1. Newsletter
Christmas carols are traditional songs of the season;
long ago, families and children would visit their
neighbors’ houses to sing songs -- a little like a trick-
or-treat, but with the music of the holidays.
This performance was given by students of the Lower
Advanced Level ESL Class. It was used as an exercise
by Emily Blake, to help her students with pronun-
ciation and projection. The most important thing in
Emily’s teaching technique: the mechanics of speak-
ing English. Many international students are scared
of talking, for fear of making a mistake. Emily is an
actress too, so she is well-acquainted with this fear of
performance. She loves to use presentations, singing,
vocalises, and other kinds of performance in class.
She sees acting and public speaking as ways to get past
her students’ fear. Christmas carols, for example, have
some difficult-to-pronounce words for the students, so
they can help to overcome pronunciation weaknesses
when used as an exercise. We are looking forward to
their next performance!!
Ms. Emily Bayard Blake
ESL Instructor
Emily Bayard Blake is a performer,
writer and teacher who has taught and
performed widely in both New York
City and in Paris, France. She received
her B.A. summa cum laude from
UC Berkeley and her TEFL from the
American University of Paris, where
she founded a theatre studio in 2001
(Theatre de la Solitude).
Emily has a passion for speech, pronunciation, and the music
and rhythm of the English language. One of the joys of teach-
ing at OPMI has been the diversity of her classes, which include
students from different regions of China, Turkey, India, Jamaica,
and Jordan. Each of these backgrounds creates a different set
of pronunciation challenges, and it is a pleasure to work with
students on perfecting their speech. Presentations, singing and
performance play a large role in her classes, where the student’s
own voice is the primary subject of the lesson. Confidence, in
her view, is also key to successful language acquisition, and the-
atre, music and speaking are ideal ways to build self-confidence
in a linguistic context.
Emily is delighted to ring in the new year at OPMI.
OPMI Business School
Date: December 17, 2016
filled a classroom at OPMI
The Great Performance of Singing
Christmas Carols
Vol.
2016.12
2

2. Let’s say we find out an asteroid is going to hit the earth at
some point over the next three months. It may kill all of us, it
may kill some of us, it may splash harmlessly into the ocean
-- but there is no stopping it. All we can do is hunker down and
see what happens. How would you react? How would human-
ity as a whole react? Well, I know how: we would prepare as
best we could, and then we would surround
ourselves with the people we love most and
party our asses off. We would do it, because
we would realize it might be our last chance.
I know this, because we have Christmas.
This is the time of year when my Christian
friends remind me via Facebook image mac-
ros that Christ is the reason for the season,
and my atheist friends remind everyone
that “Christmas” is at best a renamed pagan
orgy and at worst a crass hybrid of religious
conditioning and economic stimulus (“God
became a man to save us from sin, so let’s
get into a fistfight over the last PlayStation
4 at Target!”). Well, let me take the bold stance that if you’re
using Christmas as an excuse to be a dick to somebody, you’re
probably doing it wrong. The real origins of this holiday are
amazing, sacred, and etched into your very DNA, if not by
God then by evolution. There’s enough magic here for every-
body, damn it.
It’s hard to understand why Christmas came to be a big deal
even for people who have never stepped foot inside a church
without understanding the context. And the context -- which
does predate Christianity by thousands of years -- is that De-
cember kicks off winter in the Northern hemisphere. And for
most of human history, winter meant a bunch of us were going
to freaking die.
We’re so detached from that idea today, when the cold means
nothing more than mild annoyance and sometimes slippery
roads, that it’s hard to grasp how recent this was, and that this
was the way of things for virtually all of human history. Every
year, you headed into winter with just enough stored food and
fuel to get by. The old and the sick knew they might not make
it through, and an espe-
cially harsh winter could
mean no one would feel
the sun’s warmth ever
again. Every year, you
watched all of the plants
turn brown and shrivel
into husks, followed by
an unrelenting darkness
and cold that threatened
to swallow you and
everything you love.
And looking back at
that, we see an awesome
little portrait of exactly
how much humans kick ass. Every year, you see, winter ar-
rived with a short day followed by the longest night of the year
(aka the winter solstice), and since before recorded history,
humans have been celebrating that day with a feast, or festival,
or outright debauchery. On that longest night before the frozen
mini-apocalypse, in all times and places you would find light
and song and dancing and food. Cattle would be slaughtered
(to avoid having to feed all of them through the winter), fami-
lies would travel to be together, and wine would flow. Precious
supplies were dedicated to making decorations and gifts --
frivolous things, good for nothing other than making each other
happy.
These celebrations went by many names over the millennia,
and everyone did it their own way. But deep down, I think the
message was always the same: “We made it through anoth-
er year, some of us won’t see spring, let’s spend a few days
reminding each other of what’s good about humanity.” Or, I’ll
just let you read my favorite Christmas quote, from esteemed
essayist Dan Harmon:
No matter how black, white, male, female, Irish, German, tall,
short, ugly or pretty you felt this year, you are part of a family
that has been targeted by an unforgiving cosmos since its in-
ception but has, regardless, survived ... humanity, warts and all,
is an inherently heroic species that has spent about 99.99% of
its short lifetime as an underdog. And If you see no billboards
telling you that, it’s not because it’s not true. It’s because
there’s little to no profit to be made telling you.
I could go on and on about the suffering we’ve endured and
The True Meaning of Christmas
That Everyone Forgets
By Thomas Andolfo

