He feels Alex slowly lose his tension, and soon the boy is hugging him back tightly. He holds him for a few minutes longer before pulling back to look at his face.

“Milkshakes and fries, tomorrow at the Crashdown,” he says, smiling when Alex gives him a confused look that clears to a surprised but hopeful expression.

“Are you asking me out, Guerin?” Alex asks, a small smile playing on his lips.

“Are you going to put me out of the misery you’ve had me for the last month and say yes, Manes?” he questions, his heart tripping all over itself when Alex nods at him, his eyes soft.

As he closes the space between their lips, he silently thanks Isobel for dragging him to this stupid party. Not that he’ll ever tell her verbally, no need for her smugness, he thinks. Which is the last thought he has because Alex does a twisty thing with his tongue and Michael stops thinking completely.

[artlang-gr]

Η Ελληνική “Proficiency Mania”

The Greek Proficiency Mania

When people come to Fullspate and confess that they are thinking of doing a proficiency exam in English we often tell them to sit down, take a deep breath and think again. In Greece, where we are based, hundreds of thousands of families are absolutely sure that their kids MUST get the proficiency. Little Nick and Maria down the road got the proficiency, so it becomes a matter of family pride to prove that their kids are just as good. Unfortunately, the chances are that these parents know almost nothing about either the content or the aims of the proficiency exam. Perhaps if they understood a bit more about the proficiency exam, and a bit more about how kids can improve their English, there wouldn't be this nationwide panic. (Hey! Shouldn't schools be doing more to inform parents?)

Let's not forget the aims of the proficiency exams. The new European framework for these exams states that language learners at this level (the top level - level 5) should be "approaching the linguistic competence of an educated native speaker." Let's put that in block capitals: APPROACHING THE LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE OF AN EDUCATED NATIVE SPEAKER. And by the way, we're not talking here about hip-hop, break dance, emo, iPod English. We're talking about the sophisticated English used in seminars and tutorials at university.

Similarly, the handbook for the Cambridge proficiency tells us that candidates should be able to handle abstract ideas and concepts in a mature way, and they should be able to "advise and talk about complex, sensitive or contentious issues, understanding colloquial references." Does that sound like you, or do you think you need to carry on with your general education a bit more before you attain that level of intellectual maturity?

In a nutshell:

1. If you want to teach English, your priority should be to do a degree in English at university. One of the proficiency-level (C2) certificates would be a useful addition to your portfolio, but still there is no need to rush things.

2. The certificate might be an essential qualification for a job, but if it is really necessary, you don't want to take the exam more than one or two years before you apply for the job. An employer that really wants you to be a fluent English speaker will not be satisfied with a ten-year-old certificate.

3. Should you try to run before you can walk? What's the big rush? Enjoy walking first, and when you feel confident you can start a gentle jog.

4. Use it or lose it. Unless you are going to do a degree in English or get a humble job in the office of an English firm at the age of 18 you are probably not going to use the language much until you finish university in your early 20's and then get your military service out of the way. By that time you will have forgotten so many of those lovely proficiency words and phrases that you spent so many long hours back in your teens trying to remember (words like "exacerbate", "ameliorate", "procrastinate", and "obfuscate"). Isn't it a shame to sacrifice so much of your youth learning stuff that you are going to forget before you really need it?

5. High school students in Greece are unbelievably overburdened with extra lessons in the evenings at what we call cramming schools (where they try to quickly cram as much information as possible into the very limited space between your ears). University students have much more free time, and because they should have a clearer idea of what they are actually going to do with their English they should be more motivated to sit down and learn the 50 or 60,000 words and phrases which top-notch proficiency candidates ought to know.

6. Where are the poets and the painters of modern Greece? If teenagers had more free time, it might be possible for a few more of them to discover that they have a talent for things like poetry and painting.

Does that mean I should just drop out of the cramming school and play more footy in the street with those guys my mum calls 'losers'? Definitely not. The point is not to turn your back on your education, but to find enjoyable things to do to maintain and improve your English language skills without worrying (before there is any real need) about exams that almost half the candidates will fail.

Fun stuff to do out of school

Instead of panicking to get the proficiency when you don't need it, our advice is: chill out. The overwhelming majority of kids in their mid-teens don't need anything more than the FCE with an A or a B or a clear pass in some other B2 exam like the ECCE. If you have a good B2 certificate in English at that age, you have all you need to start to understand and appreciate movies, lyrics, websites and books in English ON YOUR OWN. Find a subject you are interested in, like wargames, lovemetal, body art, bikes, web design or whatever, and start reading lots of stuff in English and finding places on the internet where people chat about that kind of stuff in English. Without doing a single multiple choice question your English will improve, and if you really do have to do another exam in the future it will be a piece of cake.

