My experience with English courses at the University

Nowadays, it has become a part of the common sense to assert that you need to know how to speak English if you want to be succesfull as a professional and to be integrated into the global world. So it couldn't take too long for the University to incorporate the teaching of English as a requirement for the titulation of the students.

I knew from the beginning of my career that at some point of it I would have to take two English courses. I didn’t really like the idea, I thought I had the minimum English skills required to access and make profit of the English literature (that was the point, wasn't it?), so I saw it rather like a waste of time. Although I wasn’t completely wrong in what respects to my reading abilities and its precarious sufficiency, when I finally took the courses I saw it was not going to be a waste of time: my oral pronunciation was really-really poor, and it was a good opportunity to improve it.

So how did it go? Let’s first see what was the didactic at display: classes consisted mainly in oral discussions with classmates following the instructions from a book or those that the professor gave, in order to learn different aspects of grammatics and vocabulary; after the discussions we shared our thoughts and doubts with the rest of the class and the professor. The other main element for our learning process was the writing of this blog. As you can see both were very appropriate for the development of productive linguistic abilities: you were forced to produce written text and spoken language. So that was very adequate for me at least and I think I have improved quite a lot in comparison with my previous knowledge.

On the other hand, a minor critical remark: I think books editors and teachers should join together and revise urgently the topics they choose for the excersices. This is very amazing, they are really lame and embarrassing. Indeed sometimes you would prefer not to speak or write rather because what embarrasses you is the topic itself and not the use of the yet unknown language . I think students should choose, as much as possible, their own topics of interest in wich to excercise the foreign language.

But that's just a detail. In sum, it was a very pleasant experience, I had real good time and it allowed me to improve my weaker points with regard to the production and comprehension of messages in English .

The facilities of the Social Sciences Faculty

I think the main facilities in my faculty are the canteen, the photocopying shops, the library and the computer labs. I don't use the canteen very much, however I think it has very expensive prices in comparison with some of the others shops in the campus, like the one placed near the sciences Faculty. The fotocopying shops are two: the green one and the chuncho’s. I prefer the green one which is runned by Hugo, a very nice guy.

Now, the library I’d say is the poorest one of our facilities, it doesn’t have enough books and it is not used by the students as a library but rather as a meeting room. So we definitely need a room only dedicated to study (i.e. a room in which the rule of silence were respected) and more books! Now about the computer labs: I think we are OK with what we have now: we have two labs with enough number of computers. Although, the printing machines tend to fail a lot and some of the computers are much slower tan others, becuase they are the old ones, the ones that were working before the investment on new modern computers was recently done.

Last general comment, now about the facilities of the campus: the soccerfield sucks badly, it’s very poorly maintained, it needs urgently to be leveled and the actual grass must be retired and replaced for a new one, of better quality. This would allow the full display of my soccer skills and increase the quality of the time we spend excercising ourselves with our mates.

Festival spotlight on mental health stigma

This news item is about the Mental Health Arts and Film Festival which is taking place this month in Scotland. This year the Festival spotlight is on the representations of female mental illness which are contained in films back to the golden age of Hollywood. But as the title says, the festival does not only consists of filmic material but also music, theatre, dance and comedy are being performed.

This Festival has been taking place for now three years and it has grown its remit until to become the largest Festival of its kind in the world. The purpose of this year’s activities is to exlpore and expose the stigmas on female mental health issues which pertaining to society as a whole have been embodied on the celluloid. And this is done in order to challenge them and to generate debate about them. But also, as the guitarist of the music band Idlewid -which is playin on this year’s closing concert- says, it has a direct therapeutical effect as a goal: showing to people that they are not alone with their issues, that they are not the only ones who have suffered them and it is a common thing to happen.

Yo can find the article here at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/14/festival-spotlight-mental-health-stigma

Sports and Excercises

I like sports very much, both to practice and to watch them. Although I particullarly enjoy soccer and athletics in all it's variations. I admire athletics because I think it has an heroic and a dignifying quality, specially for those who run the Long Distance Events, which are the events over the 3000 meters mark, I think they are very admirable. Here I admire very much the ethiopian runner Kenenisa Bekele, member of the glorious ethiopian team of distance runners and actual holder of both the World and the Olympic record for the 10000. And of course in soccer I admire and I’m keen of that which is indisputably the most succesfull institution of the world (including schools, hospitals or States): Colo-colo team, which has never lost not even a martch! Anyhow, I only use to play soccer and not athletics. Right now I'm also doing Yoga at the University, because it's a requirement of my career to take at least two sports courses. So I’m a moderated sports fanatic and not so much of a fitness freak.

