ESLweblog

The recent melamine mess could serve as a basis for many classroom activities. The following story, though short, has many implications, one being the extent to which melamine from China has entered the wider food chain. Another question this article gives rise to, especially regarding international food corporations, is one of responsibility. Pizza Hut admits that 「65,000 2g packets, might have already been served to consumers」. First of all, why aren’t they sure? Secondly, knowing that melamine had entered the food chain weeks ago, why didn’t they test sooner? Why are they just announcing this now, after the fact? And with China apparently in the habit of exporting toxic food and dangerous products, shouldn’t large multinationals start testing their ingredients and parts more regularly?

And finally, what is our responsibility as individuals? What can we do to protect ourselves? Although China bashing is easy in cases like this (and they certainly deserve more than a little bashing in this case), the people who buy this crap also must bear some of the responsibility. If a company or region or country continues to sell poison food, we need to be a little more responsible and start buying our food elsewhere, even if it costs a little more. I’ll gladly pay more to have my pizza without the plastic.

Taipei Times - archives

Pizza Hut warns about toxic cheese powder packets

STAFF WRITER, WITH CNA
Saturday, Sep 27, 2008, Page 1

Packaged cheese powder made with ingredients contaminated with the toxic chemical melamine might have been consumed by diners at the Pizza Hut chain, store officials said yesterday, adding that it had stopped supplying the product.

Felisa Wu (吳玉屏), who is in charge of the chain’s sales and marketing department, said the results of an examination released the previous evening show that melamine levels of 76.2 parts per million (ppm) were found in packaged powder cheese.

「We ordered 400kg of cheese powder on Aug. 22. Apart from a stock of 270kg, about 130kg of the tainted cheese powder, or 65,000 2g packets, might have already been served to consumers,」 Wu said at a press conference, urging people who still have the cheese powder not to consume it.

She said the packaged cheese powder had only been used for delivered and take away pizzas and that the cheese powder served inside the stores is imported from New Zealand, the US and Germany, and 「is safe to eat.」

Consumers with questions can call 0800-231-927, Wu said.

This test is just fun, but could also be used as an exercise in proofreading or attention to detail:

1. What do you put in a toaster?

Answer: “bread.” If you said “toast,” give up now and do something else.
Try not to hurt yourself. If you said, bread, go to Question 2.

2. Say “silk” five times. Now spell “silk.” What do cows drink?

Answer: Cows drink water If you said “milk,” don’t Attempt the next question. Your brain is over-stressed and may even overheat. Content yourself with reading a more appropriate literature such as Auto World. However, if you said “water”, proceed to question 3.

3. If a red house is made from red bricks and a blue house is made from blue bricks and a pink house is made from pink bricks and a black house is made from black bricks, what is a green house made from?

Answer: Greenhouses are made from glass. If you said “green bricks,” why are you still reading these??? If you said “glass,” go on to Question 4.

4. It’s twenty years ago, and a plane is flying at 20,000 feet over Germany (If you will recall, Germany at the time was polit ically divided into West Germany and East Germany ) Anyway, during the flight, TWO engines fail. The pilot, realizing that the last remaining engine is also failing, decides on a crash landing procedure. Unfortunately the engine fails before he can do so and the plane fatally crashes smack in the middle of “no man’s land” betw een East Germany and West Germany Where would you bury the survivors? East Germany, West Germany, or no man’s land”?

Answer: You don’t bury survivors. If you said ANYTHING else, you’re a dunce and you must stop. If you said, “You don’t bury survivors”, proceed to the next question.

5. Without using a calculator - You are driving a bus from London to Milford Haven in Wales In London , 17 people get on the bus; In Reading, six people get off the bus and nine people get on. In Swindon , two people get off and four get on. In Cardiff , 11 people get off and 16 people get on. In Swansea , three people get off and five people get on In Carmathen, six people get off and three get on. You then arrive at Milford Haven. What was the name of the bus driver?

Answer: Oh, for crying out loud! Don’t you remember your own name? It was YOU!!

Yet another article on the bad milk scandal that is increasingly affecting Taiwan. This raises a lot of questions about the practice of buying goods made in Taiwan rather than China on the assumption that Taiwanese goods are safer. That logic tends to break down if components of the Taiwanese goods are from China.

