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.