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[Assistant] Hi, I'm Eli. Uhm, uh, the book I wanted to pitch was Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Sackenfour. Uhm, and, uh, the main reason I wanted to pitch it, of course, was Professor Hungerford said that, you know, she's waiting for one of us to pitch their own book. And, um, contrary to conventional wisdom, this is actually my own book.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so that's one world. And then in the other world, the world of the shtetl, we have a well-regarded rabbi who speaks exclusively in capitals. We have a broad, a brilliant girl who emerges magically from a river.


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[Assistant] We have Harry V, the Shtetl's master logician and resident pervert, who had been working for many years on his magnum opus, The Host of Hoists, which he promised contained the tightest of tight logical proofs that God indiscriminately loves the indiscriminate lover.


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[Assistant] Me too. Do you like baseball?


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[Assistant] No, I don't. I like soccer. Me too.


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[Assistant] Make sure you wash all over. You need to look your best for the summer fair tomorrow.


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[Assistant] Hello Lee, just in time. In you go, your friends have already washed. I don't like water. But you're covered in mud. I like


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[Assistant] Oh, here comes Sora. Look how clean she is, Lee.


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[Assistant] Oh sh- oh fuck. Shit shit. Oh. Oh shit. Duh shit.


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[Assistant] Exercise of inviting you to choose our last novel. As I think I explained in the very first class of this term.


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[Assistant] Is an exercise in thinking together about what defines a period of literature.


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[Assistant] So for all the other books in the syllabus, I came with my rationale for why I included them. And for this book, I'm invited again to think about whether I would if I were teaching this again and you had not chosen it.


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[Assistant] So today I want to reflect on that and it will lead directly into my analysis of what the Holocaust is doing in this novel. And then I will have some parting words, uh, for you to conclude the course. When I think about books to include,


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[Assistant] Uh, you might think of the ones that feature the identity plot, as I argued in that lecture mid-semester. The identity plot is a reigning narrative structure in this period.


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[Assistant] And some of the books in our syllabus, culminating in the human stain, and I think this book too could be included in that group.


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[Assistant] Uhm, all are representative of different versions of that narrative structure.


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[Assistant] So, representative, innovative. I include works on the syllabus that I consider innovative in the form of the novel, in the genre of the novel.


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[Assistant] Or for their subject matter. Somehow they think about something in a way that I haven't known anything else to think about before. Uhm, I think Lolita fits this model very well. And in its own way, the bluest eye at that time


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[Assistant] In the 1970s took up a subject that had also been neglected and was innovative in its subject matter.


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[Assistant] Well, this book certainly meets that criterion.


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[Assistant] And some of our other books do as well. Lolita is one, The Human Stain is another, The Woman Warrior, uhm, pretty much any Morrison novel you can choose.


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[Assistant] Uhm, there are lots of books that fit this criteria, and usually what I'm aiming for is a book that will be


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[Assistant] Both widely read and something else on my list.


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[Assistant] So that it covers, uh, more than one base.


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[Assistant] And finally, and this is the most, uh, evanescent category, is it somehow excellent or important in some other way? Uhm, generally for me this is an aesthetic category. So is it an excellent example of writing? Is it an excellent example of narrative art? Uhm,


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[Assistant] Is it important in what it thinks about somehow? Um, philosophically, topically, in a way that nothing else, uh, quite can match.


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[Assistant] I talked to you on Monday a little bit about Jonathan Safran Foer's ambitions for this novel and his ambitions in general as he expresses them in interviews. I think when I consider this novel, I know that this is where Foer's interest truly lies. I'm sure he wants to be widely read.


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[Assistant] Uhm, he probably doesn't want to be representative. Most writers want to be singular rather than representative. Uhm, but this is where the investment really is.


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[Assistant] It's in the effort to be important, to be writing about something important in this novel, that the Holocaust comes to have such a place in it. Or that he chooses a story that has the Holocaust at its center.


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[Assistant] Now, I myself am reserving judgment on the excellence or importance of this novel. But,


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[Assistant] I will say that it is certainly representative


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[Assistant] Of two things. One is a version of the identity plot.


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[Assistant] It is a novel of a young person, two young people, coming to seek out their past and somehow gain from that search some sense of themselves.


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[Assistant] So it is a version of the identity plot. It is also


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[Assistant] Representative of late modernist formal characteristics.


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[Assistant] So this is clever in the way that John Barth is clever with language. It is funny in the way that Pynchon and Barth are just drawing from our syllabus. Uh, it makes some of the kinds of moves that the woman warrior makes.


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[Assistant] So it is representative in that way. I do not think it innovates formally.


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[Assistant] There's nothing I see here formally that I have not seen elsewhere and before.


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[Assistant] So for me, it doesn't quite meet that criteria.


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[Assistant] There is a way in which I think it could be understood as innovative. And my


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[Assistant] This is in that harrowing scene where the woman they think of as


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[Assistant] Uh, Augustine has told them the story of the murder of the Jews of track and broad and then afterwards the grandfather


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[Assistant] Confesses to his complicit conduct with that murder.


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[Assistant] And Alex says he's translating for Jonathan.


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[Assistant] His grandfather's words, he says, in the middle of 185, you cannot know how it felt to have to hear these things and then repeat them.


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[Assistant] Because when I repeated them, I felt like I was making them new again.


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[Assistant] That phrase, making them new again.


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[Assistant] In writing is very closely allied with the project of modernism. A formal project.


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[Assistant] To use that phrase in this emotionally loaded moment suggests two things.


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[Assistant] One is, it draws on a whole history of discourse about genocide, and particularly about the Holocaust.


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[Assistant] That could be encompassed under the banner of trauma theory.


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[Assistant] Now, some of you may have encountered trauma theory. It's a sort of mix of psychoanalysis and literary criticism.


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[Assistant] That has been powerful in the past couple of decades. It's power is waning, I think. Although there's a new interest in sociology in trauma, uh, now.


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[Assistant] In the former literary critical version of it, trauma theorists argued that to tell the story again, to tell the story of a trauma again, was to re-experience it.


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[Assistant] This was a way of understanding representation as human experience, as actual experience unmediated. And the special thing about trauma was that it was the only kind of experience


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[Assistant] This is what most trauma theorists argued, that it was really the only kind of experience that had this quality to it, this peculiar quality to it, that it remained real


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[Assistant] In the sense of remaining experience and not becoming language somehow.


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[Assistant] This was a way of imagining language also, conversely,


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[Assistant] As being experienced. And for some trauma theorists, this analysis of language spread out to other kinds of language so that any language


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[Assistant] And this is a, a far reach of it. Much of this work I have to say was done at Yale.


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[Assistant] By two scholars, Kathy Carruth and Shoshana Fellman, uh, both have now, uh, left the institution, but Yale was very well known for trauma theory.


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[Assistant] It had its applications in Holocaust studies. In particular, in the building of the Fortunoff Archive of Testimony, which is housed here, I think in Sterling.


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[Assistant] The effort to make video tapes of survivors' testimonies was in part, of course, a historical effort.


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[Assistant] To get that knowledge secure before that generation passed away.


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[Assistant] To gather as much as could be known of the human experience of the Holocaust.


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[Assistant] About and studied the Holocaust to have that immediacy.


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[Assistant] That video, uh, was thought to give. So rather than have transcribed testimonies or written testimonies, you get to see the actual face and expression of the person telling that story.


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[Assistant] This is something that scholars have felt, have since the founding of the archive have spent a lot of time thinking about and theorizing. In the course of that theorizing the word witness has come to have a very specific and powerful meaning. The interviewer


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[Assistant] Was to think of herself or himself as not a questioner.


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[Assistant] Or as an interviewer in the way that we would usually understand that role, but rather as a witness to that person's story. A witness in the sense of


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[Assistant] That something had indeed happened. There was a sense that validation was needed in the context of gathering this evidence.


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[Assistant] Witnessing was, uh, theorized in a much more complex way by Shoshana Feldman and Dory Laub, a psychiatrist, uhm, who is, I think Dory Laub is still


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[Assistant] In New Haven, I think he's still at Yale. Uhm, but together they wrote a book called Testimony that had a lot to say about exactly how the witness functions in relation to the person who's testifying.


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[Assistant] And I think you can see the mark of all of this thought about how the Holocaust is received in the present, stamping Foer's work.