3. the adaptations we’ve made, but to me, our species’ crown-
ing jewel is that on the shortest day of the year, when the
sun spends most of its time swallowed, when everything is
frozen, when nothing can
grow, when the air is so
cold our voices stop right
in front of our faces ... we
put a string of lights on a
universe that is currently
doing nothing to earn it.
We not only salvage an
otherwise desolate time
of year, we make it the
best time of year.
“Wait,” you might say,
“so your inspirational, ‘true meaning of Christmas’ is that
we should remember how our filthy ancestors used to freeze
to death on a regular basis?” No, Christmas isn’t magical
because of what it was, or where it came from. It’s magical
because that’s what it still is.
See, around this time of year, my social media also fills with
friends and acquaintances half-joking about having to tolerate
the holidays around their extended family, people they only
see once or twice a year with whom they have nothing in
common and don’t like talking to. It all seems so arbitrary to
them, a holiday that as a kid meant free toys and as an adult
means travel, shopping, and trying to remember the name of
your cousin’s new wife while the two of you make awkward
conversation around the eggnog fountain. But that’s only
because we’re separated from that ancient, unspoken truth,
which is that this festive gathering around the fire might be
the last time you see those faces.
And that part hasn’t changed.
This will
be read
by tens of
thousands
of peo-
ple, and
statistical-
ly, some
of you
are in fact
traveling
to see your
grand-
parents, or
parents, or siblings, for the very last time. You don’t know it’s
their last Christmas, of course -- if you somehow knew, you’d
do it differently. You’d try to stretch out those moments, you
wouldn’t spend conversations nervously looking for an exit
point, you’d spend a little more time digging up old memo-
ries and laughing about your shared past. You’d spend less
time worrying about the gifts and the budget, and more about
how we’re spending the precious little time we have left.
Once upon a time, nobody needed that reminder that life was
short -- the holiday was the reminder. You hugged your fami-
ly extra tight because, to quote the HBO series all the kids are
watching these days, “Winter is Coming.”*
So in my mind, the Christians complaining about
people losing sight of the real meaning of the
holiday are right, in the sense that people do
forget that it’s supposed to be about generosity,
and redemption, and forgiveness, and clinging
to hope in a world turned dark, cold, and cruel.
But it stood for those things before it was called
Christmas. It stood for those things back when
religion wasn’t just something you did out of ob-
ligation to some tradition, or a set of ceremonies
you performed in order to join a tribe or political
party. No, back then if the sun didn’t shine on your crops, you
had to watch your children slowly die. So you got on your
knees and begged the sun to shine. You pleaded for the rain
to fall, for the plague to pass your family by, for the winter to
go easy on you this year. It was a time when it was so much
harder to pretend that the universe was under our control,
when all you could do was look up at the sky and beg it for
mercy.
And then, receiving no immediate answer, we would gather
around the fire and eat rich food and sing songs and give
gifts. Because while we waited for the frozen gray skies to
render a verdict, all we had was each other and the warmth of
our generosity.
Thomas Andolfo
ESL Instructor
Greetings students and fellow teach-
ers!! My name is Thomas Andolfo.
Who am I? Let me tell you. I am
one of the very friendly and outgo-
ing ESL teachers at OPMI. I have
been teaching the subject of ESL for
the past nine and one-half years in
many different places and I find it to
be quite an exciting experience.
What makes teaching ESL so excit-
ing for me? Well, in my opinion,
it’s not just the task of giving the stu-
dents instruction on the aspects of the English language (i.e.,
reading, writing, listening, speaking), but the joy of meeting
new faces every day and acquainting myself with their ethnic
backgrounds.
How do I accomplish this process? It begins the moment
when the ESL students step into my classroom. I treat the
students with the utmost cordiality while doing everything
possible to make them feel welcome in my class. One of my
best approaches is through informal conversation. The reason
I utilize the informal conversation aspect is because you do
not want to either intimidate or confuse the student with your
speech. The last thing any teacher wants is a student staring at
him/her with a blank expression on their face.

