Inversion exercises

Inversion 1

Never before had he seen anything so beatiful
He had never seen anything so beatiful before

Only now are the effects becoming apparent
The effects are only becoming apparent now

On no account must exhibits be touched
Exihibits must not be touched on any account

Rarely do you find a coin of this age in such good conditions
You rarely find a coin of this age in such good conditions

Only when she got home did she realizad what had happened
She realized what had happened only when she got home

Inversion 2

There isn't a city anywhere in the world with as many beautiful monuments as Rome.
Nowhere in the world is there a city with s many beautiful monuments as Rome.

You very rarely come across anyone nowadays who hasn't been abroad.
Very rarely nowadays do you come across anyone who hasn't been abroad.

You can only really learn language by living in a country where it is spoken

next part comming soon....

My blogging experience

My blogging experience has been an adventure. Once I had a blog when I was 16, I posted like 3 times and then I forgot the password, so it might still be lost in the huge ocean that internet has become.
On that occasion I wanted to post my own experiences and sad feelings that, I think, every adolescent has. But now, in this blog I’ve had the chance to talk about more general things, my likes and dislikes, my opinion about different topics and I can actually see how much I’ve grown since I made that first blog.
Now I see life from a whole new point of view because now I have so much more experience than I had before. I can see the bright side of life because I discovered that surviving adolescence is possible.
This has also been a great opportunity to improve my writing skills and how to express my self in order for others to understand me. Before this blog I had serious problems getting my head together when writing, but now I can say something without running in circles.
Anyway, I think that making a blog at school or university as an assignment is a very good idea. Its fun, it’s interesting, it helps you improve writing and technological skills but for me as a future teacher, the most important reason for doing it is that blogs help teachers to keep their students motivated. This is because you break the routine and take what is important and fun for kids nowadays. This is what critical education calls “recognizing students as subjects”, not denying their background and considering their external culture to teach the formal knowledge based on this.

Motivation

This post is about one of the biggest issues related to education: motivation.
As a future teacher, I recognize this topic as fundamental when you’re talking about teaching. this is because we all know that there are different influences in children's difficulties when they are learning (family issues, adolescent problems, mood, etc) but nobody can deny that one of the main responsibility of a teacher is to know how to motivate students to learn.
To captivate the students attention, to help them improve their self-stem, to considered them as people with a valuable opinion, are all ways to motivate children to keep fighting, to get better and not to give up just because they think they’re stupid of are too afraid of failure.

When I was at school I could see how different teachers applied this thing called motivation with my classmates and I. some didn’t even care, they thought that their only job was to stand in front of the class and “throw up” information as they were machines. Other were very interested in motivate us and made a huge effort, but the age, and external issues won the battle and those teachers end up giving up on us.

As you see, we have to faces of the coin, and the only reasonable way to go is not to go to the extremes in any position, to analyze the situation, to know the students and to study the variables that can lead them to lose every hope they can have in schools. And finally, to be creative, to innovate and be ready to break the rules or normal order, just to accomplish a most wonderful goal: student willing to do their best for their education and their future.

do schools kill the children's creativity?

Today I'll write about a very interesting conference I watched in ted.com
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

The person speaking is Sir Ken Robinson, who is very good at giving a speech (you can see he makes very funny jokes but also he makes the conference interesting)
Let me tell you that I completely agree with this man.
I believe that schools kill the imagination and creativity of very talented children. I feel so sad when I think in how many amazing, gifted people have waste a huge talent just because no one gave them the opportunity to express it.
Our social system ( political and economical) is focus on the efficiency and productivity of people, how they need to be prepared to get into the labor world since they are very little, and all the things that the government think are not important are left behind from the official curriculum.

Here in Chile is the same situation. our economical system rules the schools and ask them to teach the most important things a person needs to know to get into the university and to get a job (math, language, English, etc) and the arts are almost out of schools (or seeing as an extra class) because Chilean people think that you can’t make a living by working in something related to art (being a singer, an actor, a dancer etc)
As you can see, money is the most important issue here in my beloved country.

My school was a very good example of this situation. The school tough hundreds of children and the goal was to make them able to pass the PSU exam. They thought this exam was the only way to take children out of poverty. But it is? People who work in something related to art and are talented; actually make million of pesos compared to the ones who have a regular job.
So everyone is just going nuts, don’t you think?

Victory city

The city of tomorrow

I was looking arround a very nice page about a city called Victory city. It's aplan a guy had when he was like 13 years old, and when he grew up decided to make his idea public. this idea is just that, an idea. An uthopic dream that have never been applyed.
The whole design of the city seems perfect, good for people and for the enviroment. The thing is that even when most of the ideas are innovative and interesting, the proyect will be so good for people that the goverment won't consider it a good idea ( becouse is better for the goverment and economy that our life is expensive and difficult, more money for them)
if the city is perfect we might not need a goverment to command us, so It'snot crazy to think that they will opposed to this great idea.

I think that here in Chile the goverment gets so many benefits from the system we're living in (and also the power nations) that the system won't change too much.
I don't think we'll have a tecnological country like Japan, or flying cars like the cartoons showed us when we were kids.Maybe we will remain being like we are now.
don't think I'm a pessimistic person, I just think tht after getting to the year 2000 and not seeing more that fireworks, I lost my hopes in living in a very modern world, maybe my kids o grandkids will, but I really think I lost my chance.