Building connection through conversation
Can you describe what emotions you are experiencing right now? This is the question Tiffany Watt Smith asks her TED audience to sensitize them on how easy or how hard it is to put words on our emotions. This is a fantastic presentation to conjure the vocabulary of emotions and…
I am an amateur rock climber…very amateur. It’s not for everyone, I know. But what is interesting about rock climbing is it puts you smack in the middle of a discussion between your “afraid-self” and your “courageous-self”. Alex Honnold, famed for climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes, candidly talks about…
What have I learned from soap operas? Honestly, nothing. Except, there was one particularly boring summer, I was a teenager, no friends close by, and no motivation to get off the basement sofa. I got sucked into the soap opera vortex. There I learnt that I could spend an entire…
Level: B1, B2, C1 Handout on TPT 0.99$ (task cards included) Language focus: modal auxiliaries, opinions Media: video What matters most in life? A nice juicy ESL discussion question that is maybe not so easy to answer. Or is it? The main categories We could start by exploring the large…
Ever get in the car and suddenly a tune comes on that just takes you right out of your thoughts and makes you break into song? Or perhaps you drift into fantasy land and pump out an awesome guitare solo…leaving you to feel like a master of skill…powerful. Or perhaps…
What did you want to be when you were growing up? Personally, I wanted to be a teacher, a veterinarian, a filmmaker, a programmer, a social worker and then a teacher again. The prospect of choosing one single thing was super hard for me. But choose I did, and I…
Are you an introvert, extrovert or ambivert? You probably already know the answer, but wouldn’t you like to check? Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant shares his psycho-quiz on the TED site, which for us ESL practitioners can be transformed into a fantastic interactive reading exercise. I would suggest you pair up…
Experience is a funny thing. When we don’t have it, we don’t always know it. We are in a state of “blissful ignorance.” What is blissful about ignorance you ask? Well mainly that we can go around judging things with a feeling of superiority and mastery. Let’s consider a concrete…
Even though I know how to stand up for myself, it is not my favorite thing to do. It will inevitably cause awkwardness perhaps even anger. I might be perceived and agressive or unreasonable. Yet, we all have to deal with conflicting view points at some time or another. Perhaps…
Parenting is probably one of the toughest jobs on the planet. We all do it slightly differently and usually have fairly strong beliefs about how it should be done. In this post I have two references for you. First a psych-quiz on parenting styles: And then a series of open…
