Beyond Chile's Single Story » teaching

Welcome Brazen Careerists (part 2)

Leslie — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:59:05 +0000

Working abroad can make you taller!? Figuratively, yes. I took this photo in Bahia Inglesa, in the north of Chile. I have definitely held higher positions and done more interesting work while abroad! And you can do it too!

Today Brazen Careerist published my article, “How to Launch Your Career Overseas.”

Have you ever dreamed of working in China? India? Brazil?

The new landscape of work transcends national boundaries, which creates unprecedented opportunities to work worldwide.

Here’s how you can get started.

Study abroad

“Overseas stints have launched many a career because of the inherent curiosity, flexibility and interest in the world they indicate to an employer,” says Stacie Nevadomski Berdan, author of the new eBook GO GLOBAL! Launching an International Career Here or Abroad.

Even if you’re no longer in school, study abroad is still an option. Consider a graduate degree or language program. The Rotary Foundation offers Ambassadorial Scholarships. ESADE and IE have international MBAs in Spain. According to Ben Apple, the Chinese government is giving out scholarships for masters’ and PhD programs “like candy.” [more]

This is the second time I’ve been featured on Brazen Careerist. The first was this interview I did with Jaclyn Schiff.

If you’re interested in starting your career overseas, you might especially like Hilary Corna’s book One White Face, about her experiences training Toyota dealerships to implement Kaizen all over Asia. Hilary is offering a special discount code for readers of Beyond Chile’s Single Story. Go to https://www.createspace.com/3648642/ and enter the discount code “P554X5B4″

Here are some other posts I’ve written about international careers.

If you’re interested in chatting more about working abroad, feel free to contact me by leaving a comment or emailing me. Cheers!

Welcome Brazen Careerists!

Leslie — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:30:52 +0000

I spoke with Jaclyn Schiff from Brazen Careerist, and she recorded parts of our conversation as a podcast called How to Work Abroad After College. Not only did Jacci ask excellent questions, but Skype cooperated for our entire chat! Awesome.

Here’s the link to the full interview: How to Work Abroad After College.

If you’re new here at Beyond ~~China’s~~ Chile’s Single Story, welcome! This is my personal blog about Chile, China, entrepreneurship, inspiration, energy, translation, and so much more.

In our conversation, Jacci referred to this post, My Hypothetical Certificate in Applied Modern Chinese Studies, as an interesting example of framing diverse job experiences into a coherent and compelling story.

Here are some posts in which I’ve discussed career choices and offered ideas for fellow adventurous professionals:

Why launch your career overseas? Along with the many, many reasons I mention in the podcast, you can work from places like…

Bahia Inglesa, Chile's III Region. I took this photo on my most recent business trip!

When Frida Kahlo came to my ESL class in China…

Leslie — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:21:12 +0000

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. This is no secret. I included this information in the first line of the bio I wrote for this site, and last year I posted so many Halloween posts that my dad made fun of me. Since it´s October, that means I can start celebrating, right??

While searching for something else, I came across an email I wrote back in 2006, when I was a bright-eyed English teacher in Jiaxing, China. It feels very appropriate in the context of my current obsession with China – Latin America relations. What follows is an edited version of that note.

–

Our textbook contains a Frida Kahlo painting called El Camion, which has 6 people waiting for a bus, including Frida herself, a young boy, a mother with a baby. The relationships between the people are ambiguous, and there is a lot to discuss in the painting.

I chose 6 students to act out the painting.

I had the rest of the class interview the people in the painting. The funniest response was when one of the men (who in the picture wears a suit and holds a bag, presumably of money) explained that he was a professional murderer. Frida (who, as I explained to the students, was a very ill woman with an unhappy marriage) tried to contract his services to kill her husband. It was soooooooooooo funny! To add to the drama, Frida was on her way home from the supermarket and was carrying only eggs. So she wanted to know how many eggs it would cost for one quick murder.

And at that exact moment, “Frida”‘s cell phone rang from inside the bag that supposedly contained only eggs. It was absolutely hilarious.

Over the weekend I went to a Halloween party five hours away that the American teachers who led our orientation were hosting. I went as Frida Kahlo, inspired by my fabulous lesson!

