AndrĂŠs Orozco Yachay Tech Imbabura, Ecuador
July 25, 2015
Finally I am finishing level 6, the final step to finish the English program. I still remembered when I joined Yachay one and a half year ago. I need to take the placement exam, my mind was divided. One part of my mind told me to do the placement exam intentionally bad, so I could be placed in a low level in order to study English from the bottom again. But the other part of my mind, told me to do the best of me, so I could skip many levels as possible. At the end of the day I got placed at level 4. One and a half year later I successful finished the program. But English level 6 was something special because a lot of things, but specially it was because the work I did, the skills I learned and my professor and classmates. In this level we focused on different topics such as: ethics, language and education. But I essentially focused all my works on education. Mainly because we are living around education every day in our lives and also I shared my philosophy about education with Mr. Matthew. So the great majority of my works that you will found in this portfolio are focused on education and specially the integration of arts in education. But now, what about the expectations I had about this level? At the beginning I had a lot of expectations, many of them were true, especially the amount of work, of course I did much more work than the previous semester. But something I was not expecting was the work on groups. Almost all the semester we worked in groups which at the beginning I did not liked, I used to be a person who hate work in groups, but this semester changed my mind about working in groups. I found working in groups really helpful and interesting, mainly
because you can hear different points of view. For example we used to do an activity called peer review, in this activity our classmates checkout our essays and correct it. The first time I did this I felt uncomfortable because I used to not like the idea that someone other than the teacher review my work. But when I saw all the corrections that my classmates made, I felt happy because when I reviewed my work I did not see that mistakes. This clearly shows why is important to have different points of view about our works. Also my progress doing writing and speaking has been amazing, despite I had almost the same grades in all my essays, in every essay I made I noticed a clearly progress. I still can remember how I used to have problems doing my thesis statement and transitions, but at the end of this semester I believe myself that now I can do a good clean and structured thesis statement. Further I learned how to be more organized doing my work, I still procrastinated a little bit this semester, but this time I forced myself to better and do the things on time. But this could not happen without the help of Mr. Matthew because he really liked to upload on time our assignments and also he like attach some helpful information to do our assignments. So now I feel really prepared to take all my classes in English, but this is not the end of my journey. I’ll still learning English, because despite I feel ready to take my classes in English, I still have a lot of things to improve, especially my fluency while speaking. And knowledge is endless so never stop learning guys. Thank you reading my letter, I hope you will enjoy my portfolio, my progress, and the philosophy behind all my works.
AndrĂŠs Orozco
The Reinvent of Education Andres Sebastian Orozco Sanchez Universidad de Investigacion de Tecnologica Experimental Yachay Tech 2016, April 29
The Reinvent of Education Through the years we believe that education is one of the most important factors for the development of the person or country, but in the latest year’s statistics showed us education is not being a good invest after all, but why? Till H, a young successful therapist and speaker, showed us why we need to reinvent our education and how we should, following some steps in the way to achieve the success. Traditionally, we have believed that students need to go to school, attend to class, do the work, and that is enough, putting aside our passion.
Till H as many young people, had many expectations about university. He thought teachers would be open books, like mentors. He thought that university is designed to give us skill to our professions, and finally, he thought he was going to find many passionate students; but all his expectations quickly fell down. He found teachers that are underpaid and even they don’t have time to answer his mails, he was not going to learn or improve skills is just about how good you are at taking exams, and most of the students are not passionate, are just complaining about how boring books are. All these stuff is making university worthless and it is starting to be an obligation, but how we should design our education? Well, Till H purpose to us four simple steps, which I completely agree with those. The first step is: Develop skill; this step is pretty crucial for me. Develop skills is one of the best things we can do, and I say this from experience, when I was 16 years old I decided learn Photoshop on internet just for fun. Couple of months later I was well known on YouTube for my designs and also I made enough money to buy an iMac. Unfortunately I decided to stop designing because it began to get me stressed. But thanks
to that I learned to design and I always make a great job designing presentations, posters, videos all this kind of work that is common in university but in high school / Univers ity they do not teach you how to do it. The second step is: Learn from the best. And again, I am going to take me as example; when I started to design I decided to look the portfolios of the best designers around YouTube and I found the way to contact them on Skype, so I started to ask them for some feedback about my work. It’s helped me to improve faster than others and in a better way. The third step is: Learning is more important than making money. For me this is the other really important step I know that one of the most common objective for the people is to make a lot of money, but if we start learning things just for making money we are becoming of us machines. And is really probably that we are not going to be happy doing what we do, due to the absence of passion. This is happening a lot in universities. People never found their passion and just join university to obtain a degree, a degree that supposedly assured them a job. And the last step: Hustle come first. This is universal in every moment of our lives; without effort nothing can be gained, and maybe at the start of the journey it will be hard but in the next corner you will find the reward. This video made me feel especially good because I share all his ideas, and, in a certain way, I followed those steps when I was younger. Till H really focus on the way how traditional education is not working anymore, how important it is to find our passion and how we should develop our skills around our passion to obtain experience and success in our lives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GroÃ&#x;, Till. (2014). Forget university? 4 steps to design your own education. Extracted from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUnpSYMNEhY
