The importance of learning

My grandmother used to tell me I was always trying to learn something! In fact, I think I'm quite a learn-driven person (if this phrase exists). All my life I wanted to learn something. I remember nagging my aunts because I wanted them to teach me how to read words before I went to school and asking my brohter to let me hammer some nails (although I actually always hammered my fingers instead.)
Everytime I start learning something, I fall in love with it. I make a tone of projects, I get addicted to that and than, when I have learnt enough... I move on to something else. Thus I'm always learning something but I never get to be a specialist at anything. I think I've got a Renaissance spirit...

10 De Junho, Dia de Portugal

Today is National Holiday in Portugal. I leave you with our national song type FADO. I hpe you like Mariza and the poem by Fernando Pessoa. Enjoy

The hours

I was going to write "ten" weeks. Then I was going to calculate the days. Finally I settled for "The hours" (although I must confess I never read the book nor saw the film by that name).

It is impossible for me to calculate how many hours I invested in this course. It doesn't matter because being an e-teacher for me is to be an everywhere/ everytime teacher. In fact I got more conscious of how I teach, what is not so good and what I can do to improve it.

At first I was really excited about meeting people from other countries and those people were quite a pleasant surprise!!! Then this course caught me in some busy weeks - all of a sudden I had so many things to do I felt my time was not enough. But I managed. I learnt to use every spare hour reasonably - I had to give up reading before going to sleep because whenever I got to bed I fell asleep by KO. I went to the APPI congress in Lisbon and many things started to fit like a puzzle in my head (that was when I came up with the everywhere-teacher idea).

Curiously, the hours I remember were not the hardworking hours. I remember the excitment hours, the enthusiastic hours on-line, off-line, in the car driving home and thinking about projects and ideas, in lessons reflecting on how I could make things different...

You see, I started teaching without knowing if that was what I wanted to do. Then I fell in love with it and I remember my training year as one of exhausting work and deep enthusiasm. I worked hard and got feedback from it and tried new ways and was so tired and so happy! Then I spent almost twelve years regretting and questioning most of the time until now. Finally I got excited about my work again, fell in love with it again, felt that enthusiasm again because I was doing my best and getting feedback from it and support and appreciation.

In fact, some hours in our lives make up for years of doubt. No, this is not the part I tell you about the depths of my heart. All I want to say is that enthusiasm and appreciation change everything!!! This is the most important thing this course is leaving me with.

week 9- all my pictures

I've just uploaded my final report along with the assessment forms and the analysis I made of the students' answers.

I decided to make a graph with the students' answers. Remember I am a visual, global person so I love the general picture. These graphs are my work in colours and different shapes. It was really nice to do. I remember when I was a kid I was really great at drawing graphs, even those circular ones you had to make lots of calculations to be able to build. Now there is an amazing thing called excell where you write numbers and get perfectly drawn, colourful graphs. I also remember getting furious at a professor at university who told us we were studying languages, therefore we weren't able to understand graphs! I do understand graphs as graphs are pictures and languages can also be pictures as music can be a collection of pictures too.

My head seems to be full of pictures all the time and I always dream in colour, I'm sure. However, I don't like reading books with pictures because they interfere with the pictures I make in my head when I read them, as I don't like seeing films based on books I read as they rarely match my mental pictures and I always get disappointed. The problem is I can never put my thought into pictures- I'm lousy at drawing! - so I need words to make my picture and I'm usually good at that. Those graphs are part of my thoughts and feelings in a picture! I love computers when they solve our problems like that!

( picture in ramonaspainting.com )