4. Most Filipinos are Christians with about 80% of
people being Catholics. It’s the only Asian country
with so many Christians. Because of this, Christmas
is the most important holiday in the Philippines. The
early morning masses held before Christmas is called
Simbang Gabi. It is a nine-day Roman Catholic ritual
novena performed in the Philippines which starts nine
days before Christmas and ends on December 24. Most
Filipinos would bravely wake up by 4 in the morning
just to attend the nine-day Simbang Gabi. What do
they get from that? A grateful wish for a better
health and a better life in the coming new year.
Also, Filipinos have their own Christmas
traditions such as
the‘parol’which
is a bamboo pole
or frame with a
lighted star lantern
on it. It is tradition-
ally made from
bamboo strips and
colored Japanese
paper or cello-
phane paper and
PASKO: Christmas
in the Philippines
It’s that month of the year again! That month
where Santa Claus would drop down by the chim-
ney to present some gifts
to those little boys and
girls who were nice and
not naughty. The month
where everybody gets
busy just to buy a gift and
give it to their loved ones.
But how do we celebrate
Christmas in the Philip-
pines?
By Sherry Tulod

5. represents the star that guided the Wise Men. It is the most popular
Christmas decoration in the Philippines.
But the most cherished moment during Christmas is on… of
course, Christmas Day. Well actually, the thrill starts on the morning
of December 24, the Eve of Christmas. People get busy baking and
cooking foods in preparation for the Noche Buena! A lot of Filipinos
would attend Misa de Gallo or Midnight Mass. The final mass of
Simbang Gabi is actually mass for Christmas day. This is followed by
a midnight feast, called Noche Buena.
The Noche Buena is a big, open house, celebration with family,
friends and neighbors dropping in to wish everyone
a Merry Christmas! Most house-
holds would have
several
dishes
laid
out
and
would normally
in- clude: lechon (roasted pig), ham,
fruit salad, rice cakes (bibingka and puto bumbong
are traditional Christmas foods) and other sweets, steamed rice,
and many different types of drinks.
Spending Christmas in the Philippines with a Filipino family is
awesome. But also, we should never forget that it’s not all about the
activities that we do during the lengthy time of the season. It’s also
that time we should remember the One who is the reason why we
are celebrating Christmas.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Ms. Sherry Tulod
ESL Instructor
Sherry
Tulod
was born
into a
family of
educa-
tors who
instilled
in her a
love of
learning.
She has been a Business Office
Practices and Technology In-
structor since 2009 and has just
started teaching ESL recently.
She completed her bachelor’s
degree in Accountancy in her
native country, the Philippines.
In 2003, she decided to move to
the United States to pursue her
career. She has lived, studied
and worked in Honey Brook
and Lancaster in Pennsylvania
before moving to New York in
2007. She currently resides in
Bronx, NY.
She loves working with stu-
dents in the classroom. She
loves helping students gain
independence with their work
and believes that there’s still no
thrill like knowing that she has
helped a student understand a
difficult concept, which makes
teaching a lot more enjoyable
and fulfilling.