The educational problem for Hispanic and Black population in U.S Andrés Sebastián Orozco Sánchez Universidad de Investigacion de Tecnologica Experimental Yachay Tech 2016, May 20
The educational problem for Hispanic and Black population in U.S Children in America come from a variety of nations, which means we are surrounded by a diversity of cultures and societies. As a result, schools face the duty to provide equal educational opportunities for everyone. But is this happening? Well, latest statics shown us how social factors such as: race, family structure, poverty, parents education and bad distribution of budgets; are directly influencing the American education system, creating conditions where minorities like Hispanic and Black population experience educational problems, such as repeating a grade, behavior suspensions and inclusive dropping out school. Despite U.S is the country that spends more money on Education than other CEO countries (Cook, 2015). U.S is still a country with unequal educational system due to the difference between minorities and white population. By 2022, the number of Hispanic students in public elementary and secondary schools is projected to grow 33 percent from the 2011 numbers. And the number of multi-racial students is expected to grow 44 percent (Cook, 2015). But the fast growing of the multi-racial population is not the problem, the problem is the social background in these populations. According to the United States 2010 Census report, the amount of Hispanic children living in poverty is 35.5 percent (Colorlines, 2011). Also black children are far more likely to live in households that are low-income, extremely poor, food-insecure or receiving longterm welfare support (Cook, 2015), it seems obvious that these outside circumstances would impact their ability to concentrate at school, and also poverty means less access to learning tools such as computers, books and internet. Another frequently problem is the rate of dropout students, despite the dropout of Hispanic students has decreased in 2004 (17.6 percent), it is still over three times higher than the dropout figure for white students (5.2 percent)
(Colorlines, 2011) meanwhile Black students are more likely to be held back, harming them, and makes them dropout school later on specially in 9th grade (Cook, 2015). In addition the educational level of parents seems to be a big problem. Black parents with less education do not expect their children to attend school, causing in the children lower expectations and less-positive attitudes. In the other hand statics have shown that Hispanic families who have at least one parent with Bachelor’s degree or higher have significantly lower than average child poverty rate (8.7 percent) (Colorlines, 2011). But not all the problems are caused by poverty or family background, the bad distribution of the education budget is one of the main factors. Even though U.S is the country that speed more money than other CEO countries (Cook, 2015), the budget for education is only 2.77 percent of U.S taxes compare to the amount of 19.27 percent given to national defense (Colorlines, 2011), due to this, schools serving Hispanic and Black population have less experience, lower paid teachers and less access to information. While more Hispanic and Black population are attending to college, the need to find a solution is increasing. One of the solutions purposed by (Colorlines, 2011) to reduce child poverty is to reform the K-12 education, focusing on lowering high school dropout rates while also further supporting the increase of college attendance and graduation rates, by more funding for education that will subsequently reduce child poverty and the social familiar background. Increasing the number of high school and college graduates, leading to the financial progress of minorities. In conclusion Hispanic and Black population are having hard times as regards access to education due to diversity of circumstances like poverty, family background, parents education and bad distribution of budgets, creating a vicious circle of poverty and unemployment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Colorlines. (28 de November de 2011). Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Cook. (28 de January de 2015). U.S Race and Education. Extracted from http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/
“Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun” Analysis and Interpretation Cynthia Arias, Isaac Bravo, Carlos Bustamante and Andrés Orozco Yachay Tech June 17th , 2016
“Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun” Analysis and Interpretation Nobody knows what there is after death, and because of that, most of people feel awareness to think about death. William Shakespeare, a famous British playwright, poet and actor who lived in the XVI century, thought about death in a positive way (Bio, n.d.) One example of his way of thinking is the poem “Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun” written in between 1608 and 1609. He wanted to share with people his positive feelings about death in order to show us that we should not fear to death because death is only a part of the normal life cycle. The poem “Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun” written by William Shakespeare describes death as a natural event that we should not be afraid because death is the end of a long path where we are going to rest in peace without worrying for the bad things. Firstly, it is important to understand the Shakespeare’s message. The most important characteristic of Shakespeare’s poem is the use of multiple metaphors to make abstract the message that death is something natural. A metaphor is a figure of speech, which makes an implicit, implied or hidden comparison between two things that are unrelated, but share some common characteristics (Literary Devices, n.d.). Most of the metaphors used in the poem have the same meaning. They mean that people should not be afraid to die because death could be a new life. In addition, Shakespeare used several times the phrase “Fear no more” to show that we do not know how death is, but despite of this we should not have fear. In addition, his last poem’s stanza talks about ghosts, witchcraft and exorcism. People could associate these things with fear, so all of these words are metaphors to talk about bad moments, bad feelings or maybe bad people that could disturb our peace or could cause us problems while we are alive. However, all of these will end at the moment of death, allowing people to rest in peace.