Regardless, this article can be used either in a Health or Food module.

Taipei Times - archives

At a meeting of the legislature’s Health, Environment and Labor Committee yesterday, DPP caucus whip William Lai (賴清德) asked Lin whether Maxwell instant coffee, the brand served to legislative staff, contained melamine.

Lin responded by saying: 「The toxicity is limited if you don’t drink it very often.」

Lai pressed on, saying the instant coffee was imported from China, to which Lin replied that although the Department of Health had banned milk powder, dairy products and products containing plant protein from China, it would not recall products that had already entered the country.

「Your logic is all wrong,」 Lai said, calling for all unsafe products to be recalled.

After taking the podium, DPP Legislator Chen Ying (陳瑩) offered Chiu, who doubles as chairman of the Consumer Protection Commission (CPC), and Lin each a cup of Maxwell coffee.

The two hesitated to take the cups, at which point Chen asked: 「Didn’t you say as long as you drink lots of water, you can clear your body of melamine?」

In June, a Taiwanese company imported 1,000 25kg bags of Chinese milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical and sold them to food processing factories to be used in cakes, beverages and calcium tablets.

This certainly hits home, quite literally for Taiwanese students.

Nearly 53,000 Chinese children sick from milk - Yahoo! News

Taiwanese company King Car Co. announced it has recalled packs of its Mr. Brown instant coffee and milk tea containing contaminated milk powder imported from China.

I’m not sure how I feel about this…

Taipei Times - archives

Barbecue at crematorium

The Taoyuan County Funeral Service Industry Association said that anyone interested in a free barbecue on Mid-Autumn Festival should head for the funeral home in Jhongli (中壢). Last year, the association organized a barbecue for more than 1,000 people at the funeral home, while all six cremation furnaces were working. Because of the smell emanating from the furnaces, very few people, aside from employees and their families, took part in the activity. This year, the furnaces will be closed in the afternoon during the barbecue, the association said. The barbecue will take place between 4pm and 10pm on Friday.

How can movies be used in a writing class? Some brainstorming:

• After watching a segment of a movie, students can create a character sketch of sorts on a character of their choosing. For example, the T could introduce the script writer’s trick of writing about what a character does in a certain situation, what their morning routine is for example, as a means of discovering the character. Other options include a biography of the character that goes beyond what is presented in the movie, and discussing the character from different perspectives (1st, 2nd, 3rd person).
• Ss can assume the role of either a friend, relative, or enemy of their target character. The role they assume can be either of a person in the movie or of an imagined person. For example, Ss can write about the character from the character’s sister’s or brother’s perspective.
• Assuming the movie is shown in segments, Ss can predict what will happen in the following segment or,
• discuss motivations for what the character has done so far.

A collaborative approach would be best, and this seems to be a situation for which a wiki would be appropriate. Pairs or very small groups could do the above activities and put them in dialog and/or edit a group narrative.

This article is useful for a technology module. Note that the text is not an actual transcript of the audio, available via the link, though some of the paragraphs in the article are taken verbatim from the audio. This is a common feature of NPR stories that include both audio and substantial text, and this quality could provide from some engaging activities that would require learners to compare the audio and text versions of the story. It could also be a motivating factor because students would want to read the story to find the paragraphs in the text that are in the audio file, allowing for easier listening comprehension.

Useful for a reading course?

Discussion questions brainstorm:

1. What popular ‘cloud’ type services are available to you other than those mentioned in the story?
2. Do you compute in ‘the cloud’? Which such services do you use?
3. If you store pictures on a free service (Flikr, MySpace, etc.), are those files backed up anywhere? If you lost access to your account, how would it affect you?
4. What are the most important files that you have stored online? (Important = sentimental value, personal information, financial information, etc.)
5. Have you ever forgotten a password to a free service or otherwise been closed out of it? How was that situation resolved?

Computing In The Cloud: Who Owns Your Files? : NPR

All Things Considered, August 21, 2008 · Do you have a Yahoo e-mail account? Maybe a Gmail account? Do you put up pictures on Flickr? Perhaps you’ve started keeping your schedule online. If so, then you are using cloud computing — that’s what tech companies call it when people work and store information on the Internet.

