Kulturraumstudien USA, Homework for June 7th

For homework, please read pp. 424-433 from These Truths and answer the following questions: 

1. What caused the Wall Street Crash of 1929? (In other words, what factors converged to trigger it?)

2. Compare and contrast the public reception of Hoover and FDR. 

3. The term "new deal" is referenced in this section. What did FDR mean by it when he used it and how has it been used in 21st-century US politics? 

4. The League of Women Voters is referenced on pg. 431. Using outside research, find out about the organization's current structure and goals.

5. How did Eleanor Roosevelt reinvent the role of first lady? 

The slides from the May 31st sessions are posted under the title "WWI and the Roaring Twenties".

Music and pop culture of the Roaring Twenties (and little bit afterward :-) ): 

George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue - Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic (1976) - YouTube

Louis Armstrong "Dinah" 1933 - YouTube

Walt Disney Animation Studios' Steamboat Willie - YouTube

Kompetenzerweiterung II (Monday/Wednesday Group), Homework for June 7th

Please consult the schedule for your second Teilleistung (oral exam based on the reading/listening log), which I've posted in the "Class information" folder on Ilias. Please use our Zoom session login information for that time slot UNLESS you have a partner in the Tues/Thurs group; in that case, please obtain the login information for that session from your partner or from me via email. 

Your task for this week is to learn ALL of the vocabulary for Unit 18 (Reactions and health) and complete all of the remaining accompanying exercises. Please also do all of Review 9 on pp. 152-153. Much of this material will be review, but please pay attention to sections (those other than topic vocabulary and word formation) that we did not cover last semester.

We'll be looking at collocations more in depth next week, so please complete the following quizzes:  

https://speakspeak.com/english-grammar-exercises/intermediate/intermediate-grammar-exercise-collocations

https://www.english-grammar.at/online_exercises/collocations/coll001-adjectives.htm

https://speakspeak.com/english-grammar-exercises/upper-intermediate/collocations-3

Some supplementary exercises for the position of adverbs: 

(This is a nice run-down put together by Cambridge: Adverbs and adverb phrases: position - English Grammar Today - Cambridge Dictionary )

Pre-Intermediate Grammar | Position of Adverbs | esl-lounge Student

Position of adverbs in sentences - Exercise (englisch-hilfen.de)

Position of Adverbs - Exercises (lingolia.com)

Your optional essay prompts for this week are:

1. What should young people do to maintain sound mental health during their studies or apprenticeships? (This video might provide you with some ideas, but please don't simply summarize its content (the Mayo Clinic is one of the premier medical institutions in the US): Teens and mental health: Mayo Clinic Radio - YouTube)

2. Do companies have the right to monitor their employees' health? (This article might help, but, again, please don't just summarize its content: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/14/is-your-boss-secretly-or-not-so-secretly-watching-you ) 

Choose one of the above questions for your optional essay of 250-350 words and submit it to me via email in an MS Word document by Thursday, June 3rd  at midnight. Essays must meet the word-limit guidelines and be submitted by the deadline in order to receive feedback. 

Kompetenzerweiterung II (Tuesday/Thursday Group), Homework for June 10th

Please write down your time slot for the second Teilleistung (the file is featured in the "class information" folder on Ilias). We will use our class Zoom login information for those exams as well.

For homework, please read Units 15 and 16 and do all of the accompanying exercises. In addition, please do the review on pp. 136-137. 

Your optional essay topics for this week are:

1. What constitutes a solid foundation in a relationship? (Feel free to address any type of relationship.)

2. If you were to change one thing about housing in your town or city, what would it be? (Consider the content of this video, which outlines the housing challenges students faced at the beginning of the pademic and which many are still facing (your response of course does not have to have anything to do with the pandemic: Closing Universities Is Creating a Housing Crisis for Students - YouTube) 

Choose one of the above questions for your optional essay of 250-350 words and submit it to me via email in an MS Word document by Tuesday, June 8th at midnight. Essays must meet the word-limit guidelines and be submitted by the deadline in order to receive feedback. 

Kulturraumbezogene Wirtschaftsthemen, Homework for June 1st

Make sure to submit the slides for your presentation by May 27th at 5 pm. Changes to slides cannot be made after the deadline (irrespective of when the presentation time slots are scheduled in June). 