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[Assistant] So you see it in part in that little sentence that I just read to you. In saying it again, it was making it new.


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[Assistant] It's as if it's a moment in which trauma is transmitted through language and is imagined to be transmitted in an unmediated way.


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[Assistant] So the repetition that we experience as readers, all these horrible things are said twice because we see Alex translating them.


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[Assistant] That's dramatized for us by the device of Alex as translator.


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[Assistant] So its debt to modernism, or the way it has its eye on modernism behind it, is closely aligned to this understanding of language and its relationship to trauma.


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[Assistant] Now, by the time Jonathan Safran Foer is writing this book, not only has Holocaust studies established, this whole body of thought about language.


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[Assistant] But there are also many examples of what you might call the American Holocaust novel.


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[Assistant] And the one I'm gonna use in my lecture today, uh, to think about in relation to this is Art Spiegelman's graphic novel, Mouse. How many of you have read it? Okay, good. A bunch of you. Uhm, for those of you who haven't, it's the story of a character named Art Spiegelman.


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[Assistant] And you'll recognize that device, of course, from Foer. Uhm, Art Spiegelman is a cartoonist writing a book about his father's experiences in the Holocaust and in concentration camps.


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[Assistant] He goes through the novel alternating between scenes of art interviewing his father Vladek.


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[Assistant] And then it sinks into Vladek's story and there are lots of extended scenes where we just see Vladek


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[Assistant] Escaping from camps and making his way through them and so on. Doing all the things that he did to finally escape with his wife, Anja.


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[Assistant] We find out fairly early in the first volume of Mouse, it's a two volume graphic novel, that, uh, Art's mother killed herself.


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[Assistant] Well after she arrived in America as an immigrant, having escaped.


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[Assistant] And we see her in an inserted cartoon in a different style in the bathtub. She slit her wrists in the bathtub.


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[Assistant] That graphic novel, it's extremely smart in its meditation on the relationship between


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[Assistant] A son and his father and the relationship between growing up in America and surviving the Holocaust. But what's really striking is its meditation on the problem of art's insignificance.


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[Assistant] How can his childhood and his child's problems being bullied at school or whatever it is, how can those compete with his father's experience of having survived the Holocaust by his own wits and by luck?


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[Assistant] That dramatic story is impossible for the sun to match.


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[Assistant] And so there are certain ways, I have argued in print, uh, certain ways that art appropriates his father's story.


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[Assistant] And imagines himself as a survivor.


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[Assistant] So it's a way of transmitting the trauma of the Holocaust from one generation to another. And there are lots of, uhm, graphic devices and linguistic tricks that, uhm, that Spiegelman uses to affect this.


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[Assistant] And, uh, I won't go into that detail now, but uhm, it's something that I've argued at length.


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[Assistant] What makes everything is illuminated different? And I would argue innovative.


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[Assistant] Is that it for me represents the third generation effort to recover the Holocaust. So by the time Foer is writing,


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[Assistant] These stories have been told, not only by Spiegelman, his books came out in 1987 and 1991, or 86 and 91.


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[Assistant] The two volumes of Mouse. So well before, Foer wrote this when Foer was just a child.


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[Assistant] That was not the only book on the experience of the Holocaust. Uhm, those would include Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, very famous example.


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[Assistant] Uhm, a little later, a European writer, German writer living in England, W.G. Sebald, wrote Austerlitz, had a very similar structure of a child of the Kindertransport, someone who had been taken from Prague,


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[Assistant] To England, along with all the other children, Jewish children of his, his neighborhood, to save them.


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[Assistant] He discovers this is his own past and he tries to go back and find the traces of his parents in the concentration camps. And finally he finds


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[Assistant] A snippet of film from one of the concentration camps where his mother was. His mother was a singer. And he slows it down further and further and further just to try to glimpse her face.


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[Assistant] This is a story of the hunt for the beloved parent and for the ground of a child's identity.


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[Assistant] This story has been told many times by the time Thor is writing this novel.


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[Assistant] The first generation American experience.


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[Assistant] So Foer finds himself belated in two ways. One, because the story of the Holocaust and of finding out that secret.


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[Assistant] has already been told, and two, because he's not second generation, he's not the child of a survivor, but the grandchild of a survivor.


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[Assistant] To its centrality, to who you are, how do you make that into an unmediated kind of experience?


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[Assistant] One way that that's done both in second generation stories and I think in this third generation story is by playing off of and, uhm, excavating the Jewish cultural veneration for memory.


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[Assistant] So in Jewish tradition, memory of parents, of the dead,


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[Assistant] Children's relation to the memory of their parents. This is on 268.


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[Assistant] Whoops. Got my page wrong there. Sorry, 260.


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[Assistant] The itch to remember that he, he, uh, the novel imagines as particularly Jewish, but children had it worst of all for although it would seem that they had fewer memories to haunt them,


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[Assistant] They still had the itch of memory as strong as the elders of the shtetl. Their strings were not even their own, but tied around them by parents and grandparents, strings not fastened to anything, but hanging loosely from the darkness.


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[Assistant] So you can imagine this story of Jonathan going back to find the woman who helped his grandfather escape.


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[Assistant] suggests that already internalized here is something that, uhm, holocaust, uh,


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[Assistant] Literature coming before this has been intent on examining and questioning, which is, can you ever have that unmediated relation to the past? Can you ever tie memory back to the event?


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[Assistant] In a way that feels like it's a real connection.


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[Assistant] So here there's a fairly easy if also wistful or elegiac admission that you can't ever really tie that string up. This is why the hunt


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[Assistant] Is never going to be successful in the novel. We will never tie up all those little details. It's meant to be that way.


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[Assistant] Because at this late date, it's clear that's the only way it could be. And that's not innovative.


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[Assistant] It's simply, uh, where the genre is right now.


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[Assistant] This novel is loath to part with.


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[Assistant] What happened to his parents during the holo- to his grandparents during the Holocaust?


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[Assistant] That's the classic question. The parents won't talk about what happened, the child wants to know, the child knows there's something back there, and the hunt is to find out exactly what happened. And usually it's hidden either because the parent left a prior child,


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[Assistant] Lost a prior child or somehow felt guilty about surviving either because of explicit acts where they were forced to sacrifice someone in their family in order to escape


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[Assistant] Or in order to help someone else in their family escape, they were forced to choose. And we see that choice thematized in the Holocaust sections of this novel.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so there's that hiddenness of the Holocaust experience. That's not what's hidden in this novel.


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[Assistant] He knows his grandmother survived the Holocaust. That's not a mystery. The mystery is, who helped her?


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[Assistant] Who helped his grandfather, sorry, it's the grandfather, who helped his grandfather to escape?


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[Assistant] That's the mystery. Augustine is the mystery woman. The photograph represents that missing or hidden knowledge.


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[Assistant] That this drops out of the picture of the novel relatively painlessly. He'll never find her.


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[Assistant] Is, I think, the mark of how the story of hiding something that's hidden gets displaced onto Alex. So what I see here is the transfer of the story of the hidden past from the hidden past of the victim's side of the Holocaust to the hidden past of the perpetrator's side.


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[Assistant] This is a displacement of that narrative onto the perpetrators.


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[Assistant] So now it's Alex who is looking to find the secret buried in the dysfunctionality of his family.


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[Assistant] Now it's Alex who finds in speaking to his grandfather some explanation for why his father is such a tyrant.


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[Assistant] And the same logic of memory and genealogy that you see in the way Jewish families are talked about in their relation to memory and history between generations. That is reproduced as the Father says


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[Assistant] You are responsible for your son. The father is responsible for the son.


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[Assistant] Somehow the father is reflected in the son. So the choice that Alex's grandfather made to point out his friend Herschel as a Jew and to thus give him up to the murderous Nazis. This is somehow played out in


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[Assistant] The dysfunctionality of the family in the present. In the terrible rages and drunkenness of the father.


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[Assistant] It's interesting to me that this novel is about


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[Assistant] Disowning his father. You are not my father, he says, at the end of the novel. As he throws his father out of the house, essentially.


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[Assistant] And hopping into that space. So you can see it in the second and third generation structure.


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[Assistant] You swipe the parents out of the way and you hop into their place as immediately descended from the people who experienced these events.


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[Assistant] Americans writing about the Holocaust is that even if you emigrated here as a survivor, this is not the land of those events. And so I think this gives us some insight into the use of the European setting.