IELTS: the way forward

If you are really stubborn and insist on doing another exam now, we advise you to do the IELTS. This is the grooviest exam on the market at the moment. And what's one of the best things about it? Check this out: EVERYBODY GETS A CERTIFICATE. Each section begins with slightly easier questions and they become progressively harder. When you get your certificate it will give you a mark from 1 to 9. If you get a 7.5 or 8 you are on the same level as someone with the ECPE (or Cambridge CPE). And guess what: no grammar or vocabulary questions!!! They just check how good you are at doing the things you will actually have to do in real-life English-speaking situations: reading, writing, listening and speaking - which is exactly what you ought to have to do in a good test of English.

It is also worth noting that if you want to go to a British university they would prefer you to do the IELTS exam. Different departments will demand different scores depending on how good they think your English needs to be to do those particular courses. To do an engineering course you might only need a score of 6.5. To do psychology or philosophy, where you need to be more articulate, they would demand at least 7.5.

Bad proficiency results in Greece

Given its glorious past, the education results in Greece ought to be among the best in the world. However, in the EFL business at C2/proficiency level they definitely aren't. In 2009 while countries like Holland, South Africa, Italy, Poland, Ukrane, Sri Lanka and Latvia had 75% or more of their candidates pass the ECPE exam, in Greece only 56% passed (although Greeks can console themselves that they are better than the Vietnamese, of which only 53% passed, and the Turks, who got only 43% of their candidates through the ECPE). The results for the Cambridge CPE are slightly worse. In 2010 one in two candidates came away from that exam empty-handed.

Why the system in Greece has been failing

Costas Gabrielatos has written some very insightful articles about the poor performance of EFL candidates in Greece. Here we pick out a number of points he makes which we think are absolutely spot on.

Although it might be tempting to blame the results on the age of the candidates - saying they are too young - Costas reminds us that the fault lies elsewhere. The surprising fact is that 14- to 15-year-olds have a better success rate than older candidates. If age is not a factor, what is responsible for the failure rate?

A lack of preparation

One problem is that students simply haven't done enough preparatory work to bring them up to the required level. "In other words, most Greek learners sit for the CPE when they should be sitting for the CAE" (the advanced exam).

The exam-obsession syndrome

However, Costas gives less emphasis to the quantity of preparation than to its quality. There are some approaches to English language teaching in Greece which are misguided and which directly contribute to the failure of students. A major problem is the obsession with exam practice. Instead of concentrating first and foremost on improving the students' level of English, too many teachers waste far too much classroom time ploughing through countless practice tests. These teachers seem to believe that the more practice tests a student does, the more likely she is to succeed.

Costas advocates an alternative approach: a student's command of the language should be brought up to the required level before she begins intensive preparation for the exam. If a student is already a proficient user of the language, exam preparation will simply be a matter of becoming familiar with the tasks required, practising different approaches to tackling the exercises, identifying pitfalls and managing their time effectively.

The vocabulary list syndrome

Another dubious practice is the fixation with vocabulary lists. Words are readily taken out of context, put in lists with the translations to the right and set for homework. Insufficient attention is paid to collocations, fixed phrases and the kinds of examples of good usage that are the benchmark for more successful language-learners. We would add that the craze for companions in Greece is another symptom of this malaise - they divert the student's attention away from the way new items of vocabulary were used in the texts and dialogues that they have studied, and they discourage students from developing useful note taking skills.

The coursebook-as-Bible syndrome

The way coursebooks are used is another problem. Students are taken through books from cover to cover without much thought being given to the limitations of the books, their omissions or relevance to the students. As Costas points out, as a consequence "learners don't usually deal with topics or do tasks that are within their interests and needs; instead they are taken through a series of loosely related or even unrelated exercises."

The compartmentalisation syndrome

Costas also highlights what he calls the "compartmentalisation syndrome." "Learners do 'vocabulary' or 'listening' or 'speaking' as if those areas of language were unrelated. There seems to be little integration of the different aspects of the understanding and use of language."

Costas' conclusion is sobering. Assuming that the fault does not lie with an innate inability of Greek students to learn foreign languages well, there must be something wrong with what teachers and schools are doing. "Perhaps we would be wise to reassess our perception of exam preparation and language teaching/learning."

Πηγή: fullspate