Then, it is important to identify the characteristics like symmetry that make the poem beauty. Symmetry could make us to think that life and death is the same thing, so that we should not fear to death. Symmetry refers to something that has both sides that are exactly or very similar to each other. The poem has four stanzas, and each one has six lines. It is possible to appreciate symmetry between the first four lines and the last two lines. So, by using symmetry Shakespeare was trying to express that there is another life after death where we are going to rest of the things we used to care in the past life, such as the job or the money. According to David Anderson, senior editor of Religion News Service, it is very possible that Shakespeare was Catholic. Therefore, the Catholic religion, belonging to Christianity, has beliefs in life after death. So, if we based on religious beliefs of the author of the poem, we can to say that he wrote the poem “Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun” thinking in a new life after death, and he used the symmetr y as a mean to express his positive thoughts about death. Moreover, other characteristic that makes beauty the poem is rhyme Moreover, other characteristic that makes beauty the poem is rhyme. This poem is composed by four sextuples that have rhymes that give the poem a beautiful sound, making reference that death could a good thing. A sextuple is a six-line stanza of eightsyllable lines rhymed either ababcc or aabccd. In this poem, each stanza is rhymed according the ababcc scheme, which means that the first line verse rhymes with the third, the second line verse rhymes with the fourth and the two last line verses rhyme with each other. It kind of writing the stanzas makes the poem to have musicality. If we read or declaim the poem, we can heard it nice and we can identify that the poem has rhythm, so it property could make us feel good. In this case, the rhythm helped the author express his ideas in a positive way, so we could catch the message about death in a positive way,
too. Furthermore, the language of the poem is another important factor in the beauty of the poem.
Furthermore, the language is other important aspect that makes the poem more beautiful, and helps to make people forget their fear to death. This poem is too deep and really confusing when we are trying to understand it at first time. It is because the poem was written according to the old English, which corresponds to the English that Shakespeare spoke in the middle age. Although it is a little bit difficult to understand, the poem’s language is accessible and becomes understandable after reading it many times, so we can understand the author’s message and maybe we can change our point of view. Also, we can appreciate how much beautiful could be the end of life, and we could forget our fear about death. In conclusion, William Shakespeare had positive thoughts about death, which is reflected in the poem “Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun”. The most important characteristics found in the poem are metaphors, symmetry, rhymes, and langua ge. Metaphors mean that death is a natural event that we should not fear, and symmetr y symbolizes that death and life are the same thing. In addition, rhyme and language help to make the poem more beautiful and make people forget the fear they have about death. So, the poem “Fear No More the Heat O’ the Sun” written by Shakespeare refers to death as something natural that will happen sometime, and that we should not fear because when death comes we are going to rest in peace.