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[Assistant] Europe is where the important history happened.


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[Assistant] That's why a novel trying to be important in these terms has to be set there.


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[Assistant] You need that historical grounding, and it's not in America, it's in Europe.


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[Assistant] The story of Augustine and Alex picks up.


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[Assistant] The trope of witnessing, and it's of course accomplished through Alex's Butchered English. This is on 117 where he holds the photograph out Augustine.


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[Assistant] And he says, have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph? She examined it for several moments, no.


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[Assistant] I do not know why, but I inquired again. Have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph?


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[Assistant] No, she said again, though this second no did not seem like a parrot, but a different variety of no. Have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph? I inquired, and this time I held it very proximal to her face like grandfather held it to his face.


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[Assistant] No, she said again, and this seemed like a third variety of no. I put the photograph in her hands. Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph? No, she said. But in her no, I was certain that I could hear. Please persevere. Inquire me again. So I did.


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[Assistant] Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph? No she said and she put the photograph on her lap


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[Assistant] Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph? I inquired. No, she said, still examining it, but only from the angles of her eyes. Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph? No, she was humming again with more volume.


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[Assistant] Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph? No, she said, no. I saw a tear descend to her white dress. It too would dry and leave a mark.


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[Assistant] Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph? I inquired, and I felt cruel. I felt like an awful person, but I was certain that I was performing the right thing. No, she said, I have not. They all look like strangers. I paroled everything. Has anyone in this photograph ever witnessed you?


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[Assistant] Another tear descended. I have been waiting for you for so long.


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[Assistant] That effort, through witness, to come to an unmediated connection with the past and with the violence of the Holocaust, it's acted out, it is, as Alex said, performed by that almost liturgical repetition of the question and the answer


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[Assistant] And the way that Augustine's body gets closer and closer to the photograph, she touches the faces, she finally merges herself and the photograph by letting her tears fall on it.


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[Assistant] So the question is, have you ever witnessed four?


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[Assistant] These people, she has not yet because no one has come to hear her witness and I'm reminded then of the structure of those, uhm, survivor testimonies on video where a witness is required in order for the story to be told.


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[Assistant] And so Augustine now, she has not witnessed because she did not have a witness. Now she has her witnesses. And she will witness to them.


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[Assistant] By what he finds about himself. What he finds out about his grandfather and his family.


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[Assistant] In the second generation story, often it is the family of the second generation.


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[Assistant] Techniques of this novel is how they finally reflect.


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[Assistant] On that transfer of the narrative from the Holocaust literature.


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[Assistant] To the perpetrator's story. And if you look on 160, we can begin to see how this works.


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[Assistant] If you'll recall, uh, they are sitting in the silence and darkness.


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[Assistant] Together, peeling corn for Augustine.


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[Assistant] And opens it. And he says on 159, this is what I read.


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[Assistant] He told his father that he could care for Mother and little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true.


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[Assistant] Finally, he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. What? He asked. What? And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father. He told his father that he would forgive.


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[Assistant] Oh, his father became so angry, so full of wrath. And he told Sasha that he would kill him. And Sasha told his father that he would kill him. And they moved at each other with violence. And his father said, say it to my face, not to the floor. And Sasha said, you are not my father. So in this scene, Alex begins to understand that


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[Assistant] Jonathan is using him as a character.


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[Assistant] And moreover, that Jonathan has penetrated right into the most intimate and painful part of his family life, his relationship with his father, and is fictionalizing that.


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[Assistant] And of course, if you turn to the end, I hope you recognize this on 274, this is in fact this passage from his diary, what we are given as the letter from the grandfather to Jonathan.


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[Assistant] He took his father, he told his father that he could, he could care for mother and little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true.


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[Assistant] Finally, he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. What? And so it goes on to the end of that paragraph, and you can see, culminating as in the diary with, say it to my face, not to the floor, and Sasha said, you are not mine.


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[Assistant] About who exactly is writing this account.


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[Assistant] Whether it's Coleman or Nathan in that novel, how it is that Nathan knows what Coleman thinks.


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[Assistant] How he knows all that happened, all that he says he knows that happened in Coleman's life.


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[Assistant] Well here, at the very end of the novel, when Foer brings out this passage that has been provided much earlier in Jonathan's notebook.


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[Assistant] We are led to question the authorship of all the letters in the book.


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[Assistant] Now, of course, we know it's a novel, we know it's all written by Jonathan Safran Foer, but in the logic of the novel, its self-awareness now verges towards this question. It's not just the reader who's meant to question this, but the novel asks us directly to question it.


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[Assistant] Jonathan is revealed to be the author of this letter.


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[Assistant] Well, there are a couple ways of looking at it. There are those passages in the Book of Antecedents. Remember the, uhm, the Jewish Book of Memory.


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[Assistant] That the Trachenbrotters write over time. Some of those entries are prophetic. They tell the future. And we're given


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[Assistant] A, an excerpt from that book that describes the disaster.


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[Assistant] And so we know that something like prescience is a quality of Jewish writing imagined in this way. As a kind of religious practice. So either we can understand


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[Assistant] Jonathan, as carrying on that tradition, that what he writes in his diary is similarly


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[Assistant] Proleptic. It looks towards the future and transcribes the future. Or we can see it as constructing the future itself.


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[Assistant] So we can see it either as imagining what will inevitably happen or as making the future out of those words.


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[Assistant] The resonance of control, of making it happen leads us to, I think, quite an interesting place.


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[Assistant] And leads me to wonder whether this is not a novel of revenge.


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[Assistant] A survivor of the Holocaust, who later, much later in their life, finally comes to terms with that terror.


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[Assistant] And commit suicide. To transpose that well-worn story, well-known story, into the perpetrator's life and family.


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[Assistant] There are so many moments where


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[Assistant] Would you not do the same? That question gets asked. Who would do differently? How would you decide what to do?


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[Assistant] Of Lista's father who won't spit on the Torah even though he is not a religious man and watches as his entire family is killed.


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[Assistant] And then finally spits so that he, uh, can be killed too.


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[Assistant] Situations, situations really where moral machinery isn't appropriate or possible to think through.


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[Assistant] There is that sense that a controlling author


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[Assistant] Has scripted this future for this particular family in the present.


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[Assistant] So that makes it quite interesting to me. I just want to look on 262.


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[Assistant] At another way that transposing the story outside of the Jewish community radiates out in this novel.


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[Assistant] And maybe mitigates that suggestion of a revenge plot. And this is on 262 and suddenly


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[Assistant] I don't know if you noticed it when you were reading, I found it quite striking. This is talking about the people of the shtetl


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[Assistant] Ask that question implicitly, would you do anything differently? Would you go about your normal life? What would you do?


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[Assistant] And he says, we would do the same, but he also says, we do do the same. As if, mortality


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[Assistant] The fact of mortality, the fact that we all are, all of us.


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[Assistant] Waiting to die, and in the meantime,


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[Assistant] Not thinking about that inevitable end. Going about our daily life with joy and play.


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[Assistant] He says that that is analogous to what these people were doing, even though their end looks so different from the one that Jonathan Safran Foer


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[Assistant] The character in this novel expects to have for himself.


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[Assistant] So the Holocaust story and the reflection that it causes back on the activities of life radiates out in a universalist sense. It doesn't just impose its narrative


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[Assistant] On a new set of participants in the Holocaust.


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[Assistant] That of the perpetrators or those who are complicit, but it radiates out to all people.


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[Assistant] Past and present. So it becomes a quality of the human condition.


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[Assistant] This is a softening move, I think. Uhm, it suggests the tragedy involved in all sides of this story.


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[Assistant] The tragedy of the simple man trying to save his wife and child and in doing so becoming complicit to the murder of his friend.


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[Assistant] So we see that moral complexity and it feels like tragedy because of these softening moves. Now I want to stop there and say that it's in this innovation


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[Assistant] This change to an established narrative about genocide and its relation to literature and writing, that I find this to be an innovative novel. And if I were teaching a course, which I used to teach regularly on genocide and literature, I would probably be very happy to end with this novel.


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[Assistant] I think though, in this novel, it is partly there as a way of taking on something really hard.


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[Assistant] So I talked a little bit on Monday about the quality of this novel as a campus novel, uhm, as the product of a young person.


