24 September, 2011

English Speaking Club - “Positive Thinking”.


Today’s session of the English Speaking Club in Dnipropetrovsk WOA was a pleasant surprise to all Ukrainian participants.
Rather unexpectedly we had quite a number of the American guests.
Samantha, our regular Peace Corp.  guest, visited the session and stayed  longer than usual.
Our long time friend, Mr. J . Battilega, made a sudden appearance in an elegant summer outfit. He returned after his trip to the USA and shared the experiences.
Mrs. Virginia Kleist after a busy lecturing day at the Mining University visited our club. We knew that this day was her birthday and sang the “Happy Birthday”.

The topic of the session was “Positive Thinking”.
We read the article which explained the origin of the word “Optimism”. After that we had a small experiment to find out how many optimists do we have in the audience. The club members were shown a photo of a glass with water and were asked to describe it in one word.  Only 2 persons perceived the glass as a half-empty glass. The rest of the group described it as half-full.  Thus we made a conclusion that the majority of us are optimists.  Some smart guys apparently knew about this simple test, they gave tricky answers which did not allow to classify them.
We continued reading the article and later discussed the tips and techniques that help to fight autumn depression. Once the term “Positive thinking” was introduced we read the text about the progenitor of the Positive thinking theory Dr. Norman Vincent Peal. He was a minister and author of “The Power of Positive Thinking”. President Ronald Reagan awarded Mr. Peale, for his contributions to the field of theology, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian honor in the United States) on March 26, 1984. According to President Bill Clinton the name of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale will forever be associated with the wondrously American values of optimism and service.
We watched the video of the President’s Obama interview with Will Smith dealing with similar topic.
To round up the discussion we watched the video of the popular Ukrainian song by A. Danylko which is the quintessence of the Ukrainian positive thinking. The task was to explain to the American guests the plot of the video clip and the typical Ukrainian ways to combat depression.
The session was a real success and the discussions were not limited by the ESC timing.
The number of participants – 30 persons.

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