Friday, November 30, 2018

Just Water ?

                                                                              by Ana Paula Matheus Fiechter 












"Water is a transparent, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth`s streams, lakes and oceans, and the fluid of most living organisms. It is vital for all known forms of life, even though it provides no calories or organic nutrients." says Wikipedia. This is a very simple but also very true description of water. It respresents about 60% of our body structure, we drink it, we use it for shower, for watering plants, we can travel on it and even jump in for some fun.

 
It covers about 70% of the Earth for a total of approximately 332.5 million cubic miles (1,386 million cubic kilometers) (U.S Geological Survey) but most of this water - 97% of it - is undrinkable because it is saltwater. Only 3% of the world`s water supply is freshwater, and 77% of that is frozen. Of the 23% that is not frozen, only a half a percent is available to supply every plant, animal and person on Earth with all the water they need to survive. (National Geographic). 

According to World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in the next 3 decades the demand for water will increase by 40%-50% for the global food system, by 50%-70% for municipal and industrial sector and by 85% for energy sector. The main point in all of this is that the amount of usable water isn`t really decreasing but the demand of it is increasing. In addition, water pollution isn`t helping us to keep this amount at the same level. Also, water isn`t distributed evenly throughout the world. More than the half of the world`s water supply is contained in just 9 countries: USA, Canada, Columbia, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, India, China and Indonesia. (NRDC.org). This means that a lot of places in the world does not have access to potable water, what makes people use polluted water, bringing us to the reality that this kills more people per year than war. (NRDC.org) Water is the most important thing we need to live and yet many people use it unconsciously, tons of wastewater are dumped in the seas, rivers and lakes. 

We still have time to change it and do more for our enviroment. Some countries treat water before throwing it back to the nature, what is a great help, but just as it happens to plastic (see our May/18 text), the production of wastewater is much bigger than its cleaning.

Everyone can help to prevent water contamination by choosing simple actions like reducing plastic consumption, properly dispose of chemical cleaners, oils, non-biodegradable item to keep them from ending up down the drain, if you have a pup, be sure to pick up its poop! (NRDC.org)

Reuse water as many time as possible, don`t let water running while you do the dishes or brush your teeth, take a shorter shower. Doing little things together makes it a big thing, everyone can! There are so many ways to save water and change the perspectives of the future. Everyone is responsable for your choices, what do you want to be responsible for?


"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water!" W.H.Auden

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Entre hechizos y pociones


 por Priscila Lucia Renteria Torres 
En algún momento nos hemos preguntado si el trabajo que hacemos de enseñar es valorado por aquellos a los que con gusto y dedicación ofrecemos nuestro conocimiento, si los lazos que hacemos en nuestro camino no son permeables y esos saludos y felicitaciones que enviamos y recibimos son más que palabras cordiales… Pues bien, en las anteriores semanas tuve la oportunidad de comprobar que ciertamente no estamos solas, que el esfuerzo que hacemos y que vinieron haciendo otras en este andar sí tiene sus recompensas y que van más allá de lo que habíamos imaginado.
Cuando pensamos en los infortunios que suelen aquejar nuestra profesión podemos sentir coraje, tristeza, impotencia, debilidad y/o nostalgia, más cuando se trata del bienestar del estudiante. Junto a mi hombro tuve el honor de conocer a otras hechiceras del estudio y saborear las pócimas del conocimiento que vienen mezclando para tener éxito dentro de sus múltiples recintos generalmente somnolientos.
-Yo cambio el tono de la voz- decía una guía, -yo, bajo un poco el clima para que no se duerman- comentó otra, -a mí me resulta de repente verlos a los ojos y ser un poco intimidante para que recuerden que los vigilo- finalizó otra hechicera; eso me obligó a analizar los métodos que usamos para lograr el objetivo que es el entendimiento.
Al mismo tiempo, no sólo nos encontrábamos hablando de lo que ocurre en nuestros recintos, si no de algo más profundo, nuestras vidas, pudimos conectar sobre intereses, gustos, familia, amistades, ingredientes de cocina y modo de preparar hasta el pozole, y entre risas y suspiros penetramos en el ánima, pudimos entender nuestro yo en diferentes niveles, nuestros arquetipos educativos de aquellas antecesoras y la vocación trascendental de la hechicera que mostró como una imagen fija la paciencia, sacrificio y tolerancia.
Sin embargo, este intercambio tan favorable de hechizos se veía perturbado por una sombra fuera de nuestro alcance. La palabra decisión en lo personal no me es grata cuando se trata por una parte del deber hacia el conocimiento y por otra del derecho colectivo al fruto que nos permite pagar las cuentas. La decisión se tomó y por una gran parte aplaudimos volver con los pupilos y seguir llenando sus mentes de ideas revolucionarias que les permitirán alzarse ante el mundo y decir yo soy; pero, por otra se decidió también dejar a un lado las necesidades personales y tomar nuestros libros de poderosos encantamientos, la rama de la escritura, y el pintarrón cual cazo en el que vaciamos todo hasta desbordar la sustancia creadora de maravillas.
Y al regresar, ¡ah! Otra vez ese brinco en el corazón de volver a hacer lo que amas hacer, de aventar conjuros que envuelvan al menos a uno de ellos y tenga el poder suficiente para abrir sus ojos. Es entonces cuando en grupo te saludan alegremente y ellos envían un encantamiento que te hace estremecer la espalda, erguirte involuntariamente y darte cuenta en ese preciso momento que tú eres la aprendiz, - ¡Profesora, qué gusto poder volver a verla! Tengo libros y videos que quiero compartir con usted- dice uno, - Leí un artículo que me resultó interesante y me gustaría mostrarle lo que analicé- agrega otro, - ¡Hay profesora!, ¡qué bueno que ya regresamos! – enfatizó alguien más. Y es ahí, cuando me di cuenta de que el método puede ser simplemente nuestra presencia en el aula, los vínculos que formamos sin darnos cuenta con aquellos que nos perciben atentamente.