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[Assistant] And I was joking with you a little bit about the, uhm, the bar being set high for the achievements one can, uh, pull off by the age of 22. Uhm, I wanna use that


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[Assistant] Fact about Forward, that this is a first novel, that it's an especially and overtly ambitious novel. To reflect, uhm, on something that's closer to life, and this is, I think, something that I've earned because


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[Assistant] Literature is about its address, address to life, after all, that's why we read it, because it strikes us as a...


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[Assistant] Also to address something that comes up in the advising that I do here for students year in and year out.


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[Assistant] And to get at that question, I want to read you something, uh, as a good postmodernist from the 19th century.


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[Assistant] This is from Walden, Henry David Thoreau's Walden. So, we have read a lot of books together.


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[Assistant] This little part I'm gonna read to you from Walden comes after Thoreau has talked about the pleasures and the virtues of reading.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and then this is in a section called Sounds. The last section was called Reading. This section is called Sounds.


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[Assistant] I did not read books the first summer. I hoed beans. Nay I often did better than this.


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[Assistant] There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.


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[Assistant] I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes in a summer morning having taken my accustomed bath


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[Assistant] I sat on my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon wrapped in a reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs in undisturbed solitude and stillness while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house until the sun falling in at my west window


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[Assistant] or the noise of some travelers wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.


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[Assistant] I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been.


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[Assistant] They were not time subtracted from my life but so much over and above my usual allowance. I hope that your summer will have a lot of time like that.


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[Assistant] I hope that that time might also have latitude for reading.


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[Assistant] If it's contemporary novels you're reading, informed about where these writers come from, what kinds of projects they might be busy with, what kinds of questions they might be responding to.


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[Assistant] But also that it will give you time to enter into and pretend with Nabokov, and remember back to the beginning of the course, to pretend with Nabokov that you can climb a mountain of the imagination and meet a reader there and forget


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[Assistant] All the kinds of context that I've been teaching you to pay attention to.


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[Assistant] Because it's in that meeting in the imagination that I think literature can most powerfully speak to you.


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[Assistant] So I hope you will go and have that kind of summer.


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[Assistant] 54 years later, a similar storm threatened the region. But this time, the Netherlands were ready.


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[Assistant] The first field activation of the Maislantketting had been a resounding success.


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[Assistant] As one of the planet's largest mobile structures, this storm surge barrier is a marvel of human engineering. But the micellant kidding is just one part of a massive, interlocking system of water controls known as the Delta Works.


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[Assistant] The most sophisticated flood prevention project in the world.


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[Assistant] The Netherlands has a long history with water management. The country lies along the delta of three major European rivers, and nearly a quarter of its territory is below sea level.


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[Assistant] This geography makes the region extremely prone to flooding, so much so that some of the earliest Dutch governing bodies were informal water boards that coordinated flood protection projects.


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[Assistant] But after the storms of 1953, the Dutch government took more official measures. They established the Delta Commission and tasked them with protecting the entire southwestern region.


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[Assistant] About 100 times as safe as the average coastal city. Accomplishing this lofty goal required various infrastructure projects along the southwestern coast. The first line of defense was to dam the region's flood-prone estuaries.


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[Assistant] These large inlets fed many of the country's rivers into the North Sea, and during storms, they allowed floodwater to surge inland. Using a series of dams, the Delta Commission transformed these estuaries into expansive lakes that serve as nature preserves and community parks.


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[Assistant] However, this solution wouldn't work for the Nua Vaterve. As the lifeblood of the local shipping industry, this passage had to be kept open in safe conditions and barricaded during storm surges.


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[Assistant] In 1998, the completed micellant kitting provided the flexible protection necessary.


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[Assistant] Alongside additional barriers like grassy dikes and concrete seawalls, these fortifications made up the bulk of the Delta Works project, which was primarily focused on holding back ocean storms.


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[Assistant] But in the following decades, the Dutch pursued additional plans to complement the delta works and protect against floods further inland. Under the Room for the River plan, farms and dikes were relocated away from the shore,


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[Assistant] This left more space for water to collect in low-lying floodplains, creating reservoirs and habitats for local wildlife.


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[Assistant] This strategic retreat not only decreased flood risk, but allowed for the redeveloped settlements to be built more densely and sustainably. Perhaps no city embodies the Netherlands' multi-pronged approach to water management as much as Rotterdam, a thriving city almost entirely below sea level.


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[Assistant] When a storm threatens, densely populated older districts are protected by traditional dikes.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, newer districts have been artificially elevated, often sporting green roofs that store rainwater.


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[Assistant] Numerous structures around the city transform into water storage facilities, including parking garages and plazas, which normally serve as theaters and sports arenas. Meanwhile, in the harbor, floating pavilions rise with the water level.


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[Assistant] And as the rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten low-lying cities across the world, the Netherlands offers an exceptional example of how to go with the flow.


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[Assistant] As climate change causes natural disasters to become more, well, disastrous, how can we build smarter, more resilient cities and towns, explore how we use physics to create flexible buildings that can withstand earthquakes, or how scientists are experimenting with a form of concrete that can heal itself?


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[Assistant] I've been looking, but I still ain't seen nothing but sand.


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[Assistant] Those imps got some strange tastes if they're sunning themselves out here.


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[Assistant] What's got you, Rosie? Ain't like you to be so quiet. You got the rums or something?


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[Assistant] We're on patrol here. You keep squawking and we're likely to get sniped.


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[Assistant] You too kid. You know Rosie's got a temper on her. She wouldn't go off if you didn't talk back.


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[Assistant] I hear what you're saying, kid. Just be sure you rest up while you can. You've been working since first thing this morning. Your squad seven's only tank pilot. If you pass out on us, we're all tow up, hear me?


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[Assistant] Thousands, that big industrial city with all those ragnite mines, right?


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[Assistant] Gonna take a lot more than a pack of soldiers marching at it to do that, boss.


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[Assistant] I ain't making any promises if this guy turns out to be useless here.


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[Assistant] How are you? I'm good. How was your summer vacation? It was great. I went to Jeju-do with my family.


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[Assistant] Really? What did you do there? We looked around Jeju-do. Sounds great. We rode horses and walked along Jeju-Ole. Jeju-Ole? What's that? It's a walking path. You can see beautiful beaches and fields from there. Wow! I want to go there too. How about your vacation?


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[Assistant] I took taekwondo lessons. Great! What color belt do you have? White. I want to get my blue belt soon. Good luck!


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[Assistant] How are you? I'm good. How was your summer vacation? It was great. I went to Jeju-do with my family.


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[Assistant] I took taekwondo lessons. Great! What color belt do you have? White. I want to get my blue belt soon. Good luck!


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[Assistant] So what's really going on when you want more money, success, health, fulfillment, and it's just not showing up?


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[Assistant] I mean sure, it can be due to a lack of focus or strategy or some bad habits, but in my work, which is getting people to their physical, mental, and emotional best, I found very often it's something so much more protective, primal, and subconscious, which I'll explain using three clients whose names I've changed.


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[Assistant] Let's start with Claire. CEO, top of her field. She's been climbing the corporate ladder for 25 years. Eats, lives, breathes her work.


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[Assistant] And one day, she feels a restlessness. She can't quite put her finger on it. So she decides to relieve some stress by going back to the gym.


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[Assistant] And after a few weeks, she's got lots more energy. Lots more clarity. And this is when it hits her.


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[Assistant] How unfulfilling it's been to climb the corporate ladder in a field she chose just to please her parents. She starts dreading going to work.


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[Assistant] Questions come up. Like, well what else would I do? This is all I've ever known. I've given up everything for this. Now what?


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[Assistant] Too confronting. It's too overwhelming. So she doesn't even realize she's doing it, but she stops going to the gym and sabotages her success. Next take, Margot.


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[Assistant] Who for the last 10 years has been balancing her job, her marriage, her kids. She's exhausted. She gets up early to go to work, get everyone ready for their day, goes to work, comes home, makes dinner, cleans up, and passes by her husband to crash in bed as he's just sitting there watching TV on the living room couch. She feels so empty.


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[Assistant] Overweight, overwhelmed, exhausted, unhappy, unfulfilled. So.


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[Assistant] She decides to start eating a little bit healthier to get her energy back up, get the weight off. She cuts out the sugar and her afternoon lattes.


