11 MUST-SEE LESSONS FROM TED-ED

1. QUESTIONS NO ONE KNOWS THE ANSWER TO.

2 .WHY IS YAWNING CONTAGIOUS?

3. JUST HOW SMALL IS AN ATOM?

4. ARE ELVISH, KLINGON, DOTHRAKI AND NA'VI REAL LANGUAGES?

5. HOW SUGAR AFFECTS THE BRAIN.

6. HOW TO BUILD A FICTIONAL WORLD.

7. WHAT MAKES TATTOOS PERMANENT?

8. DARK MATTER: THE MATTER WE CAN'T SEE.

9. THE SCIENCE OF STAGE FRIGHT (AND HOW TO OVERCOME IT).

10. HOW PLAYING AN INSTRUMENT BENEFITS YOUR BRAIN.

11. EXPLORING OTHER DIMENSIONS.

HOW THE BERLIN WALL FELL

A BRIEF STORY OF MELANCHOLY

WORDS THAT DESCRIBE SOMEONE'S VOICE

LOOK UP, by Gary Turk

I have 422 friends yet I am lonely
I speak to all of them everyday yet none of them really know me
The problem I have sits in the space in-between
Looking into their eyes or at a name on a screen
I took a step back and opened my eyes
I looked round and realised
This media we call social is anything but
when we open our computers and it’s our doors we shut
All this technology we have it’s just an illusion
Community, companionship, a sense of inclusion
When you step away from this device of delusion
You awaken to see a world of confusion
A world where we’re slaves to the technology we mastered
Where information gets sold by some rich, greedy bastard
A world of self-interest, self-image, self-promotion
Where we all share our best bits but leave out the emotion
We’re at our most happy with an experience we share
But is it the same if no one is there?
Be there for your friends and they’ll be there too
But no one will be if a group message will do
We edit and exaggerate, crave adulation
We pretend not to notice the social isolation
We put our words into order till our lives are glistening
We don’t even know if anyone is listening
Being alone isn’t the problem let me just emphasise
If you read a book, paint a picture, or do some exercise
You’re being productive and present not reserved and reclused
You’re being awake and attentive and putting your time to good use
So when you’re in public and you start to feel alone
Put your hands behind your head, step away from the phone
You don’t need to stare at your menu or at your contact list
Just talk to one another, learn to co-exist
I can’t stand to hear the silence of a busy commuter train
When no one wants to talk for the fear of looking insane
We’re becoming unsocial, it no longer satisfies
To engage with one another and look into someone’s eyes.
We’re surrounded by children who since they were born
Have watched us living like robots and think it’s the norm
It’s not very likely you’ll make world’s greatest Dad
If you can’t entertain a child without using an iPad
When I was a child I’d never be home
I’d be out with my friends, on our bikes we’d roam
I’d wear holes in my trainers and graze up my knees
Or build our own clubhouse high up in the trees
Now the park is so quiet it gives me a chill
See no children outside and the swings hanging still
There’s no skipping, no hopscotch, no church and no steeple
We’re a generation of idiots, smart phones and dumb people
So look up from your phone, shut down the display
Take in your surroundings, make the most of today
Just one real connection is all it can take
To show you the difference that being there can make
Be there in the moment as she gives you the look
That you remember forever as when love overtook
The time she first held your hand or first kissed your lips
The time you first disagreed but still loved her to bits
The time you don’t have to tell hundreds of what you’ve just done
Because you want to share this moment with just this one.
The time you sell your computer so you can buy a ring
For the girl of your dreams who is now the real thing
The time you want to start a family and the moment when
You first hold your little girl and get to fall in love again
The time she keeps you up at nights and all you want is rest
And the time you wipe away the tears as your baby flees the nest
The time your baby girl returns with a boy for you to hold
And the time he calls you Grandad and makes you feel real old
The time you take in all you’ve made when you’re giving life attention
And how you’re real glad you didn’t waste it by looking down at some invention
The time you hold your wife’s hand, sit down beside her bed.
You tell her that you love her, lay a kiss upon her head.
She then whispers to you quietly as her heart gives a final beat
That she’s lucky she got stopped by that lost boy in the street
But none of these times ever happened. You never had any of this
When you’re too busy looking down, you don’t see the chances you miss
So look up from your phones, shut down those displays
We have a finite existence, a set number of days
Don’t waste your life getting caught in the net
because when the end comes, nothing’s worse than regret
I am guilty too of being part of this machine
this digital world we are heard but not seen
where we type as we talk and read as we chat
where we spend hours together without making eye-contact
So don’t give in to a life where you follow the hype
Give people your love, don’t give them your “like”
Disconnect from the need to be heard and defined
Go out into the world, leave distractions behind
Look up from your phone, shut down the display
Stop watching this video, live life the real way.

