Few of my students had trouble with the first part of the assignment (work given to students):

Identify a kind of person you don’t like or makes you uncomfortable and describe what it is that you don’t like or makes you uncomfortable.

Everyone had trouble with part two:

Find someone like that. Spend some time with them – take them to lunch or have coffee with them – and talk to them for at least 20-30 minutes. Learn as much as you can about them.

The third part was always the best:

Look at your answer to part one, then write about what, if anything, changed.

Something always did. And when we talked about it in class, we discovered quickly that talking – and more importantly, listening – to someone can change ideas about other people that we had believed, often for many years.

During last year’s election campaign (political activity before a vote), reporter Yvonne Leow felt that too few people were talking – or listening – to each other. She believed that many people forgot that “we’re all humans at the end of the day trying to understand each other” and did nothing about it. That’s why she started the Hello Project.

Leow is a second-generation American – her mother was born in Cambodia – and the two of them have often had trouble understanding each other. Their relationship began to improve when they sat down to talk about themselves – Leow calls it storytelling. Her mother grew up in Cambodia, she in the U.S. They had had different experiences while growing up and, as a result, looked at life differently.

Leow wanted the Hello Project to help people connect with each other and to share their stories, like she and her mother had. In her invitation she wrote, “We know our country is divided, and we want to see if individual conversations can help” make a difference. We want to encourage “understanding, not necessarily agreement and . . . learn from each other.”

More than 100 people signed up to talk. One of them, a reporter from Washington, D.C., talked to a retired school teacher in Phoenix, AZ. Their backgrounds, their lives, and their hopes and fears were very different. But after they finished talking, they shared their email address and agreed to become pen pals (people who write each other). Others had similar experiences.

Leow is hoping to continue the Hello Project. She writes that we as people and the world we live in are complex (difficult to understand) and asks if we can accept and respect each other for that. The Hello Project’s answer seems to be, “Yes!” Especially if we continue to talk to each other.

~ Warren Ediger – ESL tutor/coach and creator of the Successful English website.

Photo by Steve Garfield used under Creative Commons license

Spring is here, and in the next few weeks U.S. students will be getting one week of vacation from elementary (kindergarten to 5th grade) and secondary schools (middle school/junior high school and high school), and from colleges and universities.

For students, especially college students, spring break is a time to go on vacation with friends and to go to a lot of parties. Whether you’re partying for spring break, attending a friend’s birthday party, or going to a more formal gathering (social meeting), you might find these terms useful to talk about parties and the people who attend them.

Americans have many terms to talk about party-goers (people who go to parties). A guest of honor is the person for whom a party is held (organized and hosted). For example, at a birthday party, the person who is celebrating a birthday is the guest of honor. At a graduation party, the person who has completed his or her studies is the guest of honor. Often there are VIPs (an acronym for “very important people”) at a party. If your boss comes to a party, then he or she might be a VIP even if he or she isn’t the guest of honor.

Sometimes people come to a party without an invitation (a request to attend or go to an event). These people are called party crashers. In American movies, you sometimes see parties on college campuses (the buildings and land belonging to a college/university,) which are ruined by party crashers who drink too much alcohol and damage the home where the party is being held.

A party pooper is an informal term for a person who isn’t very much fun at a party–or any social event. A party pooper is someone who is sad or depressed and makes it difficult or impossible for other people to have fun. Often a party pooper is a person who doesn’t want to do what everyone else wants to do.

The opposite of a party pooper is a party animal or the life of the party. The term party animal isn’t used very often today, but you still hear people use it jokingly to refer to a person who really enjoys going to parties and has a lot of fun, often getting too wild (out of control). The life of the party is simply someone who makes the party more fun and is often the center of attention (the person other people notice because he or she is interesting).

Finally, some people who go to parties are known as wallflowers. A wallflower is a very quiet and shy person who doesn’t enjoy talking to other people and sits quietly somewhere and is not noticed. This is especially true at dances, where wallflowers sit and watch everyone else dance, but are too timid (shy) to dance themselves.

So the next time you throw (have) a party, let’s hope you don’t get any party crashers or party animals attending the party and upsetting the VIPs or the guest of honor (but don’t forget to invite me!).

~ Jeff

Imagine, if you can, a railroad that had most of the things that railroads have . . .

• passengers or freight (packages),
• stations (where trains stop so people can get on and off),
• conductors (people who check tickets and help passengers),
• routes (a way to get from one place to another)

. . . but no trains and no tracks (the metal strips that trains ride on).

February is Black, or African-American, History Month – when we celebrate important people and events in black history in the U.S. and Canada. One of the fascinating chapters in that history is the story of the railroad that wasn’t – the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad wasn’t a real railroad. And it wasn’t underground (beneath or below the earth). It was a network (system) of people who worked together to help slaves who had escaped from their owners to move from the southern U.S. to the northern states and Canada where they could be free. It was called “underground” because everything they did had to be secret. They used railroad language so that if anyone heard them talking, they wouldn’t know what they were talking about.