Because it enables users to access their documents anywhere, cloud computing is very convenient. But it’s also creating a whole new set of worries.

Abel Habtegeorgis, 23, learned recently how it can all go wrong. Habtegeorgis is pretty typical for someone his age; he stores the most important documents of his life — from family photos to conversations with his mother — online using Gmail and Flickr.

“It’s easier in a lot of ways,” says Habtegeorgis. “It’s so amazing to have access to so many pictures and everything. Pretty much my life is up there.”

Until it wasn’t: One day, Habtegeorgis typed in his password and found that it didn’t work.

Problem: ESL materials that are supposedly designed according to a communicative framework nonetheless feel contrived, irrelevant, and just plain boring.

Problem: Activities that are designed for the purpose of language acquisition when language, in reality, is rarely acquired for the sake of language acquisition just as trees are rarely counted for the sake of counting trees and a cake is rarely baked for the sake of baking a cake. The missing ingredient is purpose. That purpose is what fuels motivation, which in turn drives attention. Modern ESL materials still try to create that purpose through information gap activities and the like that, for example, require a learner to find out what the other learner’s favorite TV program is or what day they were born on. Who cares!

Question: How can we create an environment or situation in which learners have a real-life stake in the outcome and that requires spontaneous and collaborative use of the target language? Some brainstorming:

• Social issues
  • Problem based learning
  • Debating & discussion
• Academic or work issues
  • Problem based learning
  • Debating & discussion
• Real hobbies (of which few people have more than a couple, and some none at all)
  • Information sharing
  • Project completion
• Family
• Love, romance, and of course, sex

But simply identifying an issue, cause, or problem is not enough. A specific deliverable needs to be identified, with a framework for reaching or creating that deliverable, including:

• Time table, even if flexible
• Defined process or procedure
• Tools available
• Roles of stakeholders

None of this is new, and it’s all very straightforward, and yet it’s a difficult nut to crack. Educational materials distributed for a mass market are almost by default irrelevant, watered down, and agonizingly contrived. In order for learners to truly have a stake in an activity that will lead to incidental language acquisition, they need to have a role in determining the purpose of that activity from the ground up.

I think most language learning materials are designed in a backwards fashion. Developers first decide what language patterns and forms they think need to be learned, and then build a lesson around that, with actual content and subject matter the last element to be added, when in fact all authentic language exists to serve the subject matter; subject
and purpose are the source and core of all language.

When people talk just for the sake of talking, we call them annoying or perhaps mentally deranged. And yet, that’s what language learning materials often ask learners to do.

Perhaps instead of ‘teaching language’, we should have students engage in truly meaningful, socially relevant, collaborative activities in the target language.

I do not know how correct the following article is, but assuming it is fairly accurate, it is amazing how much the roots of Halloween have in common with current practices of Chinese ghost month here in Taiwan. Ghosts coming back for a limited time, offerings of food to appease them, and bad things that might happen to you if you do not make the ghosts happy are common in both traditions. Please see the source page via the link below for the complete article.

Crash Halloween

HALLOWEEN
Prof. Bruce L. Johnson

The origin of Halloween goes back thousands of years in Europe. Ancient Celtic priests called Druids were heavily involved in occultic practices and sorcery. They lived in the forests and worshiped nature and the “spirits” of the dead. Their chief god was called Samhain, “lord of the dead.” Later on in history, Samhain was given many other names, such as Pan, “god of death and darkness.” (Satan is Satan and still is Satan!)

October 31st was the principle night to worship Samhain. The Druids celebrated this event with several fire festivals, honoring both Samhain and the goddess Beltane, “The Great Mother Earth.” (Later on, under Roman ruse, the Druids added the worship of many of the Roman gods and goddesses as well.)

November 1 was considered to be the “day of death,” since it was the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. The Druids were also the builders of the mysterious “Stonehenge” in England, which was used to calculate various solstice and equinox, thus arriving at the four infamous Witchcraft days, which are: February 2 (Caldlemas); May I. (Poodmas); August 1 (Lammas); and October 31 (Halloween). June 21 (Midsummer s Night Eve) is also time for demonic pranks and rituals.

