Bullying at teachers??

As everything evolves in life, bullying is not only related to students but also to teachers. What? Yes, to teachers... now teachers are victim of bullying by their students.

How can they manage to this? It is very simple, thanks to the technology (cellphones, video camaras, digital camaras, etc) student can record the agression to the teacher and uploading it to the Internet. That is one way. Another one can be hitting to the teacher, yelling at him or her and making his or her life impossible inside a classroom.

How can we stop this? Probaly teaching our children that the teacher and their classmates are human beigns just like them and that we all deserve to be respected by some else. Let them know that with violence they can not accomplish anything, that is bad to be annoying other people, etc. Probably these are very utopic solutions, but I truly believe that we are what we are due to how we were raised, everything we are is buildt with our life experiences and parenthood.

What are these concepts about?

As a task, Mr. Litman asked us to investigate what the following concepts mean.

Learning to Learn: For some people, this concept seem to be the most effective methodology for students to learn something new. Learning to learn is all about a process who settles into certain step.
As teachers, we must be able to teach our students how to learn in order for them to be succesful at life. We have to make sure, they learn everything step by step and that the most effective learning is through knowing.

Agression at school: This concept seems to be very popular nowadays at many schools. Violence inside a classroom or in the school itself is increasing every single day. Agression at school can be presented in different ways: verbal agression and physycal agression. Some of the most known agressions these days is the bullying, probably a custom brought by the television and movies, who are constantly showing how the American Students are used to bully another student.

What people who practise any type of agression do not know is the social and psichological consequences this brings to the victim. Not only teachers and school must make sure students learn about this type of agression and promote them not to perform them, but it is a family matter as well.

My debate... Preuniversitarios!

I had to admitt it was not easy to choose a topic for the debate, but we did it anyway.

My groups was Marlene, Claudio and myself and we decided to talk about Preuniversitarios in Chile, and how effective these institutions are.

On the presentations we talked about what Preuniversitarios are and how important they are for students. As we all know, these private institutions help secondary students to improve their skills at the moment to give the PSU test who select students to sign up into a University in Chile. Most of them have intensive courses that lasts all year and reinforce what students have learned at highschool.

For some people it is very important to get into a public and prestigious University, due to different facts, and those people study very hard and choose to complement their highschool learnings with a Preuniversitario.

The debate turned out very well, we divided our class into a for and against group and my classmates discussed about if the Preuniversitarios were effective or not.

I honestly think that these institutions can help someone who really needs it, but if you are not interested in getting into a public University, sometimes they are not so necessarry.

Keirsey Temperament Report

I took the temperament test Mr. Litman told us, who can define how our temperament is. According to the results, I turned out to be a Guardian!.

I must say I agree with the results, the reports says a guardian is someone who is very down to earth, that enjoys working on a team and someone who is very passionate about what he or she does. It is just like me!.

This is an extract from the report that I liked very much, because it describes who I am: " Guardians can have a lot of fun with their friends, but they are quite serious about their duties and responsibilities. Guardians take pride in being dependable and trustworthy; if there's a job to be done, they can be counted on to put their shoulder to the wheel. Guardians also believe in law and order, and sometimes worry that respect for authority, even a fundamental sense of right and wrong, is being lost. Perhaps this is why Guardians honor customs and traditions so strongly -- they are familiar patterns that help bring stability to our modern, fast-paced world.

Practical and down-to-earth, Guardians believe in following the rules and cooperating with others. They are not very comfortable winging it or blazing new trails; working steadily within the system is the Guardian way, for in the long run loyalty, discipline, and teamwork get the job done right. Guardians are meticulous about schedules and have a sharp eye for proper procedures. They are cautious about change, even though they know that change can be healthy for an institution. Better to go slowly, they say, and look before you leap." (1)


Definetely, this is me... I have no more words to describe it.

(1)http://www.keirsey.com/sorter/user.aspx

Continuing with the debates... Cuban Education

Cuban Education was presented by Katherinne Gonzalez, Pedro Perez and Fabian Verasay. It was a very interesting topic, because as teachers, we must be aware of what is happening in other countries regarding education or at least have a little knowledge about other realities.

I had never heard about the educational system in Cuba, so it was very nice to hear and learn something new.

The presentation was good, but I think there was too many information on the power point slides and sometimes that makes the audience to feel overwhelmed and bored about the quantity of information.

But in general terms, I think it is always good to learn something new, and as I said before, it is our duty to know that chilean education is not all, that there are other children in the world that are beign educated in very different ways and learning from them can help us to improve our teaching methodologies.

A funny web page!

Today we went to the computers lab and Mr. Litman showed as a very funny web page (http://www.wordle.net) where you can write something and the page gives you what you wrote back in a different and amuzing way.

You can customize the text by changing the layout, the fonts, the colours, etc... and leave it in the most attractive way. The text becomes into a picture with the words written in the inside of the pic.

Here is an example of what I wrote... my text is part of a Robbie William's song called "No Regrets"

British Educational System... debates part II

My classmates, Evelyn, María Teresa and Rodrigo, continued presenting the debates. Their topic was the British Educational System, something that was new, at least for me... because I had no idea of what this system was about.

The classmates gave a little review about the topic, exposing the characteristics and how it works in England. What it caught my atenttion the most, was the fact that the public schools in Britain were actually considered as private ones. It was weird to hear it backwards because we tend to relate the concept of public with the goverments and politics.

They also talked about the boarding schools, which are very common in England and students seem to be very fond of them. This type of school led to the debate topic in the class. We had to decide if signing up children in these schools was a good choice, due to the fact that children most of the time grow alone and away from their families.

I was part of the against group but we could never decided our answer to the topic, because in my opinion these types of schools have more advantages than disavantages. Why? because children start developing their independence since they are little kids and start growing up with strong values and principles given at school... the fact they do not live at their homes, it does not mean they are going to turn out different, but I think they gain more confidence beign out there by themselves. Their families are always going to be there, but it is very important to grow up in confidence and beign able to solve our personal issues by ourselves.

Apart from the debate, I think the topic was very interesting... all of my classmates had the chance to talk and express their opinions. The groups was very clear in their ideas.