About English in sociology

The first thing i must say about english as an obligatory subject in my career is that i think it mustn't. That's because we as latin american sociologists, we had two languages: spanish and portuguese, in all sociology congress we had to listen the both languages, and if you don't portuguese, you miss almost the 30% of the talks. So i think that portuguese had to be the obligatory language and english could be an elective subject.

About english classes in the university, i think there are the classical english classes that exist in all institutes or courses, using the same kind of books. So i think they are ok. About this blogs, i think that they aren't very useful, but not just because the activity of writing, which i support a lot, is that we don't receive any comment or correction of our work, so we can write like ten posts and always commit the same mistakes. I've practiced my writing, but i don't know if i'm doing it right at all. I think this has to be changed.

Well, you can't just expect that a tree hours a weer english class can do much for you if you don't practice the language outside the class. So i don't have the expectation that i'll learn english after i pass this english IV subject. I also seen a lot of my career companions that pass the fout english subjects and the don't really improve. I think i didn't improve with these english courses, but is more related with the lack of practicing that with the quality of them.

My flaw points in english are the grammar and the composition, i don't manage the verb tenses and the structure of the paragraphs, i just write like i do in spanish but in english, i don't know if english speakers do use the punctuation as we spanish fellows do. So i think if i want to really learn english, i have to read a lot more about that. With the vocabulary, the pronunciation and the listening i think i just need practice. 

I'm not really using english outside the class, so i can't improve much.    

That's a mess...

Good and Bad

This year wasn't very good for me.

All begins with the student's center position and my last year as a regular student, because the next year is just the terminal subjects. In the academic part, i planned to do a serious work on lenin's political theory, that's to my workshop subject, in this very moment, i didn't advance almost anything on that, so this is a bad point. But i going to start working in two weeks, when i finish my period at the student's center. 

The second part, the political one, wasn't good too. This requires a contextualization. This year, the 2013 was a very bad year to all student's movement and the student's organization in the universities and the high schools establishments. The callings to go on a strike in this years made that the strikes or the establishments occupations were deserted, most of the students vote to strike or occupy because they want some free days. This is very bad because all the student's organization were delegitimized not just this year, but in long term. After the long strike in the first semester, any other activity in the faculty were poor on participation, so we didn't make all the projects we had at the beginning. Well if it's true that we didn't advance this year in participation and organization, is also true that we don't step back either, other universities are living a real participation reflux. I hope this will change the next year, with the new majority in the government the political context will change a lot. 

If i have to think in a good point in this year, i think in is that i stayed with my girlfriend all this year, i'm very happy because of this. We are living together in our house since june of this year. 

Is not this bad, but it wasn't good

How education could have poor quality?

When i face someone talking about high quality or low quality education, I always feel awkward ¿How the education can be good or bad if is a need of the societies educates their new generations? When I thought it that way I realize that the existence of poor quality education is a social product more than the good quality education is. I mean, the obligation of education and the insufficient resources that the governments intend to the schools where the child of the poor and the working class goes, produces the poor quality education. Is not that some schools or some teachers do a good job and others don’t, is the conditions gave to the educational institutions to work that explains more the results. Its teachers salaries, quantity of students in a classroom, the infrastructure and the equipment, the proportion of hours that teachers dedicate to prepare and do classes, the support of non-teachers professionals like psychologists, education experts, social workers, and other technical support.

The existence of poor quality education is because education is not a real priority, just a minimal obligatory education is needed.

Well, the conditions of a good education are the first matter, but how we understand quality in education is another fundamental matter.

In Chile, the quality of the education is measured by the SIMCE test, that is about language and mathematical knowledge. This is the only thing that the government measures to evaluate the quality in primary and secondary education. At the end of secondary education, the students do the PSU test, which is about language, mathematical, history and social sciences, and natural sciences knowledge. The thing that this two tests have in common is that they are only multiple choice questions tests, this means they understand quality by doing standardized  multiple choice questions in about two hours of the students whole education. I think this is a very limited way of understand the quality and what the education must be.

To me, the education is about trespass the culture and the knowledge of the society to a new generation, so must be integral and at the highest level. Education is also about solving personal and social problems, because is about teach how to live individually and social way, so the education must start from real problems of the students social environment, and the path to solve it, where scientific, social and technical knowledge is needed, has to be the education.  

   

Ideas or technical standardization?

While i was making my road in the career of sociology, i felt that some assignments in some subjects tried to merge the technical knowledge that the subject tried to teach, with a sociological problematization that is supposed to be the center of our career. This always goes wrong. There are two habitual possibilities, that one makes a totally insignificant problem with a good technical formulation or that one makes a worked and significant problem with not a technical formulation that suits the subject matter. In this last case, the teacher or the assistants criticizes the result and make the students reformulate the assignment to fit in the subject way. 