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[Assistant] After a couple of weeks, her clothes are fitting much better. She's got lots more energy.


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[Assistant] And this is when it hits her that the lack of confidence she had with the extra weight on had her play small.


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[Assistant] She settled for a job she never liked. She also realizes she's grown apart from her husband.


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[Assistant] She's feeling things like, is this all there is? I feel so unloved. I feel so unappreciated.


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[Assistant] She's worried if she keeps feeling these things, will she want to leave her job? Will she want to leave her husband? It's too big of a risk. It's too scary. So she doesn't even realize why she's doing it.


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[Assistant] She goes back to the sugar in the lattes and sabotages her success. And finally, take Greg.


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[Assistant] Who for the last 20 years has been meeting up with his buddies every week.


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[Assistant] Where they get together, grab a beer, and complain about their jobs and their wives, and one day it hits them. You know?


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[Assistant] There's gotta be something more than this. So Greg decides to do some personal development work. He starts watching a few TED Talks.


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[Assistant] And after a couple of weeks, he's becoming inspired. Well, he's learning how he's growing. And he realizes, you know,


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[Assistant] When he sees his friends, of course he wants to talk to them about it. He's all lit up. He wants to share what he's learning. Secretly, he's hoping to inspire them too.


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[Assistant] Instead, they just make fun of him in his new ways. As they do, this is when Greg realizes he's outgrown them. He has less and less in common with them and he feels torn. He'd have to explain way too much if he stops meeting up with him each week. So he doesn't even realize why he's doing it.


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[Assistant] But he stops with all the personal development work. And when he meets up with him now, he's drinking more than he was before, sabotaging his success.


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[Assistant] So why do we sabotage ourselves and what could possibly be the benefit?


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[Assistant] Change is scary. Creates a new awareness, new perspective. Poses a huge threat to what's been so comfortable and familiar. Even if what's been so comfortable and familiar stinks.


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[Assistant] You know, it can almost feel like you're facing a death, no matter which way you turn. You either face the death of what you just learned you want,


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[Assistant] Or you face the death of who you've been. Now that you're ready to become someone new.


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[Assistant] As if this weren't bad enough with all this stress, you've ignited the stress response, creating this cascade of stress related symptoms and illnesses, conditions, even disease. You know, it's so much easier to sabotage yourself and just go numb through either


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[Assistant] You just want to keep the feelings down. But they just keep coming back up again. Going back to what you know.


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[Assistant] Sabotaging your success feels like and seems like the much better option. I mean yes, it keeps you small.


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[Assistant] But you also feel it keeps you safe. Because your head is spinning with ideas like-


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[Assistant] Will these changes lead me to lose my friends, my job security? Will you hear how selfish or crazy you are? Will you have to deal with judgement or criticism at the same time you're dealing with your own self-doubt about what you're up to? These are big questions. Thinking is hard.


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[Assistant] Being honest about what you want is hard. Change. That's even harder. You know, you heard change could be great and look something like this.


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[Assistant] But all you can picture is something like this.


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[Assistant] Because these changes could impact so much, create such a snowball, such domino effect, you do everything you can to make the feelings go away.


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[Assistant] Until you can't. It's as if you've been taking all of your energy, holding onto a pebble, because if that pebble dislodges, there's gonna be a landslide.


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[Assistant] And then there's that moment where the pain of where you are becomes greater than the fear of the unknown.


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[Assistant] You're standing on the edge, ready to jump, without the security of knowing that there's anything to catch your fall. And even with that.


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[Assistant] I mean sure, the self-doubt may still be there. You still want to sabotage yourself, but you push through it anyway. Because you realize you're meant to be, do, or have more. Maybe you realize you've been sleepwalking all this time.


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[Assistant] You see your partner on the other swing. You know what you're supposed to do. You're terrified. And you swing anyway.


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[Assistant] Your heart's pounding, your hands are sweating, you're a mess!


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[Assistant] And you know, you know, you can't move forward unless you let go of where you are. You're right there. That's decision. That's the moment.


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[Assistant] Got it going! An inspiration has taken over!


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[Assistant] You realize you just burst right through your comfort zone. Where life begins. It's the ultimate drug. Because you're high on your own growth, the impact it's having on you, those around you, and it fuels you even further.


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[Assistant] See, now you're not afraid of looking good. Not looking good supports what you're up to.


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[Assistant] Now you sound different, sounding more confident, empowered, inspired.


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[Assistant] Now you have more energy because you're being fueled by your own idea, by your own mission, by your own potential. You realize you could do great things.


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[Assistant] You realize you have something important to contribute. You realize you can make a difference and you love who you're becoming.


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[Assistant] Once you learn to kick that sabotage to the curb. And if you ask me, that's an idea worth spreading. Thank you.


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[Assistant] What are you doing, Jinzu? I'm drawing trees.


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[Assistant] What are you doing, Jinzu? I'm drawing trees.


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[Assistant] Yes, I'd like a hamburger, french fries, and a Coke. Anything else? No, thank you. That's it. Okay. For here or to go? For here, please.


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[Assistant] Yes, I'd like two cheeseburgers. Anything else? Yes, two large cokes, please. Okay, for here or to go? To go, please.


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[Assistant] Where is it at? Who's it on? It's on you so you can check back or full. Pick one and fucking do it.


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[Assistant] I apologize for calling the two of you in on an off duty day.


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[Assistant] Princess Cordelia has graciously extended banquet invitations to the three of us.


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[Assistant] It seems you two will be recognized for your successes at Vassel and more recent ops. The event will be held tomorrow at the castle.


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[Assistant] Just don't forget to wear dress uniforms, gentlemen. I'll meet you both at Castle Randbury's tomorrow evening. You're dismissed until then.


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[Assistant] We should be heading back soon. I believe the exit was this way.


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[Assistant] I-I'm so terribly sorry. Are you alright, Your Highness? I am unharmed.


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[Assistant] So the Federation takes her under their protection, and Galia along with her.


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[Assistant] Understood. Lieutenant, gather your squad immediately.


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[Assistant] All of Europa. Well, there's something we haven't heard before.


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[Assistant] Wait, let me guess. Are you building this airplane, Isara?


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[Assistant] Leave it to you, Isara. You learned all this on your own?


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[Assistant] The job comes with a $1,500 stipend and a major time commitment for the next four months.


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[Assistant] Right? Would you see to it that Mr. Carter, Coach Carter, gets these copies?


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[Assistant] Vogue is a voice of authority and leadership within the industry. Because fashion does not exist in a vacuum.


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[Assistant] Watch the world, study shifts in culture, and listen so you can make choices that speak to what is happening in a wider context.


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[Assistant] You need to stay true to your own vision and to act always with clarity and with conviction. And that to me is what a leader does.


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[Assistant] It's very important for you all to remember that not everybody is going to always agree with you and that you will be at times in your careers criticized, uhm, maybe strongly, maybe, uh, in ways that might hurt you.


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[Assistant] You can't, you shouldn't ignore it. You can't pretend it's not happening. I think it's very...


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[Assistant] Helpful, actually, to listen to criticism and to hear what people have to say. And it's often, you can often learn from it. But at the same time,


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[Assistant] You have to remain true to your own vision and I think particularly in the world of media and journalism


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[Assistant] Whoever you're addressing, whoever you're talking to to understand what it is that you're standing for and to realize that this is


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[Assistant] The core of who you are. And there will be those who disagree.


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[Assistant] You can't be everything to everybody and, and you have to accept that and, and plant your...


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[Assistant] Flag in, in the ground in a way that you feel is most appropriate to the route that you're taking.


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[Assistant] We work at Vogue, so fashion conversations happen all the time, but we also have weekly fashion meetings, which involves everybody that works in fashion throughout the title, whether it's in video or digital or...


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[Assistant] Possibly the most important meetings that we have, even though we've been talking to each other throughout the whole month of fashion shows, is the one that we have when we all come back from the shows.


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[Assistant] We discussed what we have seen, what stood out, ideas, collections we like, maybe those that we didn't, models that we admire that somehow look new and different on the runway. And we then try and distribute these various ideas over the next few months.


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[Assistant] Thank you for all the ideas. It was remarkable that


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[Assistant] Virginia, we've narrowed it down and we've tried to allocate it to two months, but it would be great to study it, discuss it, and then we can go back and review. But on January, Tabitha, I think, suggested


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[Assistant] The boots, which we thought would be great to do early. Then in February, bearing in mind who we have on the cover.