Tina Seelig’s Concept in Action: Singapore Math in Chile

Leslie — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:54:03 +0000

We had the great fortune to hear Tina Seelig, the Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and an advisor to Start-Up Chile, speak on Friday. A neurophysicist by training, Tina is one of the most enthusiastic and charismatic speakers I’ve ever seen, and her 2.5 hour workshop seemed more like 30 minutes — it flew by!

Tina Seelig. image via Stanford dSchool

At the beginning of her talk, Tina showed us a slide that said 5 + 5 = ? Everyone quickly answered 10. “Wow, you’re so smart, ” she replied. Next, she said, “But what if instead of 5 + 5 = ? we asked our students ? + ? = 10? What’s the answer then?” If you reframe the question to focus on the end product, and allow for an infinite number of ways to get to that solution, that is the type of thinking that supports creativity.

The day after Tina Seelig’s presentation, I sat in the Cafe Literario Parque Bustamante, reading Sábado, the Saturday magazine of Chile’s largest newspaper, El Mercurio. On page 42 of the September 10, 2011 edition of Sábado, I found a remarkable article by Isabel Plant, “A Clases Con El Método Singapur.”

This article describes how Singaporean math curriculum has been adapted in 250 Chilean schools, and takes us into one second-grade classroom. What surprised me most is that I saw Tina Seelig’s example in this article.

I translated about 1/3 of the article from Spanish to English. Enjoy.

The Singapore Way

The students in second basic B are sitting in groups. In the middle of their tables, they have a bag filled with what look like Legos, but really are some of the tactile instruments that are included in the first step of the Singapore class: the concrete part. Touching the math with the fingers.

The Lego-like pieces are called Unifix and they will help the children calculate. Every table has a group leader, who, according to the teacher’s instructions, assign the blocks to the other students. The pieces, of all colors, cover the table and the little hands assemble them.

“I do pink and green!”

“Me, blue and white!”

“Hey, you’ve got all the blue ones!”

Chilean students in a Singapore Method class. Image via La Tercera (a different Chilean newspaper, published by the same company as El Mercurio)

The kids look like they are playing, but really they are working: they have to put together 10 pieces, and connect them, using a distinct combination of colors. 3 red pieces and 7 green, for example, or 6 pink and 4 orange, or other combinations like that. Next, the teacher, Tabita, asks one group at a time which distinct combinations they have created, and notes them on the board. They count together, out loud.

After finishing the exercise, they move on to the second part of the Singapore Method: the pictorial part, in which the student visualizes the mathematics, not just the numbers.

For this, second basic B should put away the Unifix and take out the book, “Thinking Without Limits,” from the Singapore Method, and open it to page 122. At the same time, Miss Tabita has this page on her laptop, in front of the class, and projects it onto the board. There, represented with pictures — packets with 10 sticks in each one — the kids begin to do every type of multiplication. The teacher writes it down and asks the students, until the multiples of ten have been understood and reviewed. The students advance rapidly, although maybe one doesn’t succeed in multiplying 6 times 10.

“The time to make mistakes is now,” says Miss Tabita.

“… because when the test comes, it’s too late,” says one student, very seriously.

The teacher moves on, while the students do the exercises from the book, to show distinct ways of calculating multiplication, from counting on one’s fingers, to doing it mentally, to the “technique of zero,” which is used in multiples of 10.

The kids, very involved, raise their hands like bullets, now that the correct response gives a star to the group. Through this exercise, they begin to understand that there are many ways to arrive at the same solution. One of the focuses of the Singapore Method is problem solving, not just the content.

Finally, in the third part, the students do math problems using what they learned (“If Gugo has 6 trucks with 10 wheels each…”). This is the abstract part, the metacognition, which comes only after they have already touched and visualized the mathematics. This is the part that tests whether the child is capable of retaining what she has learned and solving problems in her head.

The students receive a yellow card and a red card. “Raise your yellow card if you understood the class. And the red card if you didn’t understand something.”

A sea of yellow cards rises, with one red in the middle.

“I have one thing I don’t understand well, the zero technique, does it only work for multiples of 10?” asks one student.

Miss Tabita reviews the material. They do two more exercises from the book, then the put away the books, put away the cards, and are ready to go out and play.