The Druid priests, believed that by setting huge bonfires they were attracting spirits of the dead who had passed away the previous year. By incantations and magic rituals, these spirits would be drawn to the sacrificial fires and be released from their bondage during this one evening only. They would then be free to roam the countryside, doing either good deeds or taking revenge upon their enemies. By morning they were turned over to Samhain, who would lead them away to his realm.

In the building of the bonfires, the Druids would perform horrible rituals by casting both live animals and humans int the flames! The human victims were usually the mentally ill, criminals, the deformed, and war prisoners. This practice gave the blazes the name of bonefire.” (Think about this the next time you observe the traditional “pep rally” bonfire we were so familiar with in high school.)

During these times, farmers and villagers alike had an Animistic approach to life, similar to the Druids. Each family would extinguish its own hearth fire, then go into the forests and join the Druids in their cruel fire sacrifices. In exchange, and many times for compensation, the Druid warlocks would present each family a burning ember from the “sacred” dying fires, so the people could go back and re-light their hearths, thus appeasing the evil spirits that would be roaming around that particular evening.

Centuries later, the Roman Catholic Church adopted a “holy evening” in May called “All Hallows Even,” which honored dead saints of past church history. When the Romans conquered the Celts, the church attempted to counteract the pagan influence of the Druids, by moving their observance from May to November and calling this “All Saints Day,” a decree set down by Pope Gregory in the 8th century. This is one of the reasons Christians tend to associate Halloween with Christianity. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the pagan influence proved much too dominant. Thus, an “if-you-can’t-beat-’em, join-’em” attitude prevailed and “All Hallows Eve” turned into Halloween” …and it has been going strong ever since. It has become a very special night for the witches, Satanists, and other occultic groups who worship Satan and the forces of Nature. More worldwide animal and human (yes, human!) sacrifices are recorded on Halloween night than on any other evening–and this includes the Western world!

TRICK OR TREAT

The pagans believed that the spirits came back to haunt and cause grief among the living, so these ghosts had to be appeased. This gave rise to the practice of preparing large banquet tables filled with food and drink, and holding this feast on October 31, for both the ghosts and the living. After “all” had enjoyed the meal, many villagers would don costumes representing the souls of departed spirits and imagined likenesses of demons. They would parade around the tables and ultimately lead the spirits to the outskirts of town, away from the homes. This was done to avoid tragic events that were sure to befall…such as having their livestock die; milk turning sour or poisonous; food spoiling; the stealing of c`ildren and even the death of family members.

Another common practice, while the Druids were still worshiping in the woods, was for the townsfolk to set out sweetmeats and other delectables on their doorsteps on that particular evening, so when the evil spirits came a callin ,” they would receive a “treat.” Neglecting to do so, however, would surely result in some form of evil “trick” done to that household. (I have already mentioned the consequences of opposing the “spirits.”)

The role of the children of the village would be to go off into the forests by themselves and perform their own little rituals. On this one evening they would pretend that they were Druid priests endowed with mystical powers and light their own bonfires and play magical games. They they would sneak back into the villages and steal the goodies that the townspeople had so carefully placed on their doorsteps. If any of the children were caught in the act of theft, they would simply plead the amendment called “spirit possession.” Thus evolved “trick or treat.”

Adding to this, the witches have a story of a man called “Jack the Terrible,” who was so evil that when he died even Hell would not have him! His destiny was to roam the world on Halloween night, seeking followers. He lighted his way by carrying a carved turnip with a candle burning inside. This is where the term “Jack-O-Lantern” originated, although now a pumpkin is used.

This site produces good quality, simplified English programs. My main criticism of VOA has always been not the quality of its production, which is excellent, but the content of its programs. Being almost entirely US-focused, it is not terribly relevant to students in other countries. And much of what it produces is just plain boring, like the story on vitamin D located at http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2008-07-15-voa2.cfm. Still, it is a valuable resource and one I should check more often. It also offers programming in wide variety of other languages.

VOA Special English can be found at: VOA News - Learning American English With News and Feature Programs in VOA Special English

For other languages and both live and download feeds, see http://www.voanews.com/english/webcast-languages.cfm?selectlanguage=English.