For homework, please do the following:

- watch the following video on ramen in US prisons and answer these two questions: 1) Why is ramen so valuable in US prisons? 2) What does this data tell us about how markets work?: Why ramen is so valuable in prison - YouTube

- read the article "Consider the Lobster Roll" in the "Markets and cryptocurrency" folder on Ilias and complete the accompanying comprehension questions.

- read through the scans entitled "cryptocurrency" and "Bitcoin" (each have two parts).

- open the scan "bitcoin vs libra" and organize the similarities and differences between the two into a Venn diagram. 

- watch this video and be able to account for why Bitcoin's has rallied on the stock market this year (essentially: why is 2021 different for Bitcoin?) What's Happening With Bitcoin? - YouTube

(If you're interested in the blockchain technology at the heart of Bitcoin, this is a cool optional video, which is part of Wired magazine's "5 levels" series): Blockchain Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED - YouTube

(And this is a Conan O'Brien sketch that captures quite nicely how the vast majority of the public has no idea how Bitcoin works: Bitcoin's COO Explains What Bitcoin Is - YouTube Again, this is optional ;-).) 

- finally, watch this video and answer the questions below Could digital currencies put banks out of business? | The Economist - YouTube

1. What is fractional reserve banking?

2. What challenges are intangible assets presenting banks with? 

3. Why does the video argue that digital currencies issued by governments might be more radical than cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin? 

4. What risk is involved in using digital currencies (think of risk from the perspective of different parties involved)?

I've also posted another optional article in the folder this week ("case for bitcoin") that explains cultural perception of the Bitcoin community quite nicely. 

Your optional essay for this week is to answer the following question in an essay of 250-350 words: will digital currencies and cryptocurrencies change the way banking works forever? This essay is due by Monday, May 31st by 5 pm. Please send it as a .docx file to my email address. 

Kulturraumstudien USA, Homework for May 31st

For homework, please watch these videos on US accents (the three parts total to about 35 minutes, so plan your viewing accordingly): 

Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents - (Part One) | WIRED - YouTube

Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U.S. Accents - (Part 2) | WIRED - YouTube

Accent Expert Gives a Tour of North American Accents - (Part 3) | WIRED - YouTube

Take some notes as you listen (no need to be comprehensive, but jot down some terms/details/historical information that interest you) and see if you can place where some of the accents you hear in your favorite series (think characters whose accents stand out like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory or Phoebe from Friends) are from. 

The slides from the May 10th Zoom session are posted under "Women's Suffrage and Waves of Feminism" on Ilias. 

For those who want to geek out about dialectology, accents, and varieties further, here are some useful links: 

American Dialect Society

Language Log (upenn.edu)

Kompetenzerweiterung II (Monday/Wednesday Group), Homework for May 31st

Make sure to submit your Teilleistung logs to me by May 21st. 

For homework, please read Units 15 and 16 and do all of the accompanying exercises. In addition, please do the review on pp. 136-137. 

Your optional essay topics for this week are:

1. What constitutes a solid foundation in a relationship? (Feel free to address any type of relationship.)

2. If you were to change one thing about housing in your town or city, what would it be? (Consider the content of this video, which outlines the housing challenges students faced at the beginning of the pademic and which many are still facing (your response of course does not have to have anything to do with the pandemic: Closing Universities Is Creating a Housing Crisis for Students - YouTube) 

Choose one of the above questions for your optional essay of 250-350 words and submit it to me via email in an MS Word document by Thursday, May 27th at midnight (this mistakenly read "Thursday May 28th" in a previous post). Essays must meet the word-limit guidelines and be submitted by the deadline in order to receive feedback. 

Kompetenzerweiterung II (Tuesday/Thursday Group), Homework for May 27th

Don't forget to meet with your partner this week and next and to submit your Teilleistung log to me by May 21st. 

For homework, please read Units 25 and Units 26 from Destination and do all of the accompanying exercises. In addition, please read the grammar pages and complete the accompanying exercises uploaded to the "Reported speech" folder on Ilias.

This video is a very nice recap from BBC Learning English that covers quite a few verbs that are used in conjunction with reported speech. (It's important to learn a set of verbs for reporting because they must be used in order to introduce the reporting in English. Compare this with German in which your Konjunktiv I does all of this work on its own.) VOCABULARY: How to use reporting verbs like insist, demand and advise - YouTube

All three questions below for your optional essay center on the theme of hobbies and free time from your vocabulary unit for this week.