Singapore Method Teacher Training Seminar, sponsored by Chile's Ministry of Education. Image via http://explorarm.com/seminario-metodo-singapur/

More information on Singapore Math in Chile:

http://www.latercera.com/noticia/educacion/2010/10/657-296382-9-capacitan-a-profesores-de-matematicas-para-implementar-metodo-singapur.shtml
http://explorarm.com/seminario-metodo-singapur/

Tear Gas and #TED: My take on the Student Protests in Chile

Leslie — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 18:04:49 +0000

I decided to delete this post. It’s not really my story to tell. I haphazardly cobbled together photos and ideas from other places, and for that I am very sorry.

Here is a pretty amazing New York Times slideshow showing photos of the protests.

More soon. Happy Monday to you!

Leslie

“Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?” More thoughts from #TEDxPatagonia

Leslie — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 23:43:18 +0000

Two speakers at TEDxPatagonia touched on this crucial question (this is my 3rd and last post on this fabulous event).

While working as an analyst at a hedge fund in New York, Salman Khan started making videos to tutor his cousins in math. They basically went viral on YouTube, and his cousins admitted that they preferred the videos over in-person tutoring. He realized that he was creating something of social value (apparently not common on the hedge fund scene).

He spoke about how some teachers had started assigning students to watch his videos as homework (with the option to pause and rewind as many times as needed) and then used class time to help students to work through the problems.

Salman Khan said that student-teacher ratio shouldn’t be the most important metric in educational policy. What matters more is the ratio of student time to valuable human interaction. And he found that, paradoxically, YouTube videos could be a good way to achieve this. He also said that his videos had shown to be a good tool for adult learners who wanted to learn or review certain topics. Well, I made it through a lot of years of formal education without getting a good handle on geometry. Hmmmm….

After this Ian Gilbert spoke, in person (and in English!) Here are my hand-scribbled notes from the beginning of his talk:

Ian emphasized that the teacher’s job isn’t to teach. It’s that the students learn. This accountability is the most important issue in education.

But what does accountability mean in this day and age? ”Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?” he asked us all.

I believe that the most important skill is to be able to think critically about all the information surrounding us, and make good decisions about what to do with it.

What do you think is the most important role for a teacher in the age of Google?

The power of the delantal @ TEDxPatagonia: How teachers can change Chile.

Leslie — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:40:13 +0000

This is a continuation of my account of TEDxPatagonia, an incredible event that I had the great privilege to attend.

Yasna Jelencic began her speech with a simple statement: “Yo soy una profesora orgullosa.” I am a proud teacher. Then she explained the long and somewhat humiliating path that brought her to this point of pride.

Her friends doubted her decision, and made her feel very small and powerless. On stage, she put on her delantal, the bell-shaped smock that students of pedagogía all must wear to the university. This garment basically stigmatizes people who have decided to devote their careers to educating the next generation. She would hide her delantal while riding the bus to school, and put it on at the very last minute.

This image comes from tiempo21.cl, a Chilean news website. This is what a Pedagogía class at a Chilean university looks like. All female, and all wearing the same delantal. Students from other majors wear normal street clothes.

During this TED Talk, Yasna wore her delantal with pride. Her delantal gives her the power to create new opportunities for the next generation.

After graduation, she taught at a private school in Santiago, but didn’t feel like she was having the maximum impact possible. She cited a statistic: in private schools, the teacher only has 10% of the impact on a student’s growth, because the parents have already invested so much in their children.

She then joined OPTE (oportunidad para transformar educando) and went to teach in Temuco, in the south of Chile, a poorer, colder, and more indigenous region. Her fellow teachers in Temuco rode the bus 1.5 hours to get to school, or lived on campus, and the school lacked proper bathrooms. Here she started to really feel like she was making an impact as a teacher.

The next year, as a 26th birthday and wedding gift, OPTE gave her a marvelous gift: a school called Niño Levántate. Niño Levántate had the 4th-lowest standardized test scores in all of Chile. The school is in Peñalolén, a community in Santiago.

I volunteered in the same neighborhood when I was studying here in Chile in 2005. Peñalolén is on the eastern (wealthier) side of Santiago, near the foothills of the Andes. Several years back, a real estate developer owned a large tract of land here. In the middle of the winter, hundreds of poor families moved in and fought off the police. These families built houses and roads and little shops there — a pretty impressive feat of social organization, albeit of questionable legality. An American girl named Karina wrote her thesis on the Toma de Peñalolén (“toma” means “take”). She then won a grant to start a library in the Toma. She got book donations from American publishers (like The Very Hungry Caterpillar in Spanish translation) and set up a simple library in a portable classroom. While volunteering in that library, I got to know several children and families, and this gave me a broader understanding of Yasna Yelencic’s challenge at Niño Levántate.

