Global temperature snapshot.

image credit: npr.org

In our final week of the Autumn Sessions for 2025, we will continue to explore the theme of Pollution and Climate.

There are many responses that are critical of Bill Gates’s blogpost on Climate Change published just ahead of the recently completed COP30, a United Nations climate change conference held in Brazil; we will look at and evaluate the validity of those objections.

The articles I have prepared for our class have been edited for Grade 6 English vocabulary skill level by ChatGPT. We will use these edited articles for oral reading practice and analysis.

I’m proud of everyone in our class for taking on the daunting challenge of reading the very lengthy Bill Gates blogpost to the end! Let’s find out together if Mr Gates has succeeded in convincing the climate change lobby at the United Nations to re-examine its financial commitment to issues that are more urgent than climate change to people who live in poor economies with unaddressed, underfunded, and life-threatening public health issues.

Gates wants a shift in funding worldwide intitiatives away from climate change programs and toward focusing more of that funding (and accompanying resources) on eliminating poverty and disease in impoverished countries.

Do his critics understand the argument of Bill Gates? We will answer this question on Saturday, November 29, 2025!

Here is the link to the first reading for November 29, 2025, including short multiple-choice questions on this reading.

Here is the link to the much shorter photo and quote carousel supplementary reading for November 29, 2025.

This week, we will continue to read the October 28, 2025 blog post of Bill Gates on his revised viewpoint on Climate Change. You can access the original post (with photos!) below:
Gates Notes for the UN Climate Conference in November 2025 called COP30

Using only 6th Grade English vocabulary, our class reading is a revision of the original article by Chat GPT.

Our reading is on this week’s supplementary page linked here:
Pollution and Climate Week 4: Bill Gates's Revised Viewpoint on Climate Change

I invite everyone to spend some time with the vocabulary list at the end of the article. To read the short article summary and its associated vocabulary list, you can click HERE.

We are nearing the end of our Autumn Sessions, which will have its final session on November 29, 2025.

We will be spending several sessions after that, starting on December 6, 2025, on Winter Art, Christmas Art, and Dreaming Big for 2026!

Climate Change, Pollution, Environmental Policy, Vocabulary

coal power plant. image credit: spectrum ieee.org

We continue our exploration of Pollution and Climate Change for a second week as we focus on the Electrification of the United States, but this investigation comes with a twist: the United States is powering its increased electrification with dirty or carbon-polluting energy sources such as coal and natural gas.

I invite everyone to read the article on The Hidden Cost of Electrification in the United States by oilprice.com on the Supplementary page found at this link.

We also have a vocabulary list at the end of the article that is part of 6th grade English vocabulary that you will find in the article.

I had ChatGPT rewrite the original article to use only 6th grade English vocabulary.

image credit: littlecharmhostel.com/ traditional-vietnamese-art

Symbols in Vietnamese Art

Our class on October 11, 2025 will continue our theme from October 4, with a concentration on symbols in Vietnamese Art, including and especially animals as symbols.

There are many symbols associated with mid-autumn festival, with Tet, and other traditional holidays of Viet Nam.

I invite everyone to find a symbol in Vietnamese art and talk about it. The class will offer insights as we can.

I will look at the topic of migration patterns and find examples of migratory animals represented in Vietnamese art.

image credit: shutterstock.com

Tết Trung Thu: The House of Wisdom English Teachers and Students Discussion Series: the Autumn Sessions will have student presentations for its September 27, 2025 class on the lanterns used in Tết Trung Thu.

We will present, either as pictures or descriptions (or both) the various lanterns we can find online and describe them or share the pictures of those different lanterns. Each presenter will say something about why this lantern appeals to them.

The academic substrate of this activity is the claim that cultural festivities have many layers of meaning, and Tết Trung Thu has many features of significance for all who participate!

We note that lanterns are a way to supply light in natural darkness and have a deep history in all socieites. Involving children in a ritual that celebrates life-giving light at the time of fall harvest is an introduction to our awareness of the cycles of nature and how we apply this knowledge to a crop like rice.

Exercise your imagination, find a lantern you like (historical or modern), create a lantern of your own by drawing one yourself, sharing a photo from your personal collection, or using AI, and then share the results of your investigation with the rest of the class.

image credit: dictionaryscoop.com

Hobbies of Famous People

This week’s class will be a fun search and discovery exercise! Each of us will select a celebrity or other famous person from any time period (the Ancient World, the Current Era, or any time up to 2025), and will tell the class about any hobbies that person had.

Use whatever sources you can, but tell us where you found the information.

