Watch the video and answer the questions
1. What did J K Rowling’s parents expect
of her when she was a child?
2. What ambitions did she have for
herself?
3. What did she study at university and
why?
4. Does she blame her parents for giving
her the wrong advice?
5. What was she afraid of when she was
a student? What was her measure of success?
6. What was her life like 7 years after
she graduated from university? How did she feel? What did it teach her?
7. What would she tell her 21-year-old
self?
B. Comment on the following quotes from
the speech.
“I was
convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels.
However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and
neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive
imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or
secure a pension.”
“At your
age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent
far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at
lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been
the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.”
“I was set
free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I
still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.
And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
“You might
never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is
impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously
that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by
default.”
“So given a
Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in
knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your
qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of
my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and
beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to
survive its vicissitudes.”
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