2012-11-29 More about the topic "Poverty"

This week, we continued to talk about the topic "Poverty."

Jeff shared his thoughts about the article "Anti-poverty program brings help to Taiwan's underprivileged," and shared a touching story of a single mom who obtained a loan to start a business.  Jeff also shared that he knows that poverty is not a shame or sin or unchangeable destiny.  We then took a look at some quotes from the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, and I was so excited to learn from Karla and Jonas that this book has actually been translated into Chinese!  (Help, please send me the name of the Chinese translation again; I forgot to write it down!  I've been trying to find it in Chinese forever, and all the bookstores always tell me that a Chinese translation doesn't exist.)  I recommend this book to everyone!  Read it in English or read it in Chinese; read it any way you can!!  ;)   We also discussed Jessica Jackley's TED speech about "Poverty, Money, and Love," and both Jerry and Jonas shared their thoughts on that talk.  

May taught us more about the body and how we damage it when we break life rules, and also how Traditional Chinese Medicine views the relationship between the five elements, the five organs, and the five tastes.  May said that when we overload our body with toxins, our skin is forced to try to help us eliminate them, and our skin then sickens.  May explained how some herbs can help the skin when it's sick from too many toxins in the body, and she passed around some live herbs so we could learn what they look like.  Then we had a feast prepared by May, one salty dish and one sweet dish, made with many herbs and plants that May found and prepared herself!  We all agreed that it was just delicious!  Thank you May, for all the time and effort you put into preparing your talk and all the food for our feast!  Yum!!  It was unforgettable!  

We also had a chance to listen to music in class!  :D  Thanks to Justin and Jerry for sharing your recordings of Dustin and I singing on 11/28!  It was so fun to be able to share the music with everyone in class! 

2012-11-22 Poverty

HI there! Today is Thanksgiving although we don't really celebrate this important holiday in here. Teacher, Abbie, still used her own ways to share something interesting and celebrate it with us.

In the end of the class, Abbie introduced a tradition of her family back to the states that everyone takes turn to express something you feel thankful. She helped us to start with "I'm thankful for..." Not just on this special day, we have something to say to show our gratitude, but we all need some inspiration or a chance to express how we appreciate someone or something! The beautiful words from each classmate were really touching and we never know what our plans would turn out until we put them into practice. Sometimes, something better happens when we really try our best!

Today, Abbie started the new topic "Poverty" with her own personal stories and experiences. She mentioned the life before she came to Taiwan and during some specific times she had to be very careful with the budget. She's learned to cherish what she has already had and to make plans more thoroughly. Because we all learn to be better "we" from mistakes and experiences.

Then, Abbie divided us into three groups of five people to brainstorm some ideas about poverty and discuss the definitions of being poor and being in poverty. She provided several questions for us to think about.

(1) What does it mean to be "poor?"

(2) What does it mean to live in poverty?

(3) How can we draw a line to define or distinguish between being wealthy and being poor?

Here are great ideas from everyone tonight:

POOR
1. not enough money but still can sustain your living
2. can survive but lacking supplies or resources
3. economy/material/mental
4. possible to be rich(physically) but poor(mentally)
5. fewer desires leads to less feeling of being poor
6. living by rations during the war times

POVERTY
1. poorer than poor
2. poor area
3. have nothing
4. not enough on the basic level of supplies
5. no access to medicine
6. can't survive with aid
7. need government supply

Jerry and his teammates brought up a famous theory "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" to help us to have better understanding.

After our second break, Neinko presented her first presentation about the speech "Independent Media" from Nov. 1st. She provided some crucial information that most of the mass media in Taiwan are controlled by some certain political parties and conglomerates. Sometimes we just can't receive the real information about the facts. However, some people in Taiwan are working really hard on developing the independent media to show us there are some other things happening and matter around us rather than the most news we see from the mass media.

Again, we had a wonderful night and talked about some serious issues. We all get to learn more from each other and we all have the power to make the world better when we start to make some changes from ourselves!

2012-11-15 POLICTICS

Dear all, today's our second week for the topic "POLITICS."

Most of us feel uncomfortable talking about politics here but our teacher, Abbie, always knows some ways to inspire us to come up with some great innovative ideas about any topic.