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[Assistant] I wanted to make that very much about, uhm, women's empowerment and wearable clothes and things that are not too fluffy and silly. So for March the idea was to really look at the West Coast for California and then


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[Assistant] April, the global idea moved to April and again looking at what we saw on the runway when there were so many influences from different parts of the globe, I think this issue really


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[Assistant] Comes together very nicely. And then for May, the Met theme is being announced today. I think you all know that it's going to be Camp. June, I wanted to go back to the idea that we've done over the years on Escape.


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[Assistant] Through these discussions, it's very important that I lead my team with my own point of view and that we absorb and reflect what is happening in fashion and the larger culture. But it's also very, very important to listen to others' perspectives and what their observations and experiences were.


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[Assistant] When we're working on shoots for Vogue, we discuss the ideas that are often formed after we've been to see the collections and meetings when we come back from, from, from the shows to really...


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[Assistant] A run through is the process where I meet with the creative team, with the art directors, with the market editors, with the fashion editors who go on the shoots, sometimes with the photographers, with the model editor.


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[Assistant] We all meet in my office and we review and discuss the clothes that we want to feature in an upcoming shoot. We also talk about the concept of the shoot.


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[Assistant] We talk about the locations, we talk about whether it might be groups or singles, if we're shooting inside, if we're shooting outside. We really try and cover a lot of territory.


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[Assistant] I would love for you to come with us to one of those run-throughs so you can really understand that particular process.


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[Assistant] If we want to look at the two jackets. Yeah, I like the jacket that has the piping. I actually think it looks better with the, with the carbon myself.


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[Assistant] When the editors go on the shoots, they fully understand what my point of view is, what Vogue's point of view is, but also within the context of that shoot, they have the freedom to express their own vision.


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[Assistant] When all of you might be looking for a stylist or an editor to work with you, again, it's important to review their work, to meet with them, to talk to them, to understand.


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[Assistant] What it is they like, and having been an extremely unsuccessful editor on shoots myself,


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[Assistant] I have learned over the years that it is important to give your fashion editors the shoots, the assignments.


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[Assistant] Been fortunate enough to work with the greatest fashion editors of...


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[Assistant] All time. And many, many years ago we worked with a wonderful filmmaker to create a film called The Editor's Eye.


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[Assistant] Which to me was such an important piece of work because it really does explain why a fashion editor who goes on the shoots and helps create some of the most remarkable, I'm talking Vogue here, remarkable images of our time, what an impact he or she can have.


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[Assistant] The passion that goes into creating great fashion images and each one of them, whether you're talking Grace Coddington or Tony Goodman or Camilla Negerson or...


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[Assistant] Phyllis Posnick or some of our younger great editors like Jordan Bickham or Alex Harrington, they all have one thing that


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[Assistant] Joins them all together, which is conviction and love of what they do and they all have very individual styles and, and, and


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[Assistant] Marvellous to work with all these different talents is because it's like putting together it's like working with all


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[Assistant] Different writers, different photographers, different editors, they're all bringing a different perspective to... Vogue.


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[Assistant] In a world which is full of women. So I don't think that I have been as exposed to the criticism that, as much criticism that women in leadership roles are sometimes subjected to. But I do think that there is a double standard.


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[Assistant] But you can't let that kind of criticism worry you. You have to do what you feel is right. You have to explain it.


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[Assistant] To those that are involved, the best that you can. And then I think it's also important to move on, not to dwell too much on the agony of whatever decision may have been or, uh,


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[Assistant] To over explain the thinking behind it because...


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[Assistant] It's better to be very clear about your thinking and then turn the page.


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[Assistant] Worrying about what others might think can honestly dilute your judgement and your effectiveness and be disruptive to your leadership and your decision making.


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[Assistant] Early on I understood the importance of owning and trusting my own choices and instincts even when they went against the grain and advice of others.


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[Assistant] Trust yourself to own your choices. Don't bow to consensus or pressure to follow other people's way of thinking or looking at things.


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[Assistant] Don't all those places sound like it to you?


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[Assistant] What was the place you can be? Don't all those places sound like it to you?


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[Assistant] And heaven is supposed to be the happiest place you can be. Don't all those places sound like it to you?


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[Assistant] It's nothing. I'm fine. Now let's go beat us up a battleship.


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[Assistant] Hey kids, welcome back to reading for vocabulary. I'm Brian Stewart. Are you ready to continue? I am. We're on unit one talking about plants lesson two. Not just for food.


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[Assistant] Plants are not just for food. Sure, we eat plants a lot, but they're not just for food. We use plants in other ways. So in this lesson, we will focus on, we will pay attention to,


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[Assistant] Think about plants we use in our lives. Plants we use in our lives, but not for food, for many other things.


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[Assistant] So, we're going to talk about in this unit about how we use plants for things other than food, besides food. Yes, we eat plants, but we use plants for many other things. For example,


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[Assistant] Let's think about this topic a little more. Here we have


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[Assistant] This type of plant. What is it? Of course, it's lemons. These are lemons. If you bite a lemon, it's very sour, right? Uh, so lemons.


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[Assistant] We don't just eat lemons or make them into a drink. We also use lemons in other ways. What other way can we use lemons?


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[Assistant] It's the place where we wash our face, right? Turn on the water, get some water, wash our face, wash our hands. A wash basin. See? Toothbrush. Right? You brush your teeth.


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[Assistant] Every day, three times a day, right, a toothbrush or soap. So what do you think we can use lemons for?


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[Assistant] Can we use lemons to make towels? That would be strange, wouldn't it? Uh, we don't use lemons to make towels. What about wash basin? A wash basin is made of very, uh, strong material, like metal and other types of strong material, not plants.


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[Assistant] Toothbrush, do we use, that would be great to have a lemon toothbrush, right? Like lemon candy, but we don't use that to brush our teeth, right? What about soap?


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[Assistant] If you smell soap, sometimes soap smells like different things. Soap can smell like lemons. So if you have soap,


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[Assistant] So of these things, we can use lemons to make soap. So you see, we don't just eat lemons, we can use lemons to make other things besides food. That's what we're talking about in this unit. Let's begin with our first word.


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[Assistant] Here we have, we brush our teeth with this. We have the picture. Not the toothbrush, right? That's a toothbrush. We're not talking about the toothbrush.


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[Assistant] We're talking about this here. What is this? What's that stuff? We put it on our toothbrush and we brush chiki chiki chaka chaka choco choco, right? We brush our teeth with this. What do we call it? We call it toothpaste. Toothpaste.


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[Assistant] Paste is the material that we use to brush our teeth. Toothpaste. Two words. We put it together. So this is toothpaste that we put on the toothbrush and we brush our teeth with it. Toothpaste. Okay.


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[Assistant] Next one. We already saw this word, right? We just saw this a little bit ago. The yellow fruit, yellow


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[Assistant] But it's a sour taste. And what did I say? I just said lemon.


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[Assistant] These are lemons. So if you have many lemons, right, you have many yellow fruits. It's yellow fruit that tastes sour.


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[Assistant] Okay, our next word, that's an interesting picture. It's the liquid. Liquid is like water, right? Water inside a bottle that girls use to smell nice. So girls like to smell nice. They smell so nice, right?


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[Assistant] Usually girls use this thing to smell nice. It's made of flowers. Many different types of flowers. What do we call it? We call it perfume. Perfume. Puh.


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[Assistant] Per-fume. So we have P, then we have F. Be careful, because P is puh, puh. F is fuh.


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[Assistant] Ha, do you see the difference? Pee, your lips are together.


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[Assistant] Perfume is liquid that girls use to smell nice, right? They put perfume on their bodies. Okay.


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[Assistant] Next one, we have another liquid. It's also a liquid. We cook food in this. So we pour this


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[Assistant] Cooking oil. There's many types of oil, but when we cook food in it, we call it cooking oil. Cooking oil. Okay.


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[Assistant] What's this here? This is very strong, right? We can tie it to one place and pull with it.


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[Assistant] A strong line we tie, tie, right? Can you tie a rope to something? Can you tie your shoes, your shoelaces together? You tie something together. You tie to things, of course I just said it, it is a rope.


