What a great class this is! Thank you, Vivian, for taking pictures for us.  And thank you all for participating so much in class.  I was surprised to hear about Brad Pitt donating $100,000 in support of gay marriage.  I was glad to hear your views on the subject and how it is handled differently in different countries.  I know we all wanted to know more about dating in the Middle East and enjoyed watching the crazy Saudi driving videos!  

The 3D sidewalk art may have been the most impressive thing we saw last week! I can't wait to hear your opinions about ghosts. Do you think they are real? Have you had any ghostly experiences? I'm not sure they are real, but I am a little afraid to find out for sure!

Thank you all for such interesting discussions in class last week. I was very interested in your views about Sarah Palin and her family troubles, including her teenage daughter's pregnancy.  In response to your comments on unwed pregnancies and abortions in your home countries, I found this article about a man in Viet Nam who helps women to avoid abortions by raising their babies in his own home.  What do you think about that?  

I hope you will be coming in with more stories to share this week, whether it is something from the news, something you saw on television, or just something from your own experience.  We will be talking about human interest stories this week too.  Here is one example of a human interest story.  This brave woman strangled a man who broke into her home in the night. But it turned out to be much stranger than that! Read it and let me know what you think. 

Please, share some links or stories of your own.

Welcome to the World Today Blog!

I am so happy that we will be working and learning together this semester. The purpose of this course is to share current events, news stories, internet stories and more items of interest to the students in this class. Each of you will be responsible for bringing in something to share with the class at least once a week. It is also very important that you participate by discussing in class every day. The fun part about this class is getting to share your ideas and opinions while improving your English.

We will be using this blog as another way to communicate with each other and share interesting news we find online. As a portion of your grade (the special project), I will ask each of you to start a blog of your own with three entries. I will give more details about this later.

I will post an entry weekly, and for homework, each of you must add at least one comment per week on this blog. You may add links or information of your own at any time.

This week, I wanted to talk about the term a "small world".   Americans often use this phrase to describe an event that makes this large world seem much smaller. For instance, I once ran into a friend of mine from Australia when I was in Sea World in San Diego, CA. I hadn't seen him in over ten years and had no idea he was even in the United States.

Here is a cute web story that illustrates the small world idea:  iphone girl. This factory worker from China has now become known to people all over the world, simply because someone forgot to erase the test photos from an iphone camera in the factory.

Do you have any stories of a small world situation? If not, try googling "small world" and "coincidence" and see what you find.  I will be very interested to read your comments!