1. Watch the TED talk "How to gain control of your free time" and take note of the speaker's main message and points. Do you agree with/can you relate to her advice? Write an essay taking one of her messages and expanding on it or refuting it: How to gain control of your free time | Laura Vanderkam - YouTube
2. Watch the video "Screen Time Rules for Kids from NPR" and answer the question, "How much screen time is too much for kids?" (The video doesn't give any specifics here, so it's up to you to determine this.) Screen Time Rules For Kids | Let's Talk | NPR - YouTube
3. Read the article "Why Don't Millennials Have Hobbies Anymore?" and answer the question posed in its title on your own terms: https://www.elitedaily.com/life/millennials-hobbies-anymore/1287244

Choose one of the above questions for your optional essay of 250-350 words and submit it to me via email by Tuesday, May 25th at midnight. 

Kulturraumbezogene Wirtschaftsthemen, Homework for May 11th

 For homework, please: 

- begin work on your second Teilleistung (see the folder "Second Teilleistung" on Ilias). 

- watch this episode of Netflix's explained on the stock market and complete the questions in the "stocks" folder on Ilias (file name: Questions for Netflix explained stock market): Explained | The Stock Market | FULL EPISODE | Netflix - YouTube

- have a look at this video and explain shorts selling into your own words: GameStop Mania: How Reddit Traders Took On Wall Street - YouTube

- do the exercises in the "Business Spotlight" files in the "stocks" folder on Ilias and check your answers with the answer key file 

- read the first two pages entitled "Financial markets". The exercises are included in the folder for extra practice or enrichment; you do not need to do them

- the files "financial centres" and "shareholder value" are also included in the Ilias stocks folder for review, extra practice, or enrichment

Optional essay: some people say the stock market is just one big casino. How do you respond to this? Is this good reasoning for choosing not to invest? Compose a response consisting of 250-350 words and submit this to my email address as a .docx file by Monday, May 10th at 5 pm.

Kulturraumstudien USA, Homework for May 10th

For homework, please read pp. 377-386 from These Truths and answer the following questions: 

1. How did the modern welfare state emerge in the late 19th-century/early 20th-century?

2. What was the impact of the Lochner v. New York ruling?

3. On pg. 382, Lepore writes, "But Kelley and female protectionists had made a Faustian bargain." What does she mean by this and do you agree? 

4. What did feminism mean in the early 20th century?

The slides from our session on May 3rd have been posted under "Industrialization and the Lead-Up to WWI".

Links of interest:

How a racist film helped the Ku Klux Klan grow for generations | The Economist

Picturing the Century : Galleries (archives.gov)

October 5 1893 | Vogue

Hate Map | Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org)

Kompetenzerweiterung II (Monday/Wednesday Group), Homework for May 10th

Don't forget to meet with your partner this week.

For homework, please read Units 25 and Units 26 from Destination and do all of the accompanying exercises. In addition, please read the grammar pages and complete the accompanying exercises uploaded to the "Reported speech" folder on Ilias.

This video is a very nice recap from BBC Learning English that covers quite a few verbs that are used in conjunction with reported speech. (It's important to learn a set of verbs for reporting because they must be used in order to introduce the reporting in English. Compare this with German in which your Konjunktiv I does all of this work on its own.) VOCABULARY: How to use reporting verbs like insist, demand and advise - YouTube

All three questions below for your optional essay center on the theme of hobbies and free time from your vocabulary unit for this week.

1. Watch the TED talk "How to gain control of your free time" and take note of the speaker's main message and points. Do you agree with/can you relate to her advice? Write an essay taking one of her messages and expanding on it or refuting it: How to gain control of your free time | Laura Vanderkam - YouTube
2. Watch the video "Screen Time Rules for Kids from NPR" and answer the question, "How much screen time is too much for kids?" (The video doesn't give any specifics here, so it's up to you to determine this.) Screen Time Rules For Kids | Let's Talk | NPR - YouTube
3. Read the article "Why Don't Millennials Have Hobbies Anymore?" and answer the question posed in its title on your own terms: https://www.elitedaily.com/life/millennials-hobbies-anymore/1287244

Choose one of the above questions for your optional essay of 250-350 words and submit it to me via email by Thursday, May 6th at midnight.