WORD CRIMES, by "Weird Al" Yankovic

ONE WOMAN, 17 BRITISH ACCENTS

THIS LAND IS MINE

This land is mine

God gave this land to me

This brave and ancient land to me
And when the morning sun
Reveals her hills and plains
Then I see a land
where children can run free.

So take my hand
And walk this land with me
And walk this lovely land with me
Tho' I am just a man

When you are by my side

With the help of God
I know I can be strong.

So take my hand
And walk this land with me

And walk this golden land with me.
Tho' I am just a man

When you are by my side

With the help of God
I know I can be strong.

To make this land our home

If I must fight

I'll fight to make this land our own.
Until I die this land is mine!

Pat Boone - Exodus (this Land Is Mine) 

FOX IN SOCKS

BORN TO LEARN

CLOTHES CROSSWORD

WHERE DO THE CHILDREN PLAY, by Cat Stevens

Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes,

Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.

Switch on summer from a slot machine.

Yes, get what you want to if you want, 'cause you can get anything.

I know we've come a long way,

We're changing day to day,

So tell me, where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass,

For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas. 

And you make them long, and you make them tough. 

But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off. 

Oh, I know we've come a long way, 

We're changing day to day, 

So tell me, where do the children play? 

Well you've cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air. 

But will you keep on building higher 'til there's no more room up there? 

Will you make us laugh? Will you make us cry? 

Will you tell us when to live? Will you tell us when to die? 

I know we've come a long way, 

We're changing day to day, 

But tell me, where do the children play?

PINK PANTHER ENGLISH VERBS

Find more videos like this on EFL CLASSROOM 2.0

WHAT DOES THE WORLD EAT FOR BREAKFAST?

BREAD & BUTTER, by Hugo

Find more videos like this on EFL CLASSROOM 2.0

ST PATRICK'S DAY

ACTIVITIES

FUTURE: WILL (PREDICTIONS, BELIEFS, EXPECTATIONS)

FUTURE: GOING TO (PLANS AND INTENTIONS)

BRITISH SCHOOLS

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

QUANTIFIERS (TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, ENOUGH)

Very too enough more from Yasin Bal

POLLUTION, by Tom Lehrer

If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air.

Pollution, pollution,
They got smog and sewage and mud.
Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud.

See the halibuts and the sturgeons
Being wiped out by detergents.
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,
But they don't last long if they try.

Pollution, pollution,
You can use the latest toothpaste,
And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.

Just go out for a breath of air,
And you'll be ready for medicare.
The city streets are really quite a thrill.
If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.

Pollution, pollution,
Wear a gas mask and a veil.
Then you can breathe, long as you don't inhale.

Lots of things there that you can drink,
But stay away from the kitchen sink.
Throw out your breakfast garbage and I've got a hunch,
That the folks downstream will drink it for lunch.

So go to the city, see the crazy people there.
Like lambs to the slaughter,
They're drinking the water
And breathing the air.