This logic go an go in almost all the subjects in the career, where the technical standardization goes before a good idea of investigation or a significant sociological problem. A first step for understand this i think is that the sociological thought is holistic and crosses all subjects and topics, and the subjects are fragments of knowledge and sociological reflections that were done in the past. 

Is not that the technical knowledge or the investigation methods aren't important, they are necessary to do science, and a sociology student has to know this before graduate. The problem is the pedagogy, the process made for teaches us this techniques and method. Is a process that smother all the students holistic ideas and thoughts to make them fit in certain technique or subject approach, putting the technical standardization before the sociological creative thought. This makes professionals that are well methodologists but that have no ideas no research or do critical or creative investigations. An example of this are the final subjects were we have to do an entire research and we don't have a topic to do it, many students delay their thesis for the same reason that we don't know what to research! we don't know what to do with the sociological knowledge that we learn in the career!

Education in prison

A summary of a Guardian's article

The prison education in the UK have poor quality standards. This is something to worry about because finding a job after serving a sentence is a crucial factor to not reoffend, and education is necessary to develop skills for jobs. The reoffending levels are 50% for adults and 72% for juveniles, but being in a employment can reduce the risk of reoffending between 30% and 50%. So with these poor educational programs, most of the prisoners are leaving prison without employability skills.

Over half prisoners have no educational qualifications, and almost all have low literacy levels. A lot of them were expelled of school.

About no one prison got good qualification on their educational program, and the good examples of prisons that work with employees and educational providers are rare.

The director of further education and skills at the education watchdog Ofsted, Coffey, criticizes the focus just on the passage of time in the convictions, and not caring about the achievement of educational qualifications. 

The prison minister and probably the whole society is concerned about the high levels of reoffending that stay the same for so long, and because of the taxes money spent in prisoners, which stands at  £34,000 per year each inmate. He says that they doing significant reforms to the offenders were rehabilitated and managed in the community. 

My current job

About two years ago i started to work with the purpose of moving of my mother's home. My brother got me a job in the same place that he was working, the Instituto Carlos Casanueva, particularly in the virtual classroom of the technical librarian career, i'm a tutor. This job is seventy percent teleworking and thirty percent in person, i have to go to reunions of about tree hours a week in the institute.

This job it's not well paid, but suits me perfect with my other activities, so i appreciate it. Besides, my boss give me some freedom in my work, he just want that the work is done, and not much how i do it or in what time of the day or the week. He is also a very nice guy, he truly wants to make a high quality career for the students. The real problem is the owners of the institute, their only goal is to make profit with education. This means low salaries for the teachers and the other workers, poor working conditions and precarious careers for the students. So my job is the best example of how disastrous the mercantile education is. This encourages me to make a change in the chilean education.

That's me when i'm working (the guy outside it's not my son)

What about my ideal job?

I really don't have a concrete idea of an ideal job. I think that's because i don't have an idealization of any job in particular, but instead i idealize the context of that ideal job. Certainly this society it's not that context. That's because any job in the capitalism had limits, in one hand by the selling of the product or service in the market, so just the ones who have the money to pay for it could access to it, and in the other hand, the labor market it self suppose a business that only pursue the profit, not the social wellness that the their product or service will do. So, in a society that is not organized according capitalist relations i think jobs would be very different, almost all will be meaningful and fulfillment. 

But we are in a capitalist society now and will be for many years more. So my ideal job now (a paid one) will be a half time one, that left me time for political activities, in a productive or academic area. In the past i want to be a baker, now i'm not that sure. I would like work in a press too, i think i like the design and the printed stuff, like papers, pamphlets, magazines, that can spread ideas and information. 

To any of these job i would need organization and planning skills, and for the press job i'll need contacts and communication with social and political organizations to do useful works and spread that ideas. I'll be doing my best because of the motivation of doing something for people even is a small thing like this. 

I think is not difficult to find any of these both jobs, but i' ll be hard to find one in which that's not just the pursue of profit the only goal. Maybe i have to do my own bakery or press to do the things i want to.

The ink smell is good

I hope getting up so early isn't that hard

Last Semester

The last semester ended less than a week ago. I didn't studied that much because my principal activity was to work in the students center in the faculty. My attendance to the subjects wasn't appropriate too. Apart from that I still learnt some things. I read  about Lenin's works because of my Workshop subject. I'm doing a theoretical investigation on the relation between practice and theory in Lenin's writings and his political action.

In my free time, I played a new version of an old computer game, now it has fancy graphics, but the story and theme are the same, is about an alien invasion to earth, in which the player takes the role of a secret and specialized military organization known as the X-COM.

Last semester i also did something i was planning to do long ago. I left my mother's home to live in an apartment with university friends and my girlfriend. Since then i have problems to visit my parents, i'm sad about that, but i have a lot of work in the students center.

So, a challenge from the past and this semester too is to spend time in my investigation (it's an annual one) and visit my parents more frequently.

And try to get early to English class.