THOUGHTS ON EDUCATION

REFLECTIVE TEXT

By: Mariana Aristizabal

When I first saw “Waiting for superman” I had so many confusing feelings, thoughts and ideas, that I couldn’t even put words together. All I’m sure of is this, it’s not fair, not at all.

The public educational system in Colombia is not very coherent right now. We many laws and projects that are not close to the reality of classrooms.

Let’s take a look to Colombia Bilingüe, for instance. This project is trying to make our high school students communicatively competent in a second language (English) by the year 2019.

This process has made us re-evaluate all the teaching –English process in our country, forcing us to realize that is not only about the students. Now we can see that we need to restructure the evaluation standards, the materials, the teaching techniques, and therefore some teachers.

So, as foreign languages students, soon to be teachers, we hold the responsibility of changing things for better. To take a first step, we have to start working with the government in a way that, laws don’t raise barriers or gaps, but help us build a much stronger educational system.

And, even if the government doesn’t change much, the motivation, the passion for what we do can make a big difference.

I started listening to some classroom research reports a year ago and in at least 70% of them, the main reason that made students lose their interest in learning English are the teachers, and when we did the analysis, we realized that most of them were tenured teachers that had being working for more than 20 years with the same methodologies, just like the cases shown in the documentary about the educational system in the USA. After all we are not so different from each other.

Even though, there are a lot of other reasons for students to lose their interest, like they think they are never going to travel abroad or that students look at the environment they live in and think that knowing English is not going to help them or change their opportunities (at least for the % 45,5 of people that is consider poor in our country, according to www.indexmundi.com in 2011); Teachers continue to be a very important factor in the students learning process.

Looking at this reality, I’m sure that a change in the teacher’s way of thinking is the most important step.

It’s up to us.

It’s up to us to make an effort to use our intellectual tools , not to be stopped by the lack of a t.v. or a stereo .

It’s up to us to be interested in our students, to get involved with them and be creative enough to desattach us from a text book and start thinking about strategies, activities and exercises that are not only related to a specific subject that we want to teach, but also to the student’s lives.

Personally, I teach because I’m passionate about it, because when I look at my student’s faces , when I see their effort to understand, and their smiles when they learned; I feel that I’m doing something with my life; that right there I’m making my little contribution for a better future for them and for my county.

I just think about how far we have gone, how much we have wasted generations and generations of talented kids because of the little attention we pay to them. The most concerning part is that is not only happening in Colombia where we are just 45 million people but that is happening to the world’s most powerful country, the USA. There, there are more than 311million people this year, and I risk to say that an educational system where students depend merely in a raffle it’s even more concerning.

When I look around and see how easy we follow everything we hear and we are told to do, I think about my niece and the importance of changing our education because, to be honest I don’t want her to live in a country where her future is played in a raffle; and in that moment I find myself saying many things but, What about what I’m doing, then I feel the need, the motivation to keep working, getting up in the morning and do it with passion.

Let’s take our place, let’s take a stand: Every effort is worth it.

Let’s start an education revolution.