BUNGHOLE OF THE WEEK: TO SOW ONE'S WILD OATS

The saying is referring to a European grass species with the formal name Avena fatua, which has for centuries in English been called wild oats. Some botanists think it’s the wild original of cultivated oats. Farmers have since ancient times hated it because it’s a weed that’s useless as a cereal crop, but its seeds have always been difficult to separate from those of useful cereals and so tended to survive and multiply from year to year. The only way to remove it was to tramp the fields and hand-weed it. Even today it’s still a problem, despite modern seed cleaning and selective weedkillers.

So sowing wild oats was the archetypal useless occupation, indeed worse than useless. It’s not surprising that the phrase sowing wild oats was applied figuratively to young men who frittered away their time in stupid or idle pastimes. But there’s a strong sexual association here, too, because the phrase was often applied, in a more or less indulgent way, and always to young men, to what was politely referred to as youthful dissipation. The associations between male sexual activity and sowing seed are obvious enough.

The saying is first recorded in English in 1542, in a tract by the Norfolk Protestant clergyman Thomas Beccon, though I’m told that a related phrase appears in the works of the Roman author Plautus. It’s common in older English literature, no doubt because the image struck a chord in a society that was still mainly agrarian. Here’s a typical example, fromLittle Women by Louisa May Alcott, of 1869: “Boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles”.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/

COMPARATIVES AND SUPERLATIVES

Comparatives superlatives from Carmen Olmedo Rueda

-ED -ING ADJECTIVES

Ing adjectives from muh1211 Abu Awwad

E-MAIL WRITING

BUNGHOLE OF THE WEEK: HEAR STH THROUGH/ON THE GRAPEVINE

The expression ‘through the grapevine’ (or sometimes ‘on the grapevine’) is commonly used to mean ‘unofficially’ rather than through an official announcement, for example ‘I heard it on the grapevine that they’re planning to make some people redundant’. Rumours and gossip are spread ‘on the grapevine’ but why ‘the grapevine’? The term originated in the USA and comes from the telegraph system invented in the 19th century by Samuel Morse. The system required thousands of kilometres of telegraph wire to be installed, held in place several meters above the ground by telegraph poles placed at regular intervals along the telegraph route. People thought the wires and poles looked like the strings used to train vines so the telegraph lines became known as ‘the grapevine’. During the American Civil War rumours were often spread via the telegraph lines. When people were asked whether a particular story was true, they would often reply ‘I heard it through the grapevine’.

Source: www.onestopenglish.com

PARTITIVES & CONTAINERS

Partitives from Adriana

IT IS ALWAYS NOW, by Sam Harris

it is always now 
I actually want to talk 
today about death 
now most of us do our best to not to think about death 
but there's always part of our minds that knows 
this can't go on forever 
part of us always knows 
that we're just a doctor's visit away or a phone call away from being starkly 
reminded 
with the fact of our own mortality 
or of those closest to us 
now I'm sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form 
you must know how uncanny it is 
to suddenly 
be thrown out of the normal course of your life 
and just be given the full time job of not dying 
or caring for someone who is 
but the one thing people tend to realize 
at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time 
when life was normal 
and it's not just what they, it's not just what they did with their time, it's not just 
that they 
spent too much time working or or compulsively checking email 
it's that they cared about the wrong things 
they regret what they cared about 
their attention was bound up in petty concerns 
year after year 
when life was normal 
and this is a paradox of course because 
we all know 
this epiphany is coming 
I mean, don't you know this is coming? 
don't you know there's going to come a day 
when you'll be sick or someone close to you will die 
and you'll look back 
at the kinds of things that captured your attention 
and you'll think, "what, what was I doing?" 
you know this, and yet if you're like most people, 
you'll spend most of your time in life 
tacitly presuming you'll live forever 
it's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time 
or bickering with your spouse 
I mean this, these things only makes sense 
in light of eternity 
there better be a heaven if we're gonna waste our time like that 
there are ways to 
really live in the present moment 
what what's the alternative? 
it is always now 
however much you feel you may need to plan for the future 
to anticipate it, to mitigate the risks, 
the reality of your life is now 
this may sound trite 
but it's the truth 
it's not quite true as a matter of physics, in fact there is no now 
that encompasses the entire universe you can't talk about an event 
being simultaneously 
occurring here and one 
at the same moment occurring in Andromeda 
the truth is, now is not even well-defined as a matter of neurology because 
we know that inputs to the brain 
come at different moments and that consciousness is built upon layers 
of inputs whose timing to have to be different 
our conscious awareness of the present moment is 
in some relevant sense already a memory 
but as a matter of conscious experience 
the reality of your life 
is always now 
and I think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind in 
fact I think there's probably nothing more important to understand 
about your mind than that 
if you want to be happy 
the past is a memory 
it's a thought 
arising in the present 
the future is merely anticipated, it is another thought 
arising now 
what we truly have 
is this moment 
and this 
and this 
and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth 
repudiating it, fleeing it, overlooking it, 
and the horror 
is that we succeed 
we we've managed to 
never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we 
are we are 
continually hoping to become happy in the future 
and the future never arrives 
even when we think we're in the present moment we're, we're in very 
subtle ways, always looking over its shoulder 
anticipating what's coming next 
we're always solving a problem 
and it's possible to simply drop your problem 
if only for a moment 
and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present 
this is not a matter of new information 
or more information, it requires a change in attitude 
it requires a change in the attentiveness you pay 
to your experience in the present moment 