Pasamos tantas horas ensimismadas en nuestro hacer automático que olvidamos el entorno en el que nos encontramos, que olvidamos con quién colaboramos y olvidamos que somos los eslabones de muchas cadenitas, olvidamos no sentirnos solas.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Viable Altruism Moves to Action


Mission: Altruism and Sisterhood
By Rebeca Olagaray

   In México, when crops are ready, mothers with their children do the harvesting.

    These are the migrant children, born in migrant families, who have inherited this way of living from generation to generation: poorest among the poor, illiterate and unschooled, they lead a semi-nomadic life, moving from crop to crop.

   Not having a viable plan about it, I had always present in my mind the concern sisters Valerie Armstrong and Lorena Quevedo had expressed about this terrible reality.

   An opportunity came up with a lovely idea: An invitation to donate a gift shoe-box for a child victim of the September 19th earthquake, decorated and filled with love, and gifts which would include a letter for the child who would received it.

   Motors got started.

  Rotary Club Jardines de Cuernavaca President, Alejandro Dorantes, chose the children in Morelos State that most likely wouldn’t receive any Christmas present and that’s how we got in touch with migrant children!


   There was a deadline, and 180 gift boxes as a goal. Count-down had begun!

 We contacted every person we could, scanning for prospective members, which led us to form a Fellowship Chat with wonderful helpers.

   The idea was enthusiastically welcomed not only from ETA-Cuernavaca and Mexico’s Gamma and Epsilon members. It attracted non-attending members that got involved in further activities as well.



   This highly motivating activity was an opportunity to join in a viable appealing altruistic endeavor of love, and an opportunity to reach migrant children at last.

Eta Mexico-Cuernavaca Chapter
August 31, 2018






Thursday, August 30, 2018

The Power of Failure in Learning



Mission: Excellence in Education
by Jeannie Andersen 

“If you are afraid of failing you won’t get very far.

This was Steve Jobs’ conclusion in an interview in his early thirties when asked about the secrets of success.


“You have got to act, you’ve got to be willing to fail, you have to be willing to crash and burn.” 


     Time and again great thinkers and innovators throughout history have voiced the same thought, that in order to succeed, it’s normal and natural to make some mistakes along the way. Failure has been shown to be essential for success in most areas of life, including education. This was eloquently expressed by Sir Ken Robinson, best-selling author and professor emeritus at the University of Warwick,  who addressed the importance of failure on learning, creativity, and success in one of the most-watched TED talks of all time.  


     According to Robinson, we should be allowed and encouraged to make mistakes which, in turn, nourish our creativity and imagination.   Robinson told the TED Talk audience that as children, we are all inherently inquisitive but when we learn in institutional settings, we lose our creativity. In a recent television interview he told the host: “We stigmatize mistakes and we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”  


     “By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost their creativity and are afraid of being wrong.”  