First, let’s begin with the defintion of a hobby. From Underhobby.net, we have:

A hobby is typically defined as an activity done for pleasure during one’s free time. As societies developed, so did the ways in which people chose to occupy themselves in their leisure hours.

Did you know, for instance, that the original Olympic Games, held in Olympia in ancient Greece, started in 776 B.C.?

Did you know that the Olympic Games in ancient Greece were celebrated as a religious festival?

We learn that entertainment in the ancient world is classified today as a hobby for the participants.

This classification includes the audience, who attended religious festivals for entertainment, cultural education, and to show their allegiance to the religion of the time.

We can conclude that anyone who attended a religious festival in the ancient world would today be understood as enjoying their hobby.

This definition is not satisfactoy to us, however. I doubt that anyone at any time in history would consider that their participation in discussions, cultural festivals or sports are engaged in a hobby!

In my own research, I have found that Nikola Tesla, the brilliant electrical engineering researcher and inventor, had the hobby of pigeon keeping: and caring for pigeons!

Do you know anyone who has the hobby of pigeon keeping?

Have fun researching the hobbies of famous people who you admire, are curious about, or otherwise want to know more about as just regular people.

We all look forward to learning about what you’ve uncovered!

Image credit: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com

A thought came to me over the weekend: Who Are We Now?

The House of Wisdom English Teachers and Students Discussion Series has changed to become what we are now. But who are we now?

I will invite each attendee to speak to the class about who they are, where they were last year, and who they are now.

This invitation is an opportunity for all class members to set goals for themselves in our weekly class. Moreover, we will use today as an occasion to name just 1 thing that we enjoy and think about every day.

I have linked an article exploring ‘Who I Am Now’ (I am Thankful for Who I Was, Who I Am Now, and Who I am Becoming) for our class to read out loud. Individually, we all understand the need to practice speaking English in an environment where a native English speaker is listening.

Click here to go to this week’s reading

This week’s class will focus on what Autumn in Viet Nam is like.

Please bring your stories—-about beginning a new grade at school, seeing wonderful moons and the night sky, new dishes to eat. Be imaginative!

I will call upon each attendee to read what they have prepared to the group. As always, I will have a document that is AI-assisted for reading by anyone who does not have time to prepare but would love to read out loud to the group.

image credit: kampatour.com

The article I have taken from the internet for group reading as a last resort is on the page:

midautumn-festival-in-vietnam-all-about-tet-trung-thu-2025

Topic:
Unhelpful Changes on a Large Scale

Try to think of a proposed change in something traditional where the proposed change proved to be unsafe or unhelpful to the people of that country.

This particular change might have been proposed by the government or a corporation, and the people of that country did not benefit from the change.

In fact, the people were worse off when they lost the unmodified traditional practice* or feature**. State the lesson to be learned from this example.

*For example, shortening the time of celebration for a holiday in the interests of commerce.

**Perhaps a fixture, like a bridge, was demolished and not replaced. Perhaps older housing was destroyed to make way for a large and noisy highway that separated traditional communities from each other.

Image credit: Pinterest

We continue our course on news literacy that focuses on teen awareness of facts and fiction in online news that is offered as fact-checked news.

The website we follow is https:www.newslit.org

We will continue to practice reading out loud to the group and taking online news literacy quizzes. I am sure it is going to be fun and educational!

image credit: Microsoft CoPilot

This week will focus on critical analyses of cultural trends. But first, what are cultural trends? Dao and Aries will help us find a working definition.

Do government policies affect cultural trends? How? Can you give any examples from recent events (events from the last 10 years)?

What are the rammifications, also called consequences, of changes in government policy on cultural trends? Can you find an example of a change in government policy affecting a cultural trend? The affect can be positive or negative.

We will all find a claim that interests us in the article, "Exploring Chinese masculinity (and China’s ban on effeminate men)" linked here.

image credit: sciencedirect.com

We will spend this week, our 2nd in a workshop of at least 4 weeks, continuing to learn how to write more effective prompts. Dao will also spend some time discussing how to use Grok and some of its features and advantages. Grok is free to use, and is the AI behind Elon Musk’s company called xAI.

We invite everyone who is planning on attending to do some of their own research. Here is a link to a helpful article that we will be discussing and sampling for oral reading practice on Saturday. (Research provided by Dao.) Click on the image above to access the link to the Science Direct article.

We will then go to the Open AI Academy, where users can take courses on how to use ChatGPT more effectively. In particular, we will look at a 9-minute video called “Mastering Prompts: The Key to Getting What You Need from ChatGPT.”

Click on the image above to access the link to the OpenAI Academy.