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.