Nov (آبان 10 – آذر 9)

Trustworthy and loyal. Very passionate and dangerous. Wild at times. Knows how to have fun. mysterious. Everyone is drawn towards your inner and outer beauty and independent personality. Playful, but secretive. Very emotional and temperamental sometimes. Meets new people easily and very social in a group. Fearless and independent. Can hold their own. Stands out in a crowd. Essentially very smart. Usually, the greatest men are born in this month. If you ever begin a relationship with someone from this month, hold on to them because their one of a kind. Repost in 5 mins & you will excel in a major event coming up sometime this month.

Passionate: having very strong feelings or emotions

Temperamental: describes someone whose mood tends to change very suddenly

Tips: Ways to Create Humor in the Classroom

Effective teachers use humor in the classroom to motivate students to learn, enhance group cohesion, and defuse tense situations. Here are a few ways you can bring humor into your classroom:

FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE.

Adopting a light, playful mind set helps establish a warm, safe learning environment.

PRACTICE VERBAL AND NONVERBAL PLAYFULNESS.

Use facial animation: smile, make lively expressions, and let your eyes sparkle. Use comfortable body language and a relaxed voice. Make sure your nonverbal messages match your verbal messages. (For example, if you say something intended as humor, but your body language is serious, your students could perceive sarcasm.)

USE HUMOR IN A STYLE THAT IS COMFORTABLE FOR YOU.

There are many ways to be humorous, and some styles may suit you more than others. Choose a style that feels natural to you.

KEEP A "HUMOR" JOURNAL.

Write down instances of when you used humor that worked well. Reflect on what happened and why your humor was well-received. Consider how you might employ that same type of humor in the future.

TARGET YOURSELF, NOT STUDENTS.

To avoid a sense of threat, the safest target for humor is yourself, not your students.

USE HUMOR TO DEFUSE TENSION.

Develop your ability to read your students' tension levels. When you sense tension, try to defuse it by making a humorous remark or telling a funny story. (Note: This approach is most successful when a tense situation begins; once the tension has had time to grow, humor may not be an effective technique.)

TIE YOUR HUMOR TO THE CONTENT.

Humor does not have to be a diversion or digression from curriculum. Whenever possible, weave humor into what your students are already learning. (See examples below.)

CLASSROOM EXAMPLES

Here are some ways to tie humor to content:

• Rewrite a familiar song to incorporate facts your students are learning. (For example, rewrite "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," replacing the simple lyrics with more difficult synonyms from your students' vocabulary list.)
• Have your students demonstrate understanding of a book, play, or textbook chapter they've read by writing a humorous, modernized version. (For example, students could write a summary of "Hamlet" and perform it as a rap for the class.)
• Put up a bulletin board and invite students to bring in humorous portrayals of a subject they're studying. (For example, jokes, cartoons, limericks, and so on.)
• Create puns and mix metaphors when discussing a subject of study, and have your students create their own. This exercises their creativity as well as checking for comprehension. In the words of humor educator Joel Goodman, "Humor and creativity are intimately related -- there is a connection between HAHA and AHA."

Give the gift of humor to your students in one of the above ways, or tap into your own imagination for innovative ways to bring the many benefits of humor to your students' learning experiences.  

Source : Humor in the Classroom

Fashion Cycles from Coco Chanel to Britney Spears: How Sociological Theory Can Help Explain What’s in Style

Since 1998, one of the main fashion trends among white, middle-class, pre-teen and young teenage girls was the Britney Spears look: bare midriffs, highlighted hair, wide belts, glitter purses, big wedge shoes, and Skechers “energy” sneakers. But in 2002 a new pop star, Avril Lavigne, was rising in the charts. Nominated for a 2003 Grammy Award in the “Best New Artist” category, the 17-year-old skater-punk from the small town of Napanee in eastern Ontario, affects a shaggy, unkempt look. She sports worn-out T-shirts, 70s-style plaid Western shirts with snaps, low-rise blue jeans, baggy pants, undershirts, a tie, a backpack, a chain wallet, and, for shoes, Converse Chuck Taylors. The style is similar to the Grunge look of the early 90s, when Nirvana and Pearl Jam were the big stars on MTV and Kurt Cobain was king. Thanks largely to Avril Lavigne, the Wall Street Journal announced in December 2002 that Grunge might be back.

Why in late 2002 were the glamorous trends of the pop era possibly giving way in one market segment to “neo-Grunge?” Why, in general, do fashion shifts take place? In the next few minutes I’m going to illustrate how the major theoretical approaches in sociology – functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and feminism – can help explain fashion cycles. Clothing styles come and go. Many of us are influenced by them. Why does this happen?