From last week, Abbie gave us several questions to think of and asked those to each other. 

(1) What do you think about politics?
(2) Do people in your family talk about politics? Why or why not?
(3) If you had the chance to be the president of the USA, would you take it?
(4) If you had the change to be the president of Taiwan, would you do it?

During the first class of discussing politics, some of us thought politics was a mess and some of us didn't want to talk about it in public or with family. And some felt disappointed about what politicians have brought to our society. However, today we dug a bit deeper into this topic with a few more questions.

(1) If you could create a law, what would you do with it?
(2) What do you think about voter apathy?
(3) What could we have done if the politics were in the ideal situations that we expected?

Ideas for 10/18: Language

Hello Everybody in C.I. class!  

This week we'll start our discussions of our next topic, Language.  Any presentations you'd like to give are welcome!!  Please just drop me a line by email or text or phone if you'd like to share a presentation on Language with us.  We had a lot of good ideas during our last class brainstorm, including:  

Poetry, "the flower of language"

Body Language 

Language Learning Tips

the History of a Word 

Bilingual Education 

Bilingual, Trilingual, etc. Speakers  

Sign Language (Taiwan's or other countries')  

the Origins of Writing 

Computer Languages 

Language Extinction 

Fun with Language: Jokes, Puns, Riddles, etc.  

an Introduction to French, or Japanese, or Welsh, or Atayal, or any other language!  

Language Families 

Translation 

Mother Tongue Education 

Linguistic Anthropology

"Colorful Language" (= Swearing!!)  

Language and the Brain

Secret Codes 

Oral History

Writing vs. Speaking 

2012-09-27 We're BACK!

Hello there! It's been more than 2 months since we updated our blog with new articles. Time slips away as usual but it's always happy to get back with old fellas and have a chance of meeting new friends!

It was the fourth class in this semester and our topic "history" was still hot. We've got so much to share and learn with each other.

Today, teacher Abbie led us to think of the positives and negatives of history. Here are the ideas from the class.

Positives:
History can help understand the background of people and places.
History is not just written down in books - it's real objects.
History is treasure of human beings, animals and the world.
Studying history helps enrich experience.
History helps us think of things more logically.

Negatives:
The past is over and don't dwell in the past.
Live for now and history repeats itself.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Life will find the way out.
History is not useful for my job and life.
Don't look back, look forward.
You can learn bad things from history.

As for me, life's just like what Abbie described - it's like a mirror reflects who you are, what you've done and where you've been to. We are all equal to have the chance to learn from good and bad experiences. We all get to learn from mistakes and deserve a second shot to make things better in the future. If we hold more thoughts on the positive side, we'll be able to make a better world and help people live better lives. At least help those who we love and those who love us.

2012-07-12 Potluck Party of 2012 Spring-Summer CI class

Donald, Kurt, Ming, George, Hans, Andrea, Chris, May, Taiya, Abbie, Jonas, Barrett, Kafei, Ammar, Jessica, Jerry, Shevin

Ideas about the new topic "Ethics" from Abbie

Hello everybody in C.I. class!

Thanks a lot for a fun and interesting class last week; I enjoyed the topic of Art! 

We started off by discussing art in "A/B"! pairs, discussing the following: 

* Describe a form of art that you love.

* Describe your last trip to an art museum.

* Describe a piece of art that you love.  

* Describe a piece of art that you hate or don't understand.

* What's your opinion of graffiti: is it art or is it vandalism? 

(I had more questions for you, but it was time to move on to the presentations!)  

2012-05-24 How I fell in love with fish & Indigenous People

It's been almost three months since we started the CI class in March. It's also coming to the last month of our semester. Summer vacation is around the corner! Time flies and there are six more classes to go. 


Tonight, we dived into the discussion about the last TED video "How I feel in love with fish." http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html The speaker, Dan Barber, mentioned that we've been fishing in the seas like we clear-cut forests for the past 50 years. Now, 90% of the large fish, the ones we love: the tuna, the halibuts, the salmons and swordfish have collapsed. As a result, fish farming is going to be a part of our future and the importance of the farm's sustainability emphasizes day by day. How can we keep the balance between fishing farming and ecosystem matters to our planet. It pollutes while it's producing but amazingly, the speaker found a natural wetland as well as fish farm that's a nearly perfect ecosystem in Veta La Palma in Southern Spain. The wetland becomes the biggest bird sanctuary in the world and holds more than 250 different species of birds. It measures success on the health of the predators. The biologist working in the wetland, Miguel, uses the ecological model to not only produce healthy high-quality fish but also maintain the natural environment from harm instead of using the traditional way - agriculture model which uses machines, capital and chemistry to produce yet do the harm.

