Esta entrada la hago en Español. A veces siento que mis palabras en Inglés no muestran mis sentimientos tan profundos como mi "Lengua Mamá".
He querido hoy reflexionar profundamente sobre este sistema educativo que nos esta matando. Y tal vez mi tiempo de reflexión no sea por la educación que a mi me toco, hoy en día aprendo y desaprendo y es fácil hacerlo, o bueno ya estoy familiarizada con ello. Pero hay un motivo más por el cual parar decir ya basta: NUESTROS NIÑOS.
Veo como la legislación educativa progresivamente se está deshaciendo de un derecho que nos corresponde: el derecho a ser educado y recibir una educación con calidad. Cada vez más son los sectores privados los que se están convirtiendo en los nuevos encargados de la Educación; Padres de familia pagan grandes cuentas por tener una educación de "calidad". Calidad es tener un cliente más al que se le oprime y se le dice qué pensar, cómo pensar, qué decir, cómo decirlo sin dejarlos ser. ¿Por qué? porque si se les deja ser se incurre en un falta que va a ser consignada en el "observador" (Desde pequeños matándoles los ideales de ser investigadores), Es ináudito que después de tantas reformas educativas aun consideremos el aula de clase como un lugar donde reina el silencio, el miedo, los gritos de una "autoridad" entendida ésta como la que más se escucha y la que de manera inadecuada trata a los demás.
¿Qué hemos hecho los docentes para no permitir esta atrocidad? Niños víctimas del estrés en las escuelas, tratados como adultos, sin dejarles disfrutar la enorme experiencia de estar con los compañeritos, (yo guardo buenos recuerdos de mi escuela y tengo que decir que para mi la Escuela era mi lugar de escape, ahora es el lugar de castigo), Niños y jóvenes que gastan todo un día en un colegio deseando salir de allí y no volver nunca.
Es aterrador escuchar que tus estudiantes te digan que estudian allí porque sus padres lo castigaron porque no se portaba bien. ¿qué clase de ciudadanos tendremos?: gente enferma y resentida con ganas de cobrar venganza por el daño que se ha hecho. Se necesita con urgencia de docentes comprometidos con una nueva y mejor educación, NUESTROS CHICOS SOLO NECESITAN UNA OPORTUNIDAD para mostrar lo creativos que son, lo especiales que son. Profesores que quieran mostrarles que paso a paso se es grande y sobre todo profesores que estén apasionados por guiarles en el descubrimiento de si mismo, no en llenar una planilla. La evaluación es importante, pero hay que verla de manera critica; no es para aprobar o descalificar a alguien, es para mostrarle como mejorar y alcanzar más.
No nos creamos los mejores, seamos los mejores pero que se vea en el reflejo del brillo de los ojos de nuestros estudiantes. Una gota de agua constante puede romper la más grande de las rocas. Solo abrir una puerta para que ellos encuentren lo hermoso que es aprender!!!
This is a space created by a language teacher for language teachers, where you can find different kind of points of view about language. Share your personal belief, let us know about your experiences and... lets explore together new ways to teach language!!!
sábado, 6 de abril de 2013
miércoles, 3 de abril de 2013
thinking about myself as a teacher!!
Here, in my bed while a horrible backache is killing me, I think about our role as a teacher in private schools. My doctor said that I am suffering this illness because I am stressful. And my boss said that my work is not enough good, it would be better. And my students told me that I have been the best teacher they have had. So my question is: who do I believe in? It is interesting how you are evaluated from different points of view and how those points of view affirm a "truth" about you.
What is the real teacher´s role?
When I was studying at the university my teachers told me that the best teacher is who gives the knowledge from the heart. I learned this conception and It became a big part on my life, Also they taught me that the best teacher is who is studying and working on getting better and ever day in my life i do it, but I can not understand why the private institutions have another idea about our role. you must to do many things: fill formats, clean the classrom, watch everything around you, listen to other people remaining silent and teach from your boss pedagogical vision which is from 60s and 70s.
