Week 2
1. Conversation
At what age do most people in your country get married?
At what age do you want to get married?
Do women usually work after getting married in your country?
Are any of your siblings married? Do you get along with your in-laws?
Do you know anyone who has had an arranged marriage?
Do you think arranged marriages are a good idea? Why or why not?
Do you know someone who has gotten a divorce?
Do you know the difference between love and like?
Can you still love your partner and not like him/her?
Do you think a boy should pay for everything on a date?
Do you think getting married means giving up freedom?
Do you think if you get married that you will change?
Do you think it is better to be single or to be married?
Do you think it is okay for a couple to live together before getting married? Why or Why not?
Do you think it is okay to marry someone of a different race?
Do you think it is okay to marry someone with a different religion?
Do you think it's OK for a man to have two wives?
Do you think it's OK for a wife to have two husbands?
Do you think it's okay for a man to have a mistress?
Do you think it's okay for a man to hit his wife?
Do you think love is necessary to have a good marriage?
Do you think marriage is necessary?
Do you think marriages based on love are more successful than arranged marriages?
Do you think marriage is very stressful for women? How about for men?
Do you think people change after getting married?
Do you think religion influences marriage? If so, in what ways?
Do you think that all adults should be married?
Do you think that you can you find eternal love through the Internet?
Do you want a husband or wife who is older, younger or the same age as you?
Do you want to have children? If so, how many?
How long do you think couples should know each other before they get married?
If your husband or wife has an affair what would you do?
If your parents did not approve of a person you loved and wanted to marry, would that be a difficult situation for you? Why/Why not?
If you had to marry either a poor man/woman whom you really loved, or a rich woman/man whom you did not love, which would you choose?
What advice would you give to someone whose partner hates their best friend?
What are some of the main reasons people get divorced?
What are some qualities that you think are important in a spouse or partner?
Would you ever consider getting divorced?
What do you think of people who get divorced?
What do you think of same-sex marriages?
What is the best way to keep your spouse happy in the marriage?
What would you do if your soon to be mother-in-law seems to hate you?
What would your parents think if you don't get married?
Would you ever marry someone who has been divorced twice?
Would you live with your parents after you get married?
Would you marry someone from another country?
Would you marry someone that your parents didn't like?
Would you marry someone who couldn't speak the same language as you speak?
Do you know a happily married couple?
In your opinion is marriage for life?
Do you think it is OK if married people go out alone?
If you were married would you like to have an open relationship?
Is it better to marry someone who loves you rather than someone whom you love?
Would you marry someone of another nationality?
What are some advantages of an international marriage?
What are some disadvantages?
Do you know anyone who married someone from a different country? If yes, what is their experience like?
How would your parents feel if you married someone from a different country?
Do you think that it is good for children to have parents from two different countries? Why or why not?
2. Speeches for week 3
2. Speeches for week 3
3. READING
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
by Ursula K LeGuin.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
by Ursula K LeGuin.
With the sound of bells, the Festival of Summer came to the city of Omelas. In the city, great processions moved toward the Green Fields on the outside of the city. Some were slow and quiet: old people in long robes of purple and gray, serious master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music became faster, there were sounds of guitars and drums, and the people went dancing.
Far off to the north and west the mountains stood, half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still on top of the mountains was white across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. In the silence of the mountain valleys one could hear the music in the city streets, and with it, the great joyful noise of the bells.
Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How to describe the citizens of Omelas?
They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. In a city like this, one usually looks for the King, mounted on a powerful horse, or perhaps in a golden chair carried by slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were few. As they did not have kings and slaves, so they also did not have the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk. They were not less complex than us. But they were always joyful.
Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking comes from the red and blue tents of the kitchens. The faces of small children are happy and sticky from eating. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the race course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a wooden flute.
All at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Serious-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering. "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope..." They begin to form up along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light leaks in between cracks in the boards and from broken somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, old and stinking, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little wet to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.
The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born retarded, or perhaps it has become stupid through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come.
The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time -- sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but stare in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are quickly filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear…
…The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its butt and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own shit continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's terrible misery.
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, weakness, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child.
But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that evil place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would be destroyed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a anger, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may think about it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too stupid to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too vulgar for it to respond to kind treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own shit to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to understand the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.
Now do you believe in Omelas and its people? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.
At times one of the teenage girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Questions:
- What kind of people live in Omelas? How are they like us? How are they different than us?
- What is the deal that the city has made with its gods?
- Why do people leave Omelas? Would you leave Omelas?
- How is our world Omelas?
VOCABULARY FOR WEEK 3 QUIZ
procession
justice
reality
misery
stock exchange
incredible
occasionally
wisdom
vulgar
whine
cellar
festival
vulgar
whine
cellar
festival