     Robinson argued that making mistakes is a crucial step in the learning process.   In the same television interview, he mentioned a friend who won the Nobel Prize. When asked about the secret of success, his friend said 98 % of his experiments failed and that is how he eventually managed to achieve a winning formula and the Nobel Prize. Failure helped him to find the answer. 

     In spite of the obvious need to fail and fail again in order to succeed, our current educational systems are designed to recognize only one right answer. This mindset starts in the primary school years and continues throughout the educational experience to university levels. 


     At the primary school level this was exemplified by the narrow focus of “No Child Left Behind” program  in the US, approved in 2001 by Congress and promoted by the Bush Administration.  It had a retrograde emphasis on teaching children “the basics”, followed by annual testing on these subjects. According to Adam Richardson, by focusing on the basics, “No Child Left Behind” reduced students’ chances of success, rather than increasing them. (1)  This congressional act has since been stripped of federal coverage and is now state-regulated, called the “Every Student Succeeds Act”, but the provisions relating to the periodic standardized tests given to students have not been challenged or eliminated.  (2)   

    In higher education, students fare no differently. They experience an educational environment that puts enormous pressure on success which is measured by grades and test scores. Success for these students is getting an A. It’s not about how much they learn; it’s not about how much the topics in the class spark their curiosity about the world around them; it’s not about how classroom experiences transform their world views. Success is about the grade they receive. Standardized testing puts all the emphasis on the final answer rather than the process used to get there. With such a perspective, there is no room for failure so there is no room for experimentation. Students fear trying something new or something that they may not be initially good at because it is far too risky for their GPA. (3) 



     The argument here is that failure - and learning from it rather than avoiding it – should be viewed as an integral part of learning. Learning from mistakes should be encouraged rather than rejected by modern educational institutes. 

     What can we do as teachers to foster a shift to an educational experience that permits, and even encourages, being “wrong”?

     There is a growing grass-roots movement among contemporary educators that promotes an alternative model.  It is characterized by a different mind-set which values making errors. In contrast to “No Child Left Behind” with its focus on “Three R’s” : reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic), this new movement celebrates the “Four C’s”: Creativity, Complexity, Curiosity, and Collaboration. (4) This approach to learning is being amply discussed by the connected educator community in blogs, forums, Facebook groups, webinars, Tweets, and other forms of social media so it is easy to tap into on the internet.  


     Here is a brief summary of a few key concepts and strategies for this kind of learning from the lower levels up to high school:


     Formative vs Summative Assessment:  Formative assessment is used to monitor student’s learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors or teachers to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. Summative assessment, on the other hand, is used to evaluate student’s learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. (5)  Most teachers who see the value of experimentation and failure in learning prefer “formative assessment” as the more effective means of helping their students throughout the learning experience rather than the pressure of cramming for one final exam.   Good formative assessments help both students and teachers gauge understanding and adjust learning and teaching. The best formative questions help students reflect on the learning process, not just the "right" answers. (6)

  Flipped classroom: As technology becomes increasingly common in instruction at all levels of education from kindergarten to college, the modern classroom is changing. The traditional teacher-centered classroom is falling away to give students a student-centered classroom where collaborative learning is stressed. Educators are effectively utilizing online learning and changing the way they teach is by flipping their classrooms. High school teachers Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergman were the first to flip their classrooms.  


   “The Flip” started when these teachers began supplying absent students with an online lecture they could watch from home or from wherever they had access to a computer and the Internet, including school or the local library. They soon realized that if ALL their students could do this from home, then they wouldn’t need to lecture in class.  The technique works this way: instead of trying to apply concepts they learned in class at home by themselves, students watch a 5-7 minute lecture at home, write down any questions they may have, and apply the concepts in class with the guidance of the teacher. Class time is used for expanding upon the content through collaborative learning. (7)

STEAM learning: STEAM is an educational approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. 


     The end results are students who take thoughtful risks, engage in experiential learning, persist in problem-solving, embrace collaboration, and work through the creative process. (8)  This type of learning involves asking the students to find and solve a problem and providing them with basic, simple materials to solve it, and learning aids such as “Maker Spaces” “Fab Lab”,  “Tinker Lab”, etc. The learning is student-centered: students have multiple opportunities to fail and achieve along the way while solving the problem at hand. They develop creativity, critical thinking and engage with each other’s efforts in collaboration to achieve their solutions. The skills they acquire during the learning process are “real-world” and often the project involves solving an issue in their own local community. 