Until the 1960s, the standard sociological approach to explaining the ebb and flow of fashion trends was functionalist. In the functionalist view, fashion trends worked like this. Every season, exclusive fashion houses in Paris and, to a lesser extent, Milan, New York, and London would show new styles. Some of the new styles would catch on among the exclusive clientele of Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, and other big-name designers. The main appeal of expensive new fashions was that, by wearing them, wealthy clients could distinguish themselves from people who were less well off. Thus, fashion performed an important social function. By allowing people of different rank to distinguish themselves from one another, fashion helped to preserve the ordered layering of society into classes. (“It is an interesting question,” wrote 19^th century American writer Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “how far [people] would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.”) Especially by the 20^th century, thanks to technological advances in clothes manufacturing, it didn’t take long for inexpensive knockoffs to reach the market and trickle down to lower classes. New styles then had to be introduced frequently so fashion could continue to perform its function of helping to maintain an orderly class system. Hence the ebb and flow of fashion.

The functionalist theory was a fairly accurate account of the way fashion trends worked until the 1960s. Then, fashion became more democratic. Paris, Milan, New York, and London are still hugely important fashion centers. However, new fashion trends are increasingly initiated by lower classes, minority racial and ethnic groups, and people who spurn “high” fashion altogether. Napanee is, after all, pretty far from Paris, and today big-name designers are much more likely to be influenced by the inner-city styles of hip-hop than vice-versa. New fashions no longer just trickle down from upper classes and a few high-fashion centers. Upper classes are nearly as likely to adopt lower class fashion trends that emanate from just about anywhere. As a result, the functionalist theory is no longer such a satisfying explanation of fashion cycles.

Some sociologists have turned to conflict theory as an alternative view of the fashion world. Conflict theorists typically think of fashion cycles as a means by which industry owners make big profits. In their view, owners introduce new styles and render old styles unfashionable because they make more money when many people are encouraged to buy new clothes often. At the same time, conflict theorists say, fashion helps to keep people distracted from the many social, economic, and political problems that might otherwise incite them to express dissatisfaction with the existing social order and even rebel against it. Conflict theorists, like functionalists, thus believe that fashion helps maintain social stability. Unlike functionalists, however, they argue that social stability bestows advantages on industrial owners at the expense of non-owners.

            Conflict theorists have a point. Fashion is a big and profitable business. Owners do introduce new styles to make more money. They have, for example, created The Color Marketing Group (known to insiders as the “Color Mafia”), a committee that meets regularly to help change the national palette of color preferences for consumer products. According to one committee member, the Color Mafia makes sure that “the mass media, . . . fashion magazines and catalogs, home shopping shows, and big clothing chains all present the same options.”

English Lessons

Lesson 1: English - the International Language
 Lesson 2: Urban Legends
 Lesson 3: The Story of Santa Claus
 Lesson 4: Visions of the Future (1)
 Lesson 5: Visions of the Future (2)
 Lesson 6: The Greatest Love Story Of All Time
 Lesson 7: Body Language
 Lesson 8: Applying for a Job
 Lesson 9: British Cuisine
 Lesson 10: Can Annimals Think?
 Lesson 11: Ecotourism: the New Face of Travel
 Lesson 12: Galapagos Islands
Lesson 13: Heathrow Airport - UK gateway to the World
 Lesson 14: Crime and Punishment
 Lesson 15: New Year's Day - History, Traditions, and Customs
 Lesson 16: Buying a Home
 Lesson 17: The History of Money
 Lesson 18: The British Isles
 Lesson 19: Air Pollution
 Lesson 20: Handwriting Analysis

Why We Follow Fashion

Fashion is a problem for evolutionary psychologists, who have to try and explain it. As Matt Ridley points out in his excellent book The Red Queen, the fact that women are so interested in wearing the right shoes and this season's colours is a bit of a mystery. The problem is this: evolutionary psychology insists that if humans have some innate shared instinct, then this must have evolved, and so must have some bearing on breeding success. It is undoubtedly the case that British women are far more interested in fashion than the men here. Specifically, they are interested in women's fashion. This would be easy to explain if men were interested in women's fashion, but they are not. If men were interested in women's fashion, then women could signal their quality to men by wearing the latest togs, and men would select mates based on these signals. The snag is, that men don't. Men will near enough always prefer a beautiful healthy young woman in last century's fashions to an ugly diseased old woman in top modern designer wear.