Her first order of business as the school’s new principal: change the name. Niño Levántate means, “kid, stand up.” It was as if the students were all on the floor, and their underachieving was their fault. The school’s new name was Colegio Puelmapu. Puelmapu is a Mapudungun word meaning “land of the east.” The Mapuche are the main indigenous group in Chile, and Mapudungun is their language.

Along with this new name, she changed the entire attitude of the school. Other teachers said things like, “here the kids are poor, there’s a roof to what they can achieve.” She did not believe this. She repositioned the school as a leader within this community, with concrete goals and better processes to help students acheive them. With this, came a massive increase in the student’s standardized test scores.

I am no expert in Chilean standardized testing, but that graph speaks for itself!

She then said that the most influential factor in the student success is the quality of their teachers. She invited us all to become leaders in this great movement.

Here’s Yasna explaining why she became a teacher:

I later asked her how her organization, OPTE, was related to Enseña Chile (the local version of Teach for America). She said that OPTE and Enseña Chile have the same goal, but different ways of achieving that goal. OPTE encourages students to study pedagogía and become professionally trained teachers. Enseña Chile invites high-achieving students from all majors to make a two-year commitment to teach in low-achieving schools.

She also invited me to visit the students at Colegio Puelmapu. Gracias Yasna!

Elige Educar (Choose to Teach) is a program sponsored by the Chilean government and other organizations, that encourages young people to choose to teach. Above is a button on the Elige Educar website. Here’s my translation:

We know that one phrase can change your life. For this, train with the best. ~~The people that study education are those who scored low [on the college entrance exam].~~ If you are an excellent student, you will enter an elite group that, with the support of organizations like Elige Educar, will lead this change.

TEDxPatagonia: Education and Innovation

Leslie — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:23:03 +0000

Last week, I had the great fortune to attend TEDxPatagonia. This expertly-produced event took place at TVN, one of Chile’s television networks. The event was SO inspiring. Each speaker had a different idea of how to reinvent education for Chile. Half the speeches were in person and the others were on video, and the videos were equally immersive and amazing as the in-person talks. Bravo to TVN, EducarChile, Fundación Chile, and everyone else behind this event.

The first speech I saw was this televised talk from Sir Ken Robinson.

He urged us to “disenthrall ourselves,” to stop being hypnotized by ideas we take for granted. He said that education should be placed in a linear/industrial model, since it’s not about scaling solutions. He described education as an agricultural/organic process, in which it is important to create the conditions in which each student can grow and flourish.

Next spoke Fernando Rojas, who defines himself as a gamer.

I took this from my iPod touch in a dark room. I'm sure better photos were taken, but you get the idea of what he looked like from my seat

He created a program to teach kids to make video games in schools. When he started, it was incredibly difficult, since most of the curriculum is eminently practical, and focused on coaching kids to do well on the PSU (standardized tests). But he kept his expectations high, and continued to lead this program in Penalolen, one of the poorest areas in Santiago. His site, aulagamer.com, describes this journey. One of the most powerful parts of this presentation for me was when he said, “Quiero ser abogado, médico…”. (I want to be a lawyer, doctor, etc) and then replaced the words abogado and médico with “yo mismo.” “I want to be myself.” What an idea.

Next we saw a televised talk by John Hunter, the teacher at the center of a documentary film called “World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements.” You should really watch this talk yourself (and maybe send it to your 4th-grade teacher). The part that touched me most is when he described watching the film for the first time and feeling himself just disappear. All he could see were the mannerisms and actions teachers that shaped him, especially his parents. The video contains a 4th-grader’s jaw-dropping description of Sun Tzu’s philosophy. I can’t do it justice in these cursory paragraphs. Really, just watch it.

Next spoke Juan Estéban Varela, a magician. When he filed his taxes, he wrote “magician” on the line where everyone needs to fill in an occupation. The tax assessor didn’t believe him. Next he gave a complex description involving creativity and education, and that time the tax assessor believed he had a “real” profession. He emphasized that magic does not belong to the musician; it lives in the mystery-filled eyes of the audience. He said that clarity is the enemy of knowledge, and urged us to abandon clarity in favor of embracing the shadow that lies within us all.

After that we saw a video about the Soccket, a soccer ball that generates electricity. This is so cool!