I keep studying because I want to change those terrible ideas about education. It is impossible that we as teachers and our children be restricted and follow rules that make their teaching-learning process be a lost cause, because they and we, in those conditions, are not going to give the best effort and for that reason the students study for passing the exam and the teachers for earning the salary and nothing is changing. The education will be better if we make a stop in the way and think about these situations and try to improve them. The schools need new reforms and ways of looking at the world and to take the best of them, apply and observe carefully.
What is the education I dream? (I remember right now the words I listened the first day in my M.A. Program "the people who think that this programm is a dream have to consider that It will be a nightmare).
So I prefer to believe in dreams and consider that the things can change, why not? I dream with children who want to go to school because they love learning and nobody forces them to go. Kind-hearted teachers who teaches and learns at the same time. Open-minded teachers who believe every answer is important and consider those spaces of sharing with their students the best choice to observe, write, think, teach and learn from experience. Looking-forward teachers who do not have ideas about students without meeting them well, instead it, teacher who always give the students the chance to show the abilities and strenghs they have.
Is this impossible??
What is the real teacher´s role?
When I was studying at the university my teachers told me that the best teacher is who gives the knowledge from the heart. I learned this conception and It became a big part on my life, Also they taught me that the best teacher is who is studying and working on getting better and ever day in my life i do it, but I can not understand why the private institutions have another idea about our role. you must to do many things: fill formats, clean the classrom, watch everything around you, listen to other people remaining silent and teach from your boss pedagogical vision which is from 60s and 70s.
I keep studying because I want to change those terrible ideas about education. It is impossible that we as teachers and our children be restricted and follow rules that make their teaching-learning process be a lost cause, because they and we, in those conditions, are not going to give the best effort and for that reason the students study for passing the exam and the teachers for earning the salary and nothing is changing. The education will be better if we make a stop in the way and think about these situations and try to improve them. The schools need new reforms and ways of looking at the world and to take the best of them, apply and observe carefully.
What is the education I dream? (I remember right now the words I listened the first day in my M.A. Program "the people who think that this programm is a dream have to consider that It will be a nightmare).
So I prefer to believe in dreams and consider that the things can change, why not? I dream with children who want to go to school because they love learning and nobody forces them to go. Kind-hearted teachers who teaches and learns at the same time. Open-minded teachers who believe every answer is important and consider those spaces of sharing with their students the best choice to observe, write, think, teach and learn from experience. Looking-forward teachers who do not have ideas about students without meeting them well, instead it, teacher who always give the students the chance to show the abilities and strenghs they have.
Is this impossible??
jueves, 28 de marzo de 2013
THINKING ABOUT LANGUAGE AS A MULTI-RELATIONAL DISCIPLINE
Making my studies in linguistic, I have noticed
that linguistics need to be supported by other sciences and disciplines. One of
them is neurology, the science that studies the brain and its functions. Language
is one of these functions, according to the studies there are some areas in
charged to produce and comprehend language. Our role as a teacher of foreign
language is to know how these areas work in order to understand, comprehend,
and produce language, specially a second one. It is important that the teacher
has an idea about how the language is learned and helps the student to overcome
difficulties or guides their families in the process to comprehend that their
children are suffering some of these phenomena. In my experience, this
knowledge has been vital because I have had students with this kind of learning
difficulties and their families do not accept it easily. Having idea is a
wonderful tool to face this kind of situations.
The disciplines like neurolinguistics and
psycholinguistics help us to understand how the language is comprehended,
learned and produced. The neurolinguistics studies the language as a function
and what areas of the brain comprehend and produce it. While the psycholinguistics
helps us to study the psychological process of comprehension and production of
language. Furthermore, these disciplines are useful in order to analyze how
some pathologies like Aphasia, Alexia, Dysgraphia, Acalculia, Hemiagraphia, Apraxia,
Agnosia, Amnesia, which could affect the language comprehension and production.