2012-05-17 More about TED videos

It was a cool comfortable night with a gentle breeze. It'd been two weeks since the last class and I guess we all missed our teacher and the class. 


When I arrived in class, Abbie was playing the guitar and singing those wonderful songs with us that she taught us two weeks ago. How lucky we are that we've got a great teacher who not only teaches with her whole heart but also has the talent for music with a beautiful voice! 


After the songs, we jumped back into the topics about the TED videos. Abbie helped us refresh our memories about those speakers' efforts and aims in the videos. We talked about two of the videos. The first one was " Follow the trail of mercury from Stephen Palumbi" and the other was  "Brian Skerry reveals ocean's glory and horror." 


Here are some quotes from the videos that help us think of the things around us more deeply:
(1) If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
(2) It smells like money!
(3) Pinch a minnow, hurt a whale.
(4) Ocean needs a place to grow from.
(5) The ocean's not a grocery store.
(6) It's never too late to...

2012-04-26 It was pouring tonight.

"Ocean" was tonight's topic. 

Before we dive into our discussion, there are some facts about the ocean we should learn first.

(1) The ocean contains 97% of the planet's water and it covers approximately 71% of the surface.

(2) Earth has five major oceans. The largest is The Pacific, located between the Southern Ocean, Asia, Australia and the western hemisphere, over an area about 15 times the size of the USA. It contains more than 25,000 islands.


(3) The largest ocean on Earth is the Pacific Ocean, which covers approximately one third of the Earth’s surface.  It measures over 180,000,000 kilometres square and has a larger surface area than all of the continents of the Earth combined.  It is also the deepest ocean, with an average depth of 4,280 metres, but at its deepest, measures an amazing 11,033 metres.  The deepest point is called the Mariana Trench which is at the bottom of the Challenger Deep.


(4) On average the depth of the ocean is 12200 feet, or 2.5 miles or 4.5 kilometers.


(5) The oceans are the greatest habitats on the planet providing more than 99% of living space with more than 90% living in the deep sea or the abyss. This means that more than 90% of the wildlife on earth live in the oceans.


(6) The deeper you travel into the ocean the more the pressure that builds up. At the deepest part of the ocean, the pressure is 8 tons per square inch; too much for any human being to handle

2012-04-12 It was a GREAT night!

What an amazing night tonight! The atmosphere was boiling and each of us grabbed the opportunity to speak up and share something with each other!

Today, teacher Abbie led us to read through the thought-provoking article "A Farm Boy Reflects http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31kristof.html?_r=2&hp" written by Nicholas Kristof of NY Times. I was late again and we had finished the first 5 paragraphs when I arrived. However, it was wonderful that Abbie helped us to go through every word and every sentence. Anyone was welcome to read any paragraph as a volunteer, and we stopped to express our own perspectives and ask questions at each end of the paragraph. It was FABULOUS and it was one of the great ways of learning English reading!

Videos about amazing animals

1.Kartick Satyanarayan: How we rescued the "dancing" bears   (4 min 02 sec)

04-06-2012 Class Review: Animals

The weather forecast was precise and we did have some rain. It's nice to let the rain wash away something we've wanted to get rid of once in a while. Today was the first class in April which means that we've already finished the first month. Wow! 


Animals is this week's topic. Teacher Abbie let us do the mingling again but this time, the students assigned with Bs had to move around. I was lucky to be the asker twice in a row thanks to Ammar's suggestion. Ha! 


Here's the list of the questions from Abbie:
(1) What wild animals(creatures) have you seen?
(2) What animals live in/around your home?
(3) What pets have you had in your life?
(4) What animals did you grow up with/around?
(5) Have you ever loved an animal?
(6) Have you been to a zoo? What were your impressions?
(7) Do you think a zoo is a cruel prison for wild animals or an important safe haven?
(8) Why are there so many stray animals?
(9) How are wild animals and stray animals different?
(10) Have you ever seen an animal that needed help? What did you do/think?