The Underground Railroad was made up of meeting places and safe houses – “stations” – that connected different different routes and different parts of each route. Slaves, who were sometimes referred to as “freight,” walked or rode in farm wagons about 10-20 miles (16-32 km) from one station to the next in small groups, usually at night. During the day, they rested in farm buildings, church basements (under the floor), or caves (large holes in the ground).

Conductors – free blacks, people who used to be slaves, and friendly white people – helped lead each group of escaped slaves from station to station along the railroad.

Traveling along the Underground Railroad was dangerous, even after the slaves crossed into the northern states. Bounty hunters, people who tried to find and catch slaves for money, were active, even in the North. If slaves were caught, the laws didn’t protect them very well, and many of those who were caught were taken back to their owners in the South.

Even though it was difficult and dangerous, about 100,000 slaves traveled the Underground Railroad to freedom in the northern U.S. and Canada before the Civil War.

This year the New York Times published an interesting set of articles about the Underground Railroad. The first, “Harriet Tubman’s Path to Freedom,” tells the story of Tubman, the most famous conductor. After she escaped slavery, she made 13 more trips along the railroad to help other slaves make their way to freedom.

The first article includes a map that changes as you read to show the places the article is talking about. At the end of the article you will find links to the other articles. Now that you know a little about the Underground Railroad and some of the words used to talk about it, you will find it easier to understand this important chapter of U.S. history when you read them.

~ Warren Ediger – ESL coach/tutor and creator of the Successful English website.

Photo of The Underground Railroad Memorial courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Sunday began gray in Huntington Beach, a popular southern California beach city. And cool, almost cold.

Surfers were out early, trying the larger waves brought by recent storms. Seagulls circled above, as they do, looking for something to eat – fish, and if not fish, some small scrap (piece) of food dropped on sand or sidewalk. And screaming when they couldn’t.

Then the runners began to arrive. Some crawled out of (got out of) cars at designated (specially marked) drop-off points. Some stepped down out of shuttle buses (buses that go back and forth between two places). Others wandered in (walked or traveled) from who knows where. They came from all 50 states of the U.S. and 17 foreign countries, more than 15,000 of them.

They gathered under a banner (sign) that read “Surf City Marathon/Half Marathon” stretched across (placed over) Pacific Coast Highway, Highway 1, that follows the coastline of California for more than 655 miles (1,054 km).

This was no Boston Marathon, or New York, or even Los Angeles. There were no elite (top; among the best) runners. But your cousin was there. And your friend from work. And the guy from down the street.

Some looked like runners. Others didn’t, like the woman behind me who said, “I’m going to take it easy, then run like h*** for the last 5k (5,000 meters).” I’m not sure she could have run that hard for 500 or even 50.

When the time came, the runners started in waves (groups), fastest first. And in a few minutes, they disappeared down the road.

If you had wandered among the spectators waiting for the runners to return to the finish line, you would have discovered that this was more party than competition. An opportunity for family and friends to celebrate and cheer for Colin or Joe or Vanessa or whatever their names were.

There were balloons. Homemade signs. And a band, three old guys on the sidewalk, playing rock-and-roll favorites. They were good! Lines at coffee shops along PCH grew until they stretched out the doors and onto the sidewalks. With coffee in hand, people wandered around or found a place to sit and talk and wait.

After two or three hours, the runners began to return. They would do that for several hours more. And as they arrived, we began to hear their stories.

Dorothy says this will be her last half marathon. She walked, not ran, her first 25 years ago. She walked it again Sunday with her daughter, her granddaughter, and her great-granddaughter. The Orange County Register, a newspaper, reported that, for the last several years, Dorothy has written her age on the back of her t-shirt followed by “Come walk with me”. This year the number was 90.

There was the story of the short brown rope. I saw, but didn’t get the names of, two women running side-by-side as they neared the finish line, each holding one end of a short brown rope. When I looked a second time, I understood: one of them was blind. Her friend had run beside her the entire race, holding onto the rope so her blind friend could run free.

Adam’s story started 11 years ago. That’s when he was told that he would never walk again because of a car accident. Two years ago he walked for the first time since his accident, thanks to an exoskeleton – a science-fiction-like device that attaches to his legs and uses small motors to make it possible for him to walk. Even with help he can only walk half as fast as other people. But he walked the last three miles Sunday, part of the one-million steps he hopes to walk in races like this to raise money – $1 per step – so others who have suffered injuries like his can walk again, helped by similar technologies.

Ordinary people. Doing extraordinary things.

~ Warren Ediger – ESL coach/tutor and creator of the Successful English website.

Surf City Marathon/Half Marathon photo by W. Ediger.