6. What to cook for
Christmas
Christmas – the one time of year when you will enjoy delicious foods with
friends and family. This year, let us try some new things for your Christmas
dinner with love.
There are too many wonderful comforting dishes weaved
into the Indian cuisine for me to simply pick one as my
clear favorite. Shivani Mehta said scrambled paneer rolls would
always remind her of Christmas Eve, though they were eaten
many occasions throughout the year. Let’s try her amazing
recipe.
INGREDIENTS
2-3 Hot/Spicy Peppers (any
kind- I use serrano, or jalape-
nos whatever is available)
1 box of silken tofu
1-2 tea spoons Turmeric Pow-
der
1-2 tea spoons Red Chili Pow-
der (I use the Indian version, lal
mirch, but cayenne should be
fine)
1 tea spoon Cumin whole or
powdered (optional)
1 medium sized Tomato (op-
tional)
1 medium sized Onion (option-
al)
½ cup chopped up Cilantro
(optional)
Frozen Kawan Malaysian
Parathas (I buy these at the
indian store but you could al-
ways substitute with a tortillas
or bread
COOKING
500 g meat broth
500 g mushrooms
2 small onions
2 teaspoons butter
cooked vegetables with broth
(1 carrot, parsley½)
½ cup broth
1 raw egg
Thinly slice onions and peppers
and chop up the tomato. Heat
some cooking oil in a pan, throw
in a bunch of cumin seeds (a tea
spoon) if whole. Wait for it to
sizzle, then throw in peppers and
onions. I like to leave them a little
crunchy so I don't wait for them
to brown. Once they are cooked,
add the tomatoes and cook for
a minute or two. Once the to-
matoes are done, take the silken
tofu and scramble it with your
hands as you drop it into the
pan. Add turmeric, chili powder,
cumin powder and salt. Cook for
a few minutes and stop before/as
soon as the tofu starts letting out
water. Sprinkle with cilantro and
roll it up in a wrap or a bun.
Variation: you can avoid cooking
the onions and put them in raw
in the end along with the cilan-
tro.dumplings). Pierogi pick out
with a slotted spoon and arrange
on plates.
Scrambled Paneer Rolls
By Shivani Mehta
GDPS student

7. By Wojciech Bonarowski
GDPS student
Very often, the foods and dishes we find most
comforting are the ones associated with our
childhood. The very smell of a dish has such nostal-
gia to bring back to home.
Wojciech Bonarowski usually had pierogi (Polish
dumplings) on Christmas when he was young.
Family recipes, flavors, textures, tastes and even
customs provided a strong nostalgic pull. Cook-
ing was a way of remembering, and whatever
was placed on the table was both respected and
enjoyed.
Here is his recipe of Polish Dumpling. Your guest
can be served with water or odsmazac.
Dumplings with wa- ter then
pour melted butter
and sprinkle with
refried bacon and
serve with sour
cream.
PART 1 COMPONENTS
450 g of wheat flour for exam-
ple.
large pinch of salt
375 ml boiling water
40 g of butter
Sift the flour into a bowl, add
salt. Hot water to put the butter
and melt, gradually pour the
flour, stirring with a spoon all.
Combine the ingredients squash
the dough with hands for about
7 - 8 minutes. Put into a bowl
and cover with a damp cloth and
let stand for 30 minutes. Put the
dough on the cutting board and
powygniatac for about 1 - 2 min-
utes, and then divided into 3 - 4
parts, and put the cutting board
and showering roller flour.
PART 2 STUFFING
500 g meat broth
500 g mushrooms
2 small onions
2 teaspoons butter
cooked vegetables with broth
(1 carrot, ½ parsley)
½ cup broth
1 raw egg
Mushrooms clean brush or
sponge, cut into smaller pieces.
Mushrooms and onions put on a
well-heated pan with butter and
heat over a larger brown short
frying and stirring occasionally.
Poultry (without skin), beef (with
fat), mushrooms, onions and
vegetables from the broth grind
in a meat grinder, put in a pan,
add the broth, season with salt
and pepper and mix. After cool-
ing, add the egg and mix.
PART 3 COOKING
Glass to cut circles from the
dough to the center put one
full tablespoon of the stuffing
(or as many as will fit). To Fold
dough in half and agglutinate
exactly edges. Ready dumplings
put on a pastry board with flour
podsypanych. In a large pot boil
salted water with a spoonful of
oil, olive oil or butter, and how
much will boil, put the first batch
of dumplings (about 15 pieces).
After re-boiling, reduce the heat
to medium and cook until soft
dough dumplings. After leaving
the dumplings cook it for about
1 minute (pick one dumplings
with a slotted spoon and check
with your finger or the dough is
soft, the exact cooking time will
depend inter alia on the thick-
ness of the dough and the size
dumplings). Pierogi pick out with
a slotted spoon and arrange on
plates.
Polish Dumplings

8. OPMI BUSINESS SCHOOL
Address: 116 John Street, New York, NY 10038
Tel: 212-269-4000 / Fax: 212-269-9070
Email: info@opmi.edu
URL: http://www.opmi.edu
Editorial Advisory: Ms. Juwen An
If you have any questions or comments,
please email us at news@opmi.edu
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FACULTY PARTY
CHRISTMAS CAROLS&
After feast there were raffle.
The winner was IT Frank -Iphone 7!!