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 educaction, 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.