References Anderson, D. (2014). Was Shakespeare Catholic? Retrieved from: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2008/04/25/april-25-2008-wasshakespeare-catholic/5519/ Bio. (n.d.). William Shakespeare Biography. Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/william-shakespeare-9480323 Dictionary. (n.d). Symmetry. Retrieved from: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/symmetry Eberhart, L. (2014). Sextilla. Retrieved from: http://poetscollective.org/poetryforms/tag/ababcc/ Literary Devices. (n.d.). Metaphor. Retrieved from: http://literarydevices.net/metaphor/ Shakespeare, W. (1609). Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/50428
“The need of censorship in school” Andrés Sebastián Orozco Sánchez Yachay Tech June 30th , 2016
The need of censorship in School Just image your children in the school’s library. When suddenly they decided to pick a book and read it, your children started to read it, when they realized is the autobiography of a porn star. Cases like this happening through years in many countries, making the censorship in school a topic of constantly debate, involving parents, students, teachers and school admins. So in order to protect the children from content that they still not can interpret it in the correct way, censorship is needed. Censorship, in most of the cases, is a safe way to protect students against inappropriate content due to their young age. But what is censorship? Censorship is defined as the forbidding, blocking, limiting or obstructing access to informa tio n whatever reason (Petress, 2005). And in recent years it is being used in schools to not expose students to certain content. An example of this is the racial censorship that is being used in order to not discriminate or offend certain groups. Another great example of censorship, is the sexual content censorship. But censorship requires a high level of attention from teachers, librarians, school administrators and parents. Because not everything should be censured, an example of this is the case called “The Tinker”, where two fifteen year old boys and one thirteen year old girl wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War (Roskin, 200). The school decided to punish the kids, but these kids were just expressing a particular opinion in a pacific way. A tons of cases like this happened before, where the opinion right, was violated due to bad censorship. Censorship also helps to improve the student’s behavior. One of the cases about bad behavior and no censorship happened in Bethel High School in Pierce County, Washington. Where a student gave a speech replete with sexual metaphors (Petress, 2005). Due to not censorship the audience were exposed to this respectful speech. The student who gave the speech was suspended and the U.S Supreme Court stated: “Even
the most heated political discourse in a democratic society requires consideration for the personal sensibilities of the other participants and audiences�. This a great example of why we need certain censorship in order to improve the students behavior. But, is censor ship against the right of free expression and access of informatio n? Due to censorship are students being kept from reality? Is censorship violating student ’s freedom? Unnecessary no. It is true that censorship in some cases are being used in the wrong way as we saw before. But, if censorship is applied logically and in a mature way, we will protect our children from content that they might can access in a future, when they will be able to use this information in a correct way, and not when they do not have the enough criteria to interpret it. In conclusion, censorship have a lot of advantages, but especially we are protecting our children, against inappropriate content. The good use of censorship is a safe way to protect students against racial, sexual and adult content that they are not able to interpret in a correct way. But to obtain this we should manage censorship in a mature way. Were parents, teachers, librarians and schools admins are working together for the benefit of the students.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Petress, K. (2005). The Role of censorship in school. Journal of Instructional Psychology.
The Impact of Learning Arts in School Andrés Sebastián Orozco Sánchez Universidad de Investigacion de Tecnologica Experimental Yachay Tech 2016, Jul 07
The Impact of Learning Arts in School I.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, much has been discussed about the actual educational system, and especially about the impact of learning arts in school. But in the last century, art has become an undervalue object and illegitimate socially, besides the educational system has not changed anything since the industrial age. An educational system that is focused in create employers, where students are educated to be just another gear for big companies. Schools certainly, have become a business where students are their product, a business in order to kill our creativity and ways of thinking. For all these reasons arises the crucial need to change the current educational system, and especially in a way where arts fills perfect with education. But is teaching arts in school just a waste of money and time? Or conversely, does it help students to obtain a higher level of skills and achievements? As I said before actually educational programs undervalue arts as a way of human development, but latest researches has shown how arts improve the educational quality and also how students with high levels of arts participation outperform other students , such as level of attentiveness, participation, student interaction and better performance in multiple fields. For all these reasons students who attend schools with arts programs perform better in schools than other students from similar socioeconomic categories, so schools should implement and invest more in arts programs. II.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Arts transform the learning experience in a better way, for both students and teachers. When arts arrives at the center of knowledge, schools become a place of discovery (Fiske, 1999). An example of this is the analysis made by the Department of Education’s (NELS:88) where a database of 25,000 students, demonstrates that students with high level of arts participation outperform other students with no art participation by
virtually every measure, these students with high level of arts participation highly success in mathematics and reading (Fiske, 1999). All these things happened because arts engage multiple skills and abilities, such as the development of cognitive, social and personal competencies. Also the learning experience changed in every way, according to the Teachers College research team, schools that involved arts programs, changed in a cultural form, figurative walls between classrooms and disciplines are broken down, teachers are renewed and even the physical appearance of a school is transformed through the representations of learning (Fiske, 1999). All these visible changes clearly improve the learning experience. But not only students changed their learning experience, looks like teachers also improve their teaching/learning experience. The teachers who involved arts programs examined by Champions of Change research, described how arts experience transform their personal lives, well trained staff and teachers become leaders for institutional and systemic change (Fiske, 1999).
