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.
No comments:
Post a Comment