And that was just the first half or so. I have a lot more to say about TEDxPatagonia, so stay tuned. I hope you actually watch these videos. Enjoy!!

Found in Translation: A Review of Biting the Wax Tadpole, by Elizabeth Little

Leslie — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 02:12:54 +0000

If you’ve ever wished for a concise, chatty course in comparative communication, this is the book for you. Part memoir and part grammar guide, it compares and contrasts the parts of speech in hundreds of languages.

I first heard of this book, whose full title is “Biting the Wax Tadpole: Misadventures of an Armchair Linguist,” when I heard the author’s interview on the BBC podcast The World in Words. A few months later I spotted it on my favorite sidewalk vendor’s cart. I just re-read it, and it resonated more this time. This is because a central component of my new job is Chinese-language conversations about English connotations, with a global audience in mind.

“Biting the Wax Tadpole” is (supposedly) a literal translation of an early transliteration of Coca-Cola. In 1928, the company offered a cash reward for the person with the best translation. 可口可乐 kekoukele (very literally “make mouth make happy”) is brilliant! It retains the ring of the original, uses simple characters that even I can recognize, and 可乐 has become the general word for cola-flavored beverages.

In the chapter on verbs, in a part on voice and mood, Little introduces the passive voices in Japanese:

Japanese has two separate ways to express the passive voice…. Basically, if Alanis Morrissette labelled it ‘ironic,’ then it would probably be expressed in the Japanese adversative passive. So if you got stuck in a traffic jam (when you’re already late), you wouldn’t say ‘I got stuck in traffic,’ you’d say something with a literal meaning closer to ‘I got stuck by the traffic.’ The implication being, of course, that it was all the traffic’s fault.

Elizabeth Little studied Chinese in university and contributed to a China travel guidebook, and she mentioned repeatedly that her struggles to learn Chinese sparked her curiosity about other languages. Her anecdotes about tones and measure words and comments that are so much more straightforward than would be acceptable in the U.S. sound just like mine.

Except… I don’t have a full library of reference books on Hausa grammar and Zulu verb endings and Guarani honorifics. (Note to my most loyal blog readers: this is not my Christmas wish list )

Overall, it’s a delightful book for native-English-speaking word nerds whos imaginations extend into other tongues.

http://www.theworld.org/?s=%22the+world+in+words%22

P.S. I couldn’t find Elizabeth Little’s interview on “The World in Words,” but I did find this one:
A new PBS documentary profiles four kids who are attending dual immersion public schools in San Francisco. The filmmakers are husband and wife team Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel. Their own kids go to a dual immersion school and speak fluent Chinese.

My hometown, ahead of the curve, as usual!

Definitely ahead of Oklahoma, which just voted to make English its official language.

Found in Translation: Conclusion, Craving, and Clarity

Leslie — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:25:06 +0000

My first semester at Cal, I took Spanish 4. This class could be subtitled “How to write in Spanish,” and I had perhaps the toughest teacher of my life to that point: Ana Campoy. A grad student in journalism, originally from Mexico, she tore through my essays with a red pen. (Now she writes for the Wall Street Journal.) Learning to write in Spanish actually taught me a lot about writing in English, especially in terms of structure and transitions.

From Ana I learned the word “aportacion,” to describe the final sentence of an essay, the sentence that connects the core message of the essay with the broader world. (For the record, that final “o” should have an accent, but the Spanish language pack is not installed on this Chinese computer.)

“Aportacion” is a word I do not know how to say in English.

Today, when researching my new profession online, I learned a more technical word to describe experience with “aportacion.” On the Dixon Schawbl blog, I came across this useful explanation:

Ever come across a situation where you’re searching for a word to describe something and the word simply doesn’t exist? Yes? Then you, my friend, have encountered what’s called a lexical gap.

Lexical gaps occur when a word is absent from a language. This can happen in translations between languages. For example, Romanian lacks the word “shallow”. So when something like “shallow waters” appears in imported media, it’s often translated through a series of words: “ape puţin adânci” (“not so deep waters”) or “apă mică” (“small water”).

Yes, that’s it! I had a similar experience when I tried to explain the word “craving” to my Chinese roommate. She translated it as 你很想吃的东西 “something you really feel like eating.” Same idea, different expression.

How about you? What are your lexical gaps? Which words do you know in one language and not another, and how does this affect your perception of that topic?