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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?
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.
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!!
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.
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?
I'm Leslie and I connect entrepreneurs in Chile, China, California, and beyond — especially through translation, training, and trade. More about me.
