Saturday, November 14, 2009

My English Learning Experience

Hello people! This is my last post in this blog. Sadly I have to say that I’m finishing my last English course in the university. It’s sad because I believe that English courses should be given across the career. Well, to finish this blog I’m going to write a brief essay about my experience learning English at the university.

Today English learning is crucial to fit in the society. English is a must to get good jobs and to get a good status in the society. In the educational field English is really important to be updated. In science the last researches and discoveries are published in English around the world, and so on. English is becoming a tool to connect people, a language that provide communication between persons every place in the world. As you can see English is very important nowadays. ¿Do we have in the university the facilities and the method to learn English properly? ¿Is the course working Style the best for learn English? I’m going to tell you my experience.

In Universidad de Chile (my university) the English courses consist in 4 difficulty levels, from very easy to very hard (lol). When you enter at the university you have to make a leveling test that put you in one of the four levels. The courses are one per semester and it’s supposed to be focused in writing and oral skills. When I made the leveling test I scored enough to reach level 3. This level was not what I was expecting. I thought that level 3 would be a course to improve our talking skills, our major lack thinking that our country language is spanish. In spite of this I think that blogging was a very constructive experience for our learning. I had never used a blog before, and I think that is an excelent tool to improve our writing skills. Now this semester I'm in (and finishing) the level 4 class. English 4 was a more helpful class than English 3 to our English. The facilities were fine, but always could be better. For example it should be really good to have an English laboratory. Also sometimes we had problems to take a classroom. About the English contents is worth to mention that teacher couldn’t go quickly with the subjects because our class level was not the same.

I had heard many critics about these courses, like “We don’t learn anything new” or “The level is not what I was expecting at all”. But I really think that we have good English teachers, with true vocation for learning. The problem I think is that the academic load is too low. We only have an hour and half per week, if we count only the classes, and that’s not enough. I'm very satisfied with the English classes, but I would like to have more. I have the feeling that I have much more to learn.
Thanks for reading,
See ya!


Friday, November 6, 2009

Challenges in my Discipline

Hello my friends!! I’m going to talk about some important challenges that my career is facing at this moment. These are challenges that we have as psychologists in many areas, such as technology, social matters, education, etc.
I’m going to start with technology issues. Technology can be defined in few words as the application of science, in that terms we can us our science (Social and clinical science) to create new technology. I think that our principal challenge in this area is to create new instruments to evaluate in more effective ways (in clinical psychology). For example a few days ago in a psychological congress a presentation talks about the need of develop an instrument to evaluate child depression.
In social matters the psychologists have many challenges too. Sometimes we face the fact that we don’t make any real difference intervening one person. Actually we have to work on an entire community to make a real change. So the challenge is how to create plans to intervene a big community. Also in social psychology there is another challenge, how to truly represent people’s speeches. This is a really important task for psychologists because lend us to elaborate more efficient interventions.

Psychology has an education area too, and it has really big challenges. Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Education psychology works with educational establishments and with government to create educational policies. Educational psychologists work in teacher educational programs, intervening child with social disorders, solving classrooms conflicts, etc. For example, a big challenge in this area will be to eradicate bullying from classrooms.

Like in any other professional area challenges are constant in psychology, thus the real big challenge is how to affront this and how to reach the best solutions. Challenges are included in the psychology student profile, so we have to get used to it,

Thanks for reading.

Bye!

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Activities I like to do in my free times

Well, I had been thinking and I realized that I have too much free time. The problem is that I “make” my free time, in other words, I have many things to do in my career but I waste my time. So I use many hours doing different activities that I’m going to tell you now.

The activities I enjoy the most when I waste my time are… certainly more than three (I have to talk about three activities in this post). Thus, I’m going to write about the activities that I spent most time.

In third place I’m going to choose theatre. Acting is an activity that I do since secondary. I spend like four hours per week in it. In my theatre academy I’m with another seven people. We are preparing a play so I spend a lot time in it.

In second place there is an activity that I spent many free time in it, I’m talking about watch movies and tv series. It’s the second activity I like most. Every day I download different videos from internet. From classic movies to new American series I see many things (except dead people lol). I spent like three hours per day in this.

And the most wasting-time activity in my life ever is… play videogames!!! I’m always playing a game in my free time. I’m used to play long games or never ending games like massive multiplayer online role-playing games. I’m a gamer because it’s very relaxing for me to play. I began to play videogames when I was eleven years old. Play games is my drug, my addiction. I know this is very nerd and geek from me but I’m fine with it. I play in average almost three or four hours per day. I know this is not good for me. I play alone and sometimes with my friends. I spent very good times in these “second worlds”. Now I’m playing two role games at the same time. I have to say that I’m learning how to manage my free time.

Well thanks for reading,

Bye!!