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[Assistant] Our rope is very thick, right? We call that a rope.


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[Assistant] Uh, this is a rope and we tie it to things and we can pull, right? So, rope, rope. Okay.


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[Assistant] The next word here, we talked about this before, right? This is something that you wash with when you wash your face, right? You get a little bit on your hand or your cloth and you


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[Assistant] Put it on your face and you wash your face with it. When you wash your hands, you take this in your hands and you wash your hands with this. It helps make your hands very clean.


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[Assistant] That's not so good. It's better if you use soap. Soap. Use soap to wash your hands.


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[Assistant] By the way, it's very interesting. You can see here it says 100%.


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[Assistant] Vegetal. That's a different language. It's not English, but it means 100% vegetable. This soap is made from vegetables. It's very natural soap. 100% vegetables. It's made, we use vegetables to make soap. Okay.


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[Assistant] Are you hungry? Woah, I'm hungry. Just looking at this, woah, it looks really good. Ah, mashita, right?


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[Assistant] This is what we eat to get energy. We want energy. Sometimes we get tired. Ah, it's been a long day. But if we eat something, we get more energy, right? So, and this looks very delicious. What is it? It's food. Food.


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[Assistant] Okay, and by the way, there's two types of food, right?


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[Assistant] These are all plants. We get this from plants. This is meat.


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[Assistant] We get that from animals. So there's two types of food, right? Vegetables are plants and meat.


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[Assistant] Here we have an interesting plant. This is a plant with a fresh smell.


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[Assistant] Ah, smells very fresh. And it tastes fresh. Mmm, it tastes very fresh. It's really good. Sometimes we have this in ice cream.


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[Assistant] Sometimes they put it into hot chocolate, right? It makes the hot chocolate taste, uh, fresh or good. It makes our ice cream taste good. What is it? It is mint.


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[Assistant] Mint. So you know mint ice cream, like mint chocolate chip ice cream. Wow, really good, right? It's green. Mint hot choco. Don't say hot choco, say


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[Assistant] Fresh. It tastes fresh. It's very good. So we put mint in food sometimes, but we also use mint for other things, like perfume, soap, toothpaste. If you have mint toothpaste, for example, it tastes fresh.


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[Assistant] And it smells fresh. Mint. Okay, what's our next word?


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[Assistant] We talked about lemons before. We talked about lemons before. But this is a drink with a lemon flavor. A drink with a lemon flavor. And you can see lemon is here. But this is a drink.


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[Assistant] So we put lemons in, we put sugar and water. Mmm, it's very delicious. What is it? It's called, oh, big word. Lemonade. Lemonade. Lemonade.


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[Assistant] Lemonade. If you say it quickly, it sounds like lemonade.


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[Assistant] Lemonade. Okay, so this is very delicious, right? If it's hot on a summer day, I'm very hot, drink some cold lemonade. It's very refreshing. It tastes good. So it's a drink with a lemon flavor. We say lemonade.


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[Assistant] Okay, the next one. Ah, this looks good, right? Are you hungry? I was hungry before. Now I see this. I'm hungry again.


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[Assistant] This is a long, it's long yellow. This is the color of yellow. This is green. This is yellow. Yellow is this color here. Yellow vegetable that has a green skin. So this is yellow. This is green. The skin is green.


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[Assistant] And then you pull back the skin underneath, it's yellow. And there are many little pieces, right, that we eat. Ah, it's very good. With butter, right? What is it? Of course we say it's corn. Corn.


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[Assistant] Wow, what's this girl doing? She has had a lot of food. She has a lot of energy, right? She is doing something. She is exercising. It's an exercise. Exercise. Something you do to make your body strong.


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[Assistant] An exercise in which, in which the player, the player or the person


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[Assistant] jumps over a rope many times, right? The rope is going around and around and around and that person is jumping, right? They have to jump over the rope many times.


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[Assistant] I'm getting tired. Okay, what is it? It's called jump rope. Very easy. Remember we said that this is like a rope here and you jump over it? It's jump rope. Jump over a rope. Jump rope. Two words. Jump rope. Jump rope. Okay.


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[Assistant] This is another fun exercise or game, right, that you can use a rope. One is jump rope. The other is people pull, pull on the rope.


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[Assistant] A game in which two teams, one team,


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[Assistant] Two teams, and it can be many people, but two teams, one team, two teams. Two teams hold a rope and pull against each other. They pull against each other. So these guys are pulling this way.


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[Assistant] This team is pulling that way. They pull against each other. Who will win, right? Who will win this game? What is this game? We say it is tug of war. It's like war. Two teams, they're fighting the war. Tug. Tug means pull.


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[Assistant] Like this. Pull. That's tug. So tug of war. Tug of war. Tug of war. It's called


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[Assistant] Tug of war. Let's play tug of war. It's a fun game you can use with many people. You have two teams. Make sure the teams are even, right? It's not fair. Teams should have the same number of people. So tug of war. Two teams. Okay, it's a fun game.


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[Assistant] Okay, let's move on to our exercise. We have words in our box here and we have the definitions down here. We have to match these words to the right definition.


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[Assistant] How well do you remember the words we just studied? Let's do a little test, shall we? Okay, so our words are toothpaste.


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[Assistant] Soap and rope, right, they sound very similar. Soap, right, and rope.


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[Assistant] Okay, let's match these definitions. Number one.


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[Assistant] We cook food in this, right? It's cooking


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[Assistant] Oil. Cooking oil. We cook food in this, it's cooking oil. Or just oil. We cook food in oil.


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[Assistant] Number two, a fruit that tastes sour, right? Sour, it makes your, your face.


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[Assistant] Ugly like mine, uuuh. It makes your face, uh, strange. So if you taste it, remember it's a yellow fruit, and you bite into it, it tastes sour. But if you put sugar and water with it, you make a nice drink, right? What is the fruit? We say it is lemon. Lemon.


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[Assistant] Number three, we brush our teeth. We brush our teeth with this. What do we brush our teeth with? Well over here we have tooth, right?


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[Assistant] And then we have paste. Toothpaste. We brush our teeth with toothpaste. With toothpaste, and we put it on a toothbrush. So we put toothpaste, like this is my toothpaste, this is my toothbrush, and then we brush our teeth.


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[Assistant] So, toothpaste, we brush our teeth with this. Okay, number four.


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[Assistant] We use this to wash things. We want to wash something. And we want it to be clean. Very clean.


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[Assistant] So, we don't just use water, we also use soap. Soap and water. We use soap and water to wash our hands, to wash our face, to wash our clothes. We use soap and water.


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[Assistant] Number five, a strong line, a strong line that we tie to things. We can tie it to things.


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[Assistant] What can we use to tie to things? Also we can play the game tug of war and we can also jump over it. What is it? It's rope. Jumping rope. Or tug of war. We use the rope for tug of war. We can also tie things with rope.


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[Assistant] Six, girls. Girls use it to smell nice. Ah, right? They spray it on their bodies to smell nice. It's made of flowers, right? What is it? Of course, it is perfume.


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[Assistant] Perfume. That's the difficult word to pronounce. Girls use perfume to smell nice. Okay? If you're a boy, don't spray perfume on you. Oh, that's strange, right? Girls use perfume to smell nice.


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[Assistant] Okay, that wraps it up for the vocabulary section. Let's take a short break, come back, and read the reading section. Don't go away. See you soon.


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[Assistant] Okay, welcome back to the reading section for lesson number two. We're talking about plants and we're talking about plants are not just used for food. Plants are used for many things.


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[Assistant] Let's find out. Let's read the first sentence. Plants are not just for food. Not just for food.


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[Assistant] Just means only, right? They're not just for food. Sure, we eat plants, that's true, but plants are not just food.


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[Assistant] We use plants to make things too, also. So, plants are not just or only used for food. We use plants to make many other things also.


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[Assistant] Do you like the taste of mint? Of course you do. You like the taste of mint. It's very fresh. It smells fresh. It tastes fresh.


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[Assistant] Some, not all, but some toothpastes taste like mint.


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[Assistant] We use mint leaves for toothpaste. So this is one way we use plants


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[Assistant] Not for food, right? You don't eat toothpaste.


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[Assistant] Don't eat your toothpaste. Ugh. Brush your teeth and then spit it out, right? Don't eat it. So, plants are not just for food.


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[Assistant] We use plants to make things too. Do you like the taste of mint?