Paredes y Varo citing Ch. Bouton (1984),
affirm that the neurolinguistics is in charge of which cerebral mechanisms hold
the phonological oppositions, which the logic-grammatical ones or the fact of
reached annunciation. While the
psycholinguistics, according to Paredes and Varo, studies the communicative
process taking into account not only the messages but also the participants in
it. For that reason, psycholinguistic also studies the acquisition and
linguistic procedure trying to give an explanation from different theoretical
models based on observation and comparison of normal individual and individual
who presents verbal dysfunctions´ linguistic behavior.
According to Ardila and Roselli (2007) the
language development is a result of interaction between the neuronal development
and environmental stimulation. In spite of the environmental development, the
language acquisition is a result of neuronal maturation. The control of smooth
movements and symbolic skills development are needed to get a well-developed
language. Following Kolb and Fantie (1997) the language acquisition is related
with the frontal and temporal lobules. The language like the other complex
behaviors is not well-known how occurs but it is the result of multiple
relationships among cells through electrical stimulations. Following to
Bernardez (2004) the language seen as a whole: use and structures, requires the
use of many parts of the brain. The most automatic processes are found in Broca
and Wernicke´s area, although there is nothing which has a specific
localization.
I keep saying that the language is a result of
experience with language. Michael Tomasello and others cited by Bernardez
consider that the child acquires the linguistic experience which is going to
form the neuronal connections making some of them more sensitive than the
others and at the same time making some more specialized than others.
Basically, we can say that the language is a result of interaction with
external factors and the stimulation of neuronal connections from those
experiences with the factors. The language comes from different places as a
result of interaction, and it is localized in many parts of the brain but we
cannot know where specifically.
Dear
colleagues: You can read more about the authors I mentioned in my post: Enrique
Bernardez with his Book; Qué son las lenguas? 2004. And the next link:
http://www.uv.es/perla/1[09]%20Paredes%20y%20Varo.pdf
Where you can find the article; Lenguage y Cerebro:
Conexiones entre Neurolingüistica y Psicolingüistica, de M de Jesus Paredes
Duarte y Carmen Varo Varo. Universidad de Cádiz.
Finally, I want to ask you: What relationship can
you find between the Gestalt Group with its theory about pregnancy and Language
learning?
sábado, 9 de marzo de 2013
JUST FIVE IN ONE: Teacher as a Super Hero
Watching
the movie Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall, I was thinking about the
fears the teacher has to face every day in front of the students. According to
the movie, the scientist feels fear to discover and assumes the bad or good
consequences. The teacher every day has to take risk to teach new things but I think
the most defiant challenge is to awake teenagers to learn and it is a discovering
and challenge.
The second
fear is to make the difference. It is easily to comprehend, when you as a
teacher tries to innovate the teaching process and maybe (This is no maybe,
this is sure!!!) the colleagues start to mock and make that teacher loses
his/her enthusiasm because they prefer to stay in the “comfortable place”. The last
fear is to defiant the authorities in order
to get the goal and help the students as
the scientist who had to face his authorities in order to help the ill people
to overcome without any kind of supporting.
The education
in Language reacquires super heroes: teacher has to be just in five, just a
real super hero because education needs a person who assumes the challenges of
innovation, someone who wants to be awake, someone who believes everything is
possible, someone who wants to be resourceful person and someone who supports
and cheers up the learning teaching process.
This super
hero has to face and go beyond the evident, beyond the “normal” pedagogical
issue, not only someone who does not let go deeply in an education as a business
but also someone who makes a stop in the
way and criticizes the way he or she is teaching. This super hero should develop
the researchable strategy to change the paradigms.
We as a
students of M. A. language teaching must awake because we are studying theories
that maybe are reevaluated and another theories which are rising but we do not
know and perhaps we are following others who do not want to change. So my
questions are: Are we super heroes? Are we awake? What are we doing for being
awake? How do we make our students awake?
domingo, 3 de marzo de 2013
LANGUAGE IS THE RESULT OF EXPERIENCES WITH LANGUAGE
In the last
months, I have read about language according different authors, researchers and
teachers, and almost the majority say that the language is the result of
experiences with the language and then those are described and a new perspective
of language is emerging.