Arts and academic performance are extremely related, students who are high involved in arts has shown help to obtain more academic achievements. Recent studies has shown how connecting arts with other subject help students comprehend and retain more about the subjects involved. A recent program called “Different ways of knowing�, revealed how students who attained this program, increased their interest in different areas such as: 7% reading art and humanities, 10% in social studies, 25% in mathematics and 7% in science. This stats clearly evidence how involving arts with subjects, increase the interest of students in different areas (Iwai, 2003). Another incredible data, is the relationship between instrumental music and cognitive development in mathematics. The champions of change study show how learning to read music and to associate musica l notation with abstracts concepts of time, rhythm and pitch appear to involve forms of
mathematical reasoning. An important skill developed while a child begins the study of music, is reading musical notation, the analysis of music at basic level reveals an obvious connection between music and mathematics (James, 1991). This relation happen because rhythm is defined as a numerical pattern of beats occurring overtime which mathematica l skills are required in order to understand the time meaning represented in a note (Fiske, 999). Also this studied analyzed the relation between the SES (Socio economic status), musical involvement and mathematics performance.
Fig 1. Probability of highest math prophecy, by S ES vs No involvement in music. Adapted from “Champions of Change� (Fiske, 1999).
As we can see in Fig 1. Low SES but with high music involvement clearly overpass the average students, and solo students with high SES and high music involvement overpass students with high SES and no music involvement. This results display how be involved in music increase your probability to perform better at mathematics. Also looks like learn piano is the instrument that most contributed with math development, a research presented at the UNESCO (Iwai, 2003) shows how a group that had taken piano lessons, had 15% higher mathematics scores than other group that played math video games who already obtained 36% higher results than the control group
(average students). Even though the participants of the experimental group marked lower IQ scores than the average students, they obtained higher scores in mathematics and history tests (Iwai, 2003). But actually one of the main problems to integrate arts in educational programs, is teacher’s preparation and beliefs. A research managed by the Australian Journal of Teacher Education, show how teachers have different points of view and beliefs about arts. The study was conducted at two groups of pre-service teachers, at two differe nt universities in Australia. The initial questions in the survey focused on documenting the teacher prior experiences with the arts. In the group 1, 11.8% had never studied arts before meanwhile the 2nd group 2.89 of the teachers had never studied arts before. The other part of the survey focused on the current participation of the teacher with arts and the role of arts in children’s learning (Lemon, 2013). The results from the second survey are shown below.
Fig 2. Perceptions of arts education. Adapted from “What is the role of arts in a Primary school?” (Lemon, 2013).
As we can see in the table there is a lack of current arts experiences from teachers, both of the groups shared similar beliefs about arts. This could be because that while teachers have experience from schooling system, they have limited experience to understand arts from a teacher experience, occasioning a disinterest on teaching arts to their students. As we could see teachers are not being educated to teach arts in order to create an anti-arts mindset. The lack of knowledge of the advantages that art provides, make teachers undervalue arts. But this can be solve easily by changing the way of teacher’s education in order to change their mindset and providing positive learning experiences that support the development of arts in school. III.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, this researches provide clearly evidence about why arts should be implemented in educational programs. There are a lot of advantages on involving arts with other subjects, this studies shown how students that involved arts in school definite ly overpass other students with the same socio-economic status, in order to improve the quality of learning and the development of skills in different area. Despite the actual educational system had create teachers that are not able to teach arts, this could be done by doing more researches and providing positive learning experiences about arts and it is advantages. So there is an urgency to implement arts in educational programs in order to explode the full potential of learning arts through the school.
IV.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lemon, N., & Garvis, S. (2013). What is the Role of the Arts in a Primary School?: An Investigation of Perceptions of Pre-Service Teachers in Australia. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 38(9). http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2013v38n9.7
Iwai, K. (2003). The Contribution of Arts Education to Children’s Lives . Extracted from http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/files/40522/12669211823contribution_AE.pdf/co ntribution%2BAE.pdf
Fiske, Edwar B, Ed. (1999). The Impact of the Arts on Learning. Extracted from: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED435581.pdf