Due by midnight on Friday, October 6 (50% of final midterm grade)
In a private Kaizena conversation with me, please:
- Post a written comment that says “Midterm Recording.”
- Reply to that comment with a recording in which you complete Part I, below.
- Reply to that comment again with a recording in which you complete Part II, below.
You can practice and record/delete these replies as many times as you need.
PART I: Read out loud the following portion of writer Pico Iyer’s TED Talk, “Where is Home?” When reading it, focus on accurate pronunciation and stress, clear thought groups, and accurate prominence and intonation.
(You can listen to how Iyer delivers this, although note that he has a British accent. You do not need to sound exactly like Iyer, as you will be evaluated only on the elements listed above. The first paragraph below begins around 5:45 of the talk. The second paragraph begins around 13:15.)
The beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. You can’t take anything for granted. Travel is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.” Suddenly you’re alert to the secret patterns of the world. “The real voyage of discovery,” as Marcel Proust famously said, “consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes.” And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different. Many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home. But for the fortunate among us, I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities. . .
. . . Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing. But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It’s the place where you stand.
PART II: In 2-3 minutes (no more than one Kaizena recording), give your opinions on Iyer’s ideas. For instance, having lived and traveled abroad, do you have an example from your own experiences of how how travel, “movement,” and “being surrounded by the foreign” changed your understanding? Or, do you agree that “movement only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to”?