This year, 2024, Earth Overshoot Day has been calculated for August 1.
Earth Overshoot Day is the day on which we humans have used up all ‘the sustainable amount of biological resources generated on earth’ (wikipedia):
Continue reading(Sequel to the Gapminder post)
Triggered by the gapminder question tile ‘Plastics in Oceans’, I created a lesson around the topic of plastics based on the text below.
History and Future of Plastics | Science History Institute
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Some years ago, I watched a TED talk given by the Swedish statistician and physician Hans Rosling and his son. Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world | TED Talk.
I also started reading his book ‘Factfulness’.
Continue readingThe Case of Soccer and Football
The European Championchip is in its last week, the English team is still playing and it is high time that I write my football/soccer related post before the tournament is over and football talk will rest for two years before it resumes with the World Cup 2026. Taking place in North America and Mexico, there will probably then be more soccer talk than football talk, at least among the hosts.
Why DO Americans call what (almost) everyone else calls football ‘soccer’? And why do they call a game pretty obviously hardly played with any feet ‘football’. American football comes across as a (rougher) version of rugby, so why wasn’t it called American Rugby?
Continue readingIs it arrogance of the educated and privileged? Or deep-rooted feelings of decency, of moral and ethical beliefs so badly violated by Mr T. that we cannot understand how any American can support him?
After the election of Joe Biden in 2020, we probably all believed, the topic of Trump would be history. We had wasted enough of our time, and emotional and intellectual energy and were happy to move on.
Ooops, no such luck. So here we are again, trying to understand.
Continue readingIn the podcast below from National Public Radio, Gregory Warner describes how he went from being obsessed with New Year’s resolutions to letting go of them. ‘Goal disengagement’ is the term; liberating yourself from old and repeatedly newly set goals, especially when, year after year, they remain unfulfilled.
Continue readingThe article and quiz ‘Are you an extrovert or an introvert (and why it matters) (link below) is related to a TEDtalk from 2012 by Susan Cain; Quiet: The Power of Introverts. This issue has forcefully come up again during corona times in connection with how people feel about having to work alone from home.
In relation to this, the BBC article Why introverts excelled at working from home deals with the question what kind of personality types are supported by which kind of work. Or in other words: do ‘traditional’ office jobs favor louder, more visible and extroverted people at the expense of introverts – whose time has now come?
During the pandemic, the topics of work-life balance, healthy work environments, satisfying work etc. came even more into focus than they had before. Work environments underwent dramatic changes in various lockdown situations. Whereas in many jobs or professions, employees and workers had no choice as to continue going to their respective work places, others, especially office workers, experienced working from home as a new normal.
Towards the end of the pandemic or the emergency situations, discussions intensified about how people wanted to work in future: which changes induced by the pandemic situation would they like to keep, where would they like to go back to how things were before – if at all – and what was truly missed.
Continue readingHow to get cars out of inner cities? Watch Janett Sadik-Khan’s TED talk about an experiment she initiated as trafic commissioner in New York City.
Continue readingAdapted from New York Times, October 5, 2022
Below you find an adapted and abbreviated version of an article from the New York Times reported by Andrew Higgins. He describes the situation of many young Russian men who are trying to escape their home country in a desperate attempt to evade being pulled into a war they do not support.
Continue readingIn the UK and several other countries, research institutes and companies are trying out different ways of working. One such project is the trial run of a four day week instead of the traditional five. Below you find an adaptation of the text from The Guardian, supplemented with a little gap-filling exercise.
One of the research institutes involved in this project is the thinktank Autonomy. On their website you find a little video titled Change the Week.
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I’ve been going through my collection of material – something I do every once in a while – and came across these little film synopses you find below. In the past, each of my course participants would get one to read out loud and for the others to guess. Simple little exercise, but I’m always relieved that there is at least a little common cultural ground we share, even if only some classic movies we all seem to have seen.
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Tim Bowen from onestopenglish created a Guardian Weekly lesson on How to Get Cars out of Cities.
With one of my groups, we never got past the warmer question that asked us to put a list of six cities into a ranking order of ‘greenness’. The discussion triggered by this task was about why these cities had made the list, who had come up with the ranking and, most importantly, what were the criteria for being considered a green city.
Continue readingVery often, the verb system of English, and maybe also of other languages, is described under the aspect of time. In German, this even finds its expression in the grammar term ‘Zeiten’ for different verb structures. Though not completely incorrect, this creates a focus that places too much emphasis on ‘time’, thereby giving learners of English a distorted perspective on the various aspects and/or meanings of verb structures.
Continue readingMany are familiar with the semi-modal ‘used to’ for exressing habits someone used to have in the past, but stopped doing at some point in time.
Classic example: He used to smoke, (but quit some years ago).
However, used to is not the only possible choice for expressing past habits.
Continue readingDo you know what a finial is? In one of the Spotlight issues from 2020, Judith Gilbert, writer, editor and translator, wrote a little column titled ‘Words for Nerds’. Here she lists a number of words most people probably never heard of, and which demonstrate that it is impossible to know all the words of any language. They are all nouns denoting special little items of everyday life. See if you can find out what they are with the help of internet images. Do you know the term for the thing in your own native language?
Continue readingThe 94th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 27. Again a little later than its pre-pandemic February date. If you like to learn more about the award itself, wikipedia is the place to go.
This year’s nomination ceremony has already taken place and can be watched on youtube.
I always like going through the Oscar nomination ballot sheet that lists all categories and films. It offers great general vocabulary practice, not just specifically film related. Going through the titles, finding out if anyone has already watched some of the nominated films, looking at trailers and synopsies of the films – all this I always find quite enjoyable even if – in most cases – we haven’t seen so many of the films.
Continue readingOne of my favorite TED talks is Dan Buettner’s How to Live to be 100. In this talk, he introduces us to places where a relatively high number of people live to be a hundred years old and more. He and his team, in cooperation with National Geographic, went to find out why these areas they called Blue Zones had more centennarians than others.
Continue readingBelow you find the link to a text that discusses changes in companies’ or employers’ attitudes towards the working conditions they offer their employees. How voluntary or not these changes are is a question worth discussing.
During the last two years, a phenomenon called the Great Resignation has been spreading. I believe it started in the US, but also seems to be affecting companies in other countries. It assumedly started during the pandemic and seems to have been triggered by the radically enforced changes in peoples’ lives. Their is a wikipedia entry devoted to the phenomenon Great Resignation that could be read in connection with the text below.
Some of the questions worth discussing in connection with the Great Resignation:
Continue readingI have a quizcard board game called Quiztimate that I liked playing every once in a while in groups before we went online. Many of the questions led to further discussions on the respective topic a question referred to, which for me is the main point of all quizzes: hoping the questions are so interesting that we can talk about them, not just go for finding the correct answer.
I have found that online people are more likely to sneak out of a conversation whose aim it is to think together and discuss possible answers to questions, and instead go for ‘instant gratification’, or what psychologists and neuro-scientists call the google affect – my biggest enemy 😉
For playing online, I have scanned some cards, 9 per round; the answers will be in a separate post, perhaps. If I forget to do that, try to find the answers via internet research. But only AFTER having exhausted all conversational solution generating processes!
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