The study
of language arises from wonderful experiences where the linguist is observing,
asking, discovering and showing what wonderful the language is. In the first
chapter of his book, Crystal (2009) shows how the language is a widely-known
field of research because every day it gives new phenomenon to study, to
observe, to discover. He shows how each single experience with language gives another
opportunity to discover a new world, which is filled of possibilities to keep
researching.
According
to this author, the main reason because many disciplines study and observe the
language is the wide variety of proposals language offers; You can study a
single world and discover that it can be studied from sociolinguistics due to
the ways it is used, or from psycholinguistics because of the way how this word
can be used, or from phonology owing to the way it is pronounced and it is
possible to study this word from anthropology: it would be to study it from
human being evolution (I do not know if any science about the origin and
evolution of words certainly exist, it would be wonderful!!!).
Being
linguist is more than knowing theories about language, perhaps it is to be
conscious and take advantage of each single situation to study, go deeply and
discover a new world inside language. Finally, I just want to say that I as a
teacher have the enormous blessing to study and teach the language, to live
with those new experiences, to discover new possibilities and teach from those
ones. The language is here and there, inside and outside, near and far away.
sábado, 2 de marzo de 2013
What is Language?
How to say its meaning
but it is meaningful by itself
How to define it
if it is more than a single definition
How to say something about it
if anything says everything about it
It is just a world, It is just a word
it is just language!
but it is meaningful by itself
How to define it
if it is more than a single definition
How to say something about it
if anything says everything about it
It is just a world, It is just a word
it is just language!
martes, 26 de febrero de 2013
What is the secret to be more than inspiration?... Just motivation.
Last weekend during my inspiration journeys
surfing in the internet, I found a wonderful movie. It is called “In front of
the class”; the tittle called my attention and I was thinking of problems with students,
especially with those ones with economic difficulties, who pretend resolve
everything through violent actions. My surprise was when I started to watch
that the movie, I was watching a teacher with Tourette syndrome. It is really
interesting because it is common to find students with learning difficulties
but I had found a teacher with Language difficulties caused by this syndrome.
His name is Brad Cohen, he lives in United
States and the movie was based on a real story. The scenario is a student with
funny and incontrollable sounds whose teachers demanded his attention and good
behavior in class, so who can control something that anybody knows?. Brad
visited each psychologist his parents could find but the result was the same: a
weird boy, incapable to read and a negation caused by his parents´ divorce, in
other words “a problematic boy”. He could not get in a library, he was rejected
in classes by his teachers and classmates, but he had a wonderful and marvelous
mother who tried to help him. She started to read many psychologist book in
order to know how her baby presented this phenomena. She discovered Tourette- I
guess you are asking yourself what is it?- The Tourette Syndrome is a
neurological illness which is characterized by repetitive and involuntary movements and the production of vowel sounds
called tics. This syndrome is called Tourette because of was discovered by
George Gilles de la Tourette.
If we follow to Chomsky, Halliday, Austin,
Hymes, we could say that this teacher does not have the competence and
performance in order to teach, especially to second grade. However, I think
that the language is more than ability, it is the essence of our lives.
According to Kumaravadivelu, Language includes three important aspects, which
have an interrelationship: Linguistic, use and knowledge or ability. Bred Cohen needed those aspects and a deep
wish to overcome this inability. Learning and teaching languages must be based
on your deeply wishes. I called those deeply wishes motivation.
Motivation is the magic word to teach English
as a second language. If Mr. Cohen had not had a motivated mother, who never stopped
to investigate and encourage her child to overcome the disease, he would not
have achieved the award of Teacher of the year. Our schools need motivated
teachers, that encourage students to overcome difficulties, through looking for
new strategies, observe, study, change, improve, apply, know their students,
follow processes but we as teachers need the administrative people to support
and collaborate our classes like Mr. Cohen was supported by them.
Finally, I would like to invite you to watch
the movie and let me know your comments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZowuVPLTP4
http://www.classperformance.com/
http://www.bradcohentourettefoundation.com/
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/spanish/ency/article/000733.htm
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