2012-04-01 Gathering on April Fool's Day

On the way of driving my students home after playing basketball for almost 3 hours on the night of March 31st, I got a phone call from Barrett and he told me on the phone that we were going to have a gathering with our teacher Abbie and Helge at his house in the afternoon the next day. It was totally a surprise especially the date of the gathering was really suspicious! However, I was still thrilled by the invitation.

Barrett's wife, Jonas and crying Smiley, Abbie, Helge, Barrett, Jerry. Picture taken by Summer

2012-03-29 Review of the class: Space, the Ocean, and the Orchid Island

There's no doubt about the amazing evening with lots of sparks among our discussions in today's CI class!

CI Class of 2012

It was another great class although it was a bit cool with the blowing wind, but the heat generated from the class made me warm and electrified.

Today, we continued to discuss more about the topics that we didn't finish last week. Teacher Abbie provided us with three big topics(Space junk, the Ocean vortex, and the nuclear waste in Orchid Island) and we formed three groups to talk about them individually. Abbie also helped us with a clear direction to think through the topics from different angles: problems, reasons, consequences and solutions. 

2012-03-22 Class Review

It was a wonderful evening! 

Jerry, Chris, Ammar, Taiya, Helge, Barrett, Jonas, Humor, Tina, Ming, Zaili, Hans

Hans, Kurt, Tony, Jonas, Michael, George, Donald, Kafei, Vita, May

I was late for class as usual but I was also really amazed by the number of the CI students. Again, there were more than 20 students joining the great night and I had to find a seat really close to the blackboard. However, don't take this wrong. I've loved sitting close to the teacher since I graduated from college. It's weird but true.


I missed most of the introduction part so I could only get to write down everyone's names when I arrived. It's a long list! NEAT!! In today's class, we had five brave hearts to give presentations. Ammar was the pioneer to share a piece of news about how many plastic bags are used a year in Europe and the total weight is 800,000 tonnes! Although some countries have banned the very thin plastic bags, there's still a big gap that we have to work on.  Right after that, I(Jonas) added some more information about how many tonnes of plastic bags we use in Taiwan annually - the figure is estimated to be 105,000 tonnes. Italy was the first country to ban the non-biodegradable plastic bags and some other countries like China, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Bangladesh followed. Ireland was the first country to introduce a charge of 20 US cents per bag in 2002. It was raised to 22 cents in 2007. It did help to reduce the plastic bag litter and push the shoppers to use the long-life bags. However, here comes to an dilemma - if a plastic bag is used just once, then a paper bag must be used three times to compensate for the larger amount of carbon used in manufacturing and transporting it, a plastic "bag for life" must be used four times, and a cotton bag must be used 131 times. I also mentioned that it's also a tough call to choose between the disposable diapers and the cloth diapers. The previous ones consume lots of trees and other materials, but the latter ones require most water, electricity or other powers when the users clean them. 

2012-03-19 Before Class: Information about Trash and Pollution from Abbie

 

Hello everybody in C.I. class, spring semester 2012!  

It was great to see you all last Thursday, and I look forward to many exciting classes over the next semester.  

Next class, we'll take the time to go around the room and make introductions, so that we can all start getting to know each other more.  

As we mentioned last time, our topic for this Thursday, 3/25, is Trash and Pollution.  

In class, we brainstormed some directions for possible research, including:

2012-03-15 We're BACK!

Wow! It's been a long time!


Tonight, I was amazed by the new faces at the first class of this new semester. There were more than 20 students in the classroom and the atmosphere was boiling.


Our teacher, Abbie, set a great schedule for us to follow and during the mingling, everyone was trying their best to know each other with those thought-provoking questions written by Abbie.


As usual, I(Jonas) was half an hour late for the class, but THANK GOD I made it. Donald is back and I couldn't be happier and more touched to see him in class. He's my role model and he really is living without stopping learning! Barrett, Zaili, Taiya, Kert, Jerry, Andrea, Tony, Hans and Ammar all returned to the CI family, and no doubt it's always wonderful to see all the family members again. I didn't get the chance to know every new friend tonight, but next week, I'll share our CI blog with all of them.