I really don’t know if any sport should be banned, I think that as long as it be practiced between consenting people I don’t see any problem with it. Maybe to involve animals in violent games is a different thing, but I’m not so sure about the status of animal suffering with regard to the making of ethical decisions. But yes I’m sure this is a subject which involves many areas besides sports, like the consumption of animal meat, the use of their skins for the making of clothes, the experimentation with animals as subjects, etc.

What to do where to go in Santiago.

I wasn’t born in Santiago, I was born in Chañaral (a Little town in the north of our country, very well known by Ricardo Lagos’ half naked horror). However I’ve been living in Santiago, since 1990, so I was bred here and I think I’am very well capacitated to emit an aesthetic judgement of the city founded by Valdivia and designed in it’s fundamental core, as we all know, by Pedro de Gamboa: I don’t find it nice.

Nontheless, we have beatiful places, and when we have clean air, we do even have beatiful people. So, I would recommend to the newbies: 1. visit the Lastarria neighbourhood, beatiful edificatons and nice retaurants (here I recommend “Les Assasins”, nice french food, and I do not recommend “Gatopardo”, too much reputation is not a good ingredient). Number two: nearby you want to go to the Bellas Artes museum, you can enjoy the artworks in there. Number three: visit the zoo (at the San Cristòbal Hill) and buy a plastic mask (great costume. You don't want to see the animals, just the masks). Four: in that same hill, take the teleférico (a cable car), an interesting trip by air. Five: for a drink, go visit Ballavista neighbourhood, or, to change the city zone, take a chance at Plaza Ñuñoa, in both you have lot of choices. Nice five elements.

Transantiago: before and after

My first experience with Transantiago was on the first day of its implementation. I remember it was a strange day of February: it was raining copiously, but I had to go some place I don´t remember, so I couldn’t skip the novelty of the trip. It was a very ugly experience: much longer waits at the bus stops than it used to be: after spending at least one hour in a very crowded bus stop I finally ended up taking a cab. I think that situation remained the same during the first period of its implementation, but it is also true that from the very beginning, it showed what for me was its bigger advantage with regards to the old system: it was much cheaper (because paying once you can take as much buses as you need in a period of two hours), cleaner and less loudly.

But right now the situation has changed in what respects to it's main disadvantage: the frecuence of the buses has progessively become bigger, that is to say, you don´t have to wait for the bus as much as at the beginning of it's implementation, even though it remains being a bigger waiting time than with the old system, and thats what freaks people out. But I think you can't have a bus every five minutes for every route without that having an impact in terms of pollution (visual, acoustic and of the air), stress for drivers, damage of the streets, poor maintained buses, more expensive tickets, etc. So it's one thing for the other and I think waiting ten minutes (as I think it’s the usual) it's not that much and that’s the situation in every civilized country of the world.

But you might say: what about the very humble people who have to wake up at 5 am. in order to get to work because their way there is taking them a longer time? I think it was already too long before!, so it’s not a problem about means of transport, but about the distribution of the population in the urban space (as is known, the poor ones are marginalizaed also in terms of space) and the distribution in it of the laboral opportunities to which the less privileged ones have acces. I think no one should be forced to travel more than one hour to work, life does not have to be that hard, especially when hardness of life is also, as we all know, unequally distributed in our society.

My first term of 2009

During the first semester of 2009 I had a couple of very interesting subjects at University in which I focused my mental efforts: they were both about psychoanalysis and marxism and its teachers were very informed people or so they seemed to me. So I learned some things about subjectivity and power relations, as they are seen from those currents of thougth.

So that was the good part of it, however, besides that, I also had a trio of uninteresting -but very promising in terms of future laboral opportunities- subjects. So it was a real challenge to study for them (I didn't). I did get anyhow, good marks overall, at least good enough to pass them (maybe I will regret this when I look for a job or a decent salary, or when I be ashamed of my current ideals and consider them to be one of the last standing expressions of adolescence??).

That's it with regards to academical matters, but I had a lot of fun too. Indeed I spent a lot of time with good friends of mine and I did even reencounter a group of friends from highschool who are very funny people, very talented for witty jokes when they are drunk and very smart when sober (I say this because I love them not because they are really like that).

So it was a very lazy (plus focused and selective mental effort) but interesting and funny semester.