PAST SIMPLE VERBS

This is the tale of Mister Morton
Mister Morton is who?
He is the subject of our tale
And the predicate tells what Mister
Morton must do

Mister Morton walked down the street
Mister Morton walked
Mister Morton talked to his cat
Mister Morton talked
(Hello, cat, you look good)
Mister Morton was lonely
Mister Morton was

Mister Morton is the subject of the sentence
And what the predicate says, he does

Mister Morton knew just one girl
Mister Morton knew
Mister Morton grew flowers for Pearl
Mister Morton grew
Mister Morton was very shy
Mister Morton was

Mister Morton is the subject of the sentence
And what the predicate says, he does

The subject is a noun
That's a person, place or thing
It's who or what the sentence is about
And the predicate is the verb
That's the action word
That gets the subject up and out

Mister Morton wrote Pearl a poem
Mister Morton wrote
Pearl replied in the afternoon
Pearl replied by a note
Mister Morton was very nervous
Mister Morton was

Mister Morton is the subject of the sentence
And what the predicate says, he does

The cat stretched
The sun beat down
A neighbor chased his kid
(Come here, kid - come on!)
Each sentence is completed when
You know what the subject did

Mister Morton knocked on her door
Mister Morton knocked
Mister Morton sat on her porch
Yes, he just sat there and rocked
Mister Morton was a nervous man
When she opened up the door he ran

Mister Morton climbed up his stairs
Mister Morton climbed
Mister Morton rhymed pretty words
Mister Morton rhymed
Mister Morton was lonely
Mister Morton was
Until Pearl showed up with a single rose
Who says women can't propose?
Now Mister Morton is happy
And Pearl and the cat are too

They're the subjects of the sentence
And what the predicate says, they do

BUNGHOLE OF THE WEEK: SPLITTING HAIRS

SPLIT HAIRS - "Argue extensively over trifles or fine distinctions; quibble. A hair can be split today without much trouble, but once it was thought to be so fine that an effort to split it would be a waste of time. The same was true of trifling points, and the analogy between the one and the other was made long ago. A translation in 1691 of Gabriel D'Emillianne's 'Observations on a Journey to Naples' offered: 'Shewing himself very inventive and dexterous at splitting a Hair in his way of handling Scholastick matter.' Gabriel D'Emillianne was the pseudonym of Antonio Gauin." From "Dictionary of Cliches" by James Rogers (Wings Books, Originally New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985).

Source: http://www.phrases.org.uk

THE BALLAD OF MARY SLADE, by Robin Fuller

FORGETFULNESS, by Billy Collins

Forgetfulness - Billy Collins Animated Poetry from smjwt on Vimeo.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. 

MASKS, by Shel Silverstein