So if men do not select women according to their fashion sense, why do women bother? Fashion has a cost, and that cost has to be borne by some advantage. If women do truly have an innate fashion interest, and men truly have none, then the war must be, I suggest, between women. Women are not trying to attract men by wearing fashionable clothes, but they are trying to give themselves an edge over potential rivals.

Go into a shop selling magazines today in Britain, and you'll see hordes of magazines selling fashion tips to women, and a handful selling them to men, and the men's magazines haven't been going nearly so long, nor sell so many. There is also the phenomenon of the "lads' mag" in which busty young things are compared for their fleshy pneumatic qualities, and nowhere does it tell you where you can buy the bikinis they are wearing. These magazines are targeted very definitely at their audiences, and men are positively repelled by the women's magazines, just as women are put off by the men's. The greatest likelihood is that these magazine producers know what they are doing, and are going with the grain of human instinct, rather than against it.

In a monogamous world, men will find young women especially attractive. My reasoning is this: if men have to commit to one woman for life, and not have sex before marriage, then the men who breed most will be the ones who pick young wives. Conversely, in a relaxed free-loving polygynous society, the men who do best will be the ones who have broader tastes, as these will have the most opportunities for fathering children.

Let us start, though, with monogamy. In monogamous societies, I would expect there to be massive emphasis on youth when it comes to judging women's beauty, and I would expect women to be more interested in fashion than men. Men would pick women according to their fertility, and unless women came up with a way to mimic youth and health that could fool men, a woman's fashion sense would be of very little help to her in making herself attractive to men.

However, a woman's fashion sense would not be useless. Imagine a society in which there are not very many women around who are available. Such a society was the one in which we evolved. In the world of the forager, a potential mate came along seldom, and one usually only had a small selection of women from which to choose a life partner. In this society, a woman who had known the local men for ages and was on good terms with them, was very nice, but perhaps not the best looking or a little bit past her prime, might lose out to some slip of a thing who walked out of the forest. A foreign woman might out-compete all the local women, even if she hardly spoke the language, if she was young and pretty, and this would not please the local women. What could these women do to keep the stranger out? Well, just as language seems to have evolved partly to keep out outsiders (a human who has learned a language as an adult will almost never fully master it and pass as a local), so too could fashion. The local women could make it next to impossible for the foreigner to pass as a local, and become accepted in society, by coming up with many arbitrary and subtle rules of fashion.

Does this fit the facts? Well, no one really knows how many affairs men of the past had, but it seems reasonable to imagine that in the days of the landed gentry, such as in pre-revolution France, the dandyish men who took great trouble to dress in the latest fashions were having more affairs outside of their marriages thanks to this fashion interest. Even though their world was officially monogamous, it was in effect, so far as genes were concerned, polygynous. In some polygynous tribal societies today, the men parade in gaudy face-paints and costumes, and are picked out by the women. Only the men who understand the language of the face painting and costume making get it right, thus excluding outsiders and cutting down competition.

So, that is my theory: that the fact that modern British women are more interested in fashion than men is down to a person's ability to narrow the field of competition by excluding outsiders from the in-group of rivals. In my childhood, there were very few fashion magazines for men, and these generally dealt with the very up-market end of fashion, since only rich men were getting more mates through fashion. Today, marriage seems to be a fair bit less monogamous, and pre-marital sex is so common, that men have started to show some, but not much, interest in fashion.

Consider now the problem faced by aristocratic women of the 18th century. Like the foragers, theirs was a world of few people in the in-group. Their brothers would have little trouble finding wives, because rich aristocratic powerful men, who stood to inherit lots of resources, could always offer that most attractive of things to their potential spouses: security for the children. However, an ugly aristocratic woman might lose out to a pretty chorus girl, because the local master of the manor might decide to hang convention and marry someone he finds nice and pretty, rather than choose from an exclusive pool of nobles. To combat this, women would conspire to make it next to impossible for pretty lower class girls to break into society. They would come up with a thousand rules of etiquette to do with letter-writing, cutlery use, choice of words, poise, dance.... On top of this they could add fashion: requiring a woman to have four new expensive dresses a year, that no chorus girl could hope to afford.

Did this work? Well, yes, but not perfectly. Ugly aristocratic women did often find aristocratic husbands, but not always. Not far from Newcastle upon Tyne is the Bowes Museum, housed in the country mansion of a stupendously wealthy aristocrat who married a French chorus girl. The local female gentry must have been livid. This doesn't disprove my theory, because I never said that any interest in fashion would exclude all outsiders. I only meant that by putting a fair bit of effort into fashion, many people could improve their breeding prospects by making it more difficult for outsiders to muscle in, and this is what I observe in the world.

Source: lloydianaspects.co.uk

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