   See this slide presentation for concrete examples of STEAM objectives and tools to use it in the classroom: Getting Started With Makerspaces and STEAM, Meredith Martin

    As is evident from the above examples, a fundamental requirement of these new learning approaches is the use of technology. Students are encouraged to use computers, tablets and cell phones which are viewed as tools for learning, and their use is integral in the classroom. As teachers it is hard for many of us to take that leap – to allow electronic devices and other forms of technology in our classes-- but it can be done with proper class management. It is true that students are distracted by technology, especially their mobile phones, but the answer to this problem is not to ban or ignore these devices, but rather to incorporate and embrace them.

  Ultimately, there can be no creativity and no success without an openness to mistakes. We should accept the inevitability of errors and view them, when they happen, as learning opportunities.   We encourage you to consider accepting mistakes in the learning process and to explore the suggestions and techniques presented here for nurturing experimentation, exploration, and failure amongst your students.

ADK - ETA Chapter 
August 2018

Bibliography

     1. Where No Child Left Behind Went Wrong, Adam Richardson, Harvard Business Review, October 17, 2011.
      2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
    3. A Manifesto for Active Learning, Jason Farman, The Chronical of Higher Education, October 3, 2013.
     4. Where No Child Left Behind Went Wrong, Adam Richardson, Harvard Business Review, October 17, 2011.
     7.  http://elearningindustry.com/the-flipped-classroom-guide-for-teachers   Christopher Pappas. E-learning industry, September 13, 2013.
   8. https://educationcloset.com/steam/what-is-steam/  Susan Riley, the founder of EducationCloset

  


Saturday, July 21, 2018


Mirror Neurons and Education

Mission: Excellence in Education
by Pilar Olagaray


The first time I heard about mirror neurons I was impressed. It’s really incredible how our brain works. And it is fascinating to discover the impact these neurons have on education.

Mirror neurons were initially discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti in the early 1990’s at the University of Parma, Italy. He was scanning a monkey’s brain, when a person came in to the laboratory and opened a peanut and ate it. At that moment the monkey’s neurons lit up as if he was eating the peanut.

With mirror neurons we are connected to other people. When I observe your anger, your joy, your frustration, etc, the same neurons will activate as if I were having  the experience myself.

These are empathy neurons, and thanks to them we can enjoy a movie, a football game, a videogame and feel every emotion we see. They help us to socialize and to feel affection and companionship. The mirror neurons’ job is to live other people’s lives and help us to understand them. These neurons essentially mirror in the observer’s brain what would have occurred if they had personally done the action.


  

But, how can I use these amazing neurons for education?

Humans learn together and with each other, we learn by observing and repeating. When we watch someone do something we learn it better than if we read about the process. Watching someone playing the piano and repeating the action will help me to learn faster than if I just read about how to do it. That’s why it is important to have a “demonstration corner” in each class so that students use their mirror neurons to learn.





But mirror neurons suggest not only demonstrations, they go deeper in education, they involve the emotions which are essential for learning. How many students have we heard they say they don’t like a subject because they actually don’t like their teacher? Teaching is influenced by mirror neurons.




As teachers we have to be aware that we are a role model. In every student I can see myself. If teachers are joyful and happy, the students will be also. We have to be aware that our students’ mirror neurons are observing and reacting to every action, emotional expression and behavior. We have to realize that we influence them both in a physical as well as in a spiritual way in a short and long term.

That is why we must have our students notice that we read and write, that we are curious and look for answers, that we read and share our reading and help others to get involved, that we are interested in difficult subjects and find them full of adventure, that we are courageous and strong, that we concentrate and participate, that we persevere until we finish the task, that we cooperate with others and care for them, and so on. May we be aware or not, we always play a role model for them to follow.


Thus, it is relevant that we are constantly checking out our own attitude and Self. Our expressions, our moods, and the way we respond to our students, are very important to create a nice environment for learning. We can consciously use our gestures to show thoughts and feelings.

So next time we find out something is not working well in the classroom we can stop and have a look to our inner selves: how am I feeling, what am I letting my feelings mirror? Furthermore, what am I mirroring and giving back?  And, from there, learn how to flow joyfully in the learning process.