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[Assistant] Some toothpastes taste like mint.


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[Assistant] We use mint leaves for toothpaste. So we use the leaves of mint and we put them into toothpaste. So it's one example of how we use plants not just for food, but for other things too. Let's continue.


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[Assistant] Another example. We talked about mint, now let's talk about lemons.


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[Assistant] Lemons are not just for lemonade. Again, not just for. Mint is, uh, plants are not just for food. Lemons are not just for lemonade. They're used for other things too.


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[Assistant] We use them to make soap. So we don't just use lemons to make lemonade and drink it. We also use lemons in another way to make soap.


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[Assistant] Lemons make soap smell good. So if we have the soap,


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[Assistant] We can smell the soap if it smells like lemon. Ah, smells like lemon. Then we know lemons were used to make soap, to make soap. People like the smell of lemons. Lemons smell good.


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[Assistant] Ah, good smell for lemons. So it's a good smell. We put it in soap.


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[Assistant] And it smells fresh and it smells clean. Lemons are very often used in soap because it smells good. We don't eat soap, eugh, that's horrible, right? But we use lemons to make soap. Okay.


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[Assistant] Let's review. Lemons are not just for lemonade. We use them to make soap.


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[Assistant] Lemons make soap smell good. Lemons make soap smell good.


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[Assistant] People like the smell. What do they like? They like the smell of onions. So people like the smell of lemons. Smells good.


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[Assistant] Let's continue here. We use seeds.


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[Assistant] So what do we use seeds for? We use seeds to make, to grow new plants.


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[Assistant] Seeds can be used to make oil too.


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[Assistant] So we see two ways that seeds are used. We don't just eat seeds, we use them to make more plants. That's one way we use plants. Another way, second way, we can use to make oil. We use seeds to make oil. Oil


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[Assistant] Then the oil is used to make food. So we have a few steps. But we start with the seed, the part of the plant. We don't eat it.


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[Assistant] We make oil. Then we use oil to cook food. For example,


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[Assistant] Corn oil is made from corn seeds. Corn oil is very common. Many people use corn oil to cook food. For cooking oil.


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[Assistant] And we make it from corn seeds. So we have our oil. We can cook food in a different way. Ah, it's very good and it's very delicious. And corn oil is good oil to cook food in. It doesn't have a lot of fat. Okay, let's review here.


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[Assistant] Seeds can be used to make oil too.


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[Assistant] Oil is used to cook food.


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[Assistant] Corn oil is made from corn seeds. Okay, so here we can see two ways to use seeds. One way to grow plants, a second way to make oil. Let's continue. Do you like to smell flowers?


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[Assistant] Of course you do. Everybody likes to smell flowers. Flowers smell good. Some flowers smell very nice. So some flowers smell very nice. They smell very good. They have a good smell.


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[Assistant] We use flowers to make perfume. Aha. We use flowers. Why? To make perfume. That's one way we use flowers. We don't eat flowers. We don't eat these flowers. That's strange. But we use flowers to make perfume. Who uses perfume?


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[Assistant] Girls like to smell like flowers. So girls use perfume to smell like flowers. Girls want to smell like flowers. Flowers smell good.


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[Assistant] Not boys. Boys don't like to smell like flowers, right? Girls like to smell like flowers, or women like to smell like flowers, so they use perfume. And that's how we use plants, not for food, but to make perfume.


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[Assistant] Girls like to smell like flowers. Girls like to smell like flowers. It's interesting. Girls like, they like to do it. They think, oh, it's a good thing, let's do it.


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[Assistant] Like is similar to here. So there's two meanings. Girls like it, smell like flower,


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[Assistant] Two different meanings. I like to do it means I want to do it. It smells like flowers means it smells similar or the same as something else. So two different meanings for like, like and like.


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[Assistant] Okay, let's continue here. Another way. What's another way we use plants not for food?


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[Assistant] We can use plants to make ropes. People use ropes for many things, right? We use ropes for many different things. They can be used, they, not people, but ropes.


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[Assistant] Ropes. They can be used for games. We use ropes to play games, right?


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[Assistant] Kids like to jump rope. That's one game, right? That's one type of game. You need a rope to play tug of war. To play tug of war. That's another


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[Assistant] So two different games. We can use ropes for games. One, we can jump rope. Two, we can play tug of war.


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[Assistant] We use plant stems, right? Stems are the body of the plant to make ropes. So we use stems to make ropes. Very interesting.


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[Assistant] So this is another example how we use plants for things other than food. Okay? Let's review. People use ropes for many things. They can be used for games.


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[Assistant] Kids like to jump rope. One game. You need a rope to play tug of war. Two games.


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[Assistant] We use plant stems to make ropes. It's the part of the plant we use to make ropes.


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[Assistant] Okay, so let's go to our reading comprehension. Now remember, we saw in the reading section many ways to use plants, not just for food, but there are many different ways. We saw that we use plants to make toothpaste. We use plants to make soap.


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[Assistant] We use plants to make oil. We use plants to make perfume.


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[Assistant] And we use plants to make rope. Many different ways that we use plants.


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[Assistant] Okay, well let's, uh, cover the reading comprehension questions. Number one, this story is about what? What are we talking about in this story? A, vegetables. B, useful plants. C, cooking. D, exercise.


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[Assistant] So we have to think about what is the big subject that covers the whole reading passage, the whole reading passage, not just part of the reading passage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like I said, we use plants for many many different things. It's very useful. Soap is useful. Perfume is useful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, oil is very useful. So we're talking about useful plants, not vegetables. Vegetables are things we eat. So the passage is about plants that we don't eat. So we're not talking about vegetables.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're not talking about cooking. Yes, we talked a little bit about cooking. Making oil to cook food. But that's just a small part of the whole reading passage. So it's not about cooking.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sure, they mentioned cooking, but cooking is just a small part of the reading passage. The big part is useful plants.


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[Assistant] Also, exercise. Yes, we talked about exercise a little bit, but the story's not about exercise. Exercise was just an example of how to use ropes.


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[Assistant] The whole passage is about useful plants. Useful plants. Plants can be used for cooking. It can be used for exercise. It can be used for perfume.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Toothpaste. Many, many different things. So the main subject that we're talking about, the whole subject, is useful plants. These are just small examples. So our answer is B.


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[Assistant] Are some things that taste like mint. We saw the example, right? A. Soaps. B. Elephants. C. Toothpastes. D. Lemons. So, which one of these, some of them, taste like mint? Let's look at A. Soaps. First of all, be careful. Taste. That means you eat them. Do you eat soaps?


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[Assistant] It's crazy, right? And we don't eat soap, so we don't taste soap. Soaps don't taste like mint. They might smell like mint. They could smell like lemons, like we read in the passage, but we don't taste soap. That's silly, blech, and that's yuck-kya-wah. Anyway, yuck, right? Elephants.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do you taste elephants? If you see a big elephant, uuuh. What does it taste like? Don't do that. It's very dangerous. Okay? So we don't say some elephants taste like mint. Besides, the reading passage didn't talk about elephants.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So there were no elephants in the reading passage. So this is not the correct answer.


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[Assistant] Toothpastes. Did we talk about toothpaste in the reading passage?


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[Assistant] Yes, we did. What did we learn about toothpaste? We learned that mint leaves are used to make toothpaste because the toothpaste tastes like mint. Then that's our answer. Some toothpastes taste like mint, but some


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not all, right? Sometimes mint leaves are used to make toothpastes. That's what we read. So, toothpastes is the answer.


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[Assistant] What about d, lemons? Some lemons taste like mint? No. In the reading passage, we learn that lemons are used to make soap, not toothpaste. So d is not toothpaste.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so our answer is toothpastes. We read that mint is used to make toothpaste, so some toothpastes taste like mint. Very fresh. Okay, good. Okay, number three. Beep.


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[Assistant] What's beep? Beep can be used to make oil. So what did the reading passage say?


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[Assistant] Something is used to make oil, right? We saw that plants are used in many different ways, to make soap, to make rope, to make perfume. But which was used to make oil? What was used to make oil? We have A, seeds. B, perfume. C, oxygen. D, flowers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes they are. Remember we read about corn and we saw that the seeds of corn, they're yellow on, they're also delicious to eat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're not talking about eating food, we're talking about using food for things other than food. We saw that corn