Study Abroad- Posted by Gemma Sanz

10 reasons why you should study in a foreign country

Have you considered studying abroad, but are not sure whether it's worth your time? If you ask anybody who has studied abroad, he or she will most certainly tell you that it is a life-changing experience and one of the most rewarding things he or she has ever done. Perhaps you're not certain what benefits you can reap from an extended stay in a foreign country. Here are 10 very excellent reasons why you should take the plunge:

1. Study abroad is the optimal way to learn a language. There is no better and more effective way to learn a language than to be immersed in a culture that speaks the language you are learning. You're surrounded by the language on a daily basis and are seeing and hearing it in the proper cultural context. Language learning happens most quickly under these circumstances.


2. Study abroad provides the opportunity to travel. Weekends and academic breaks allow you to venture out and explore your surroundings - both your immediate and more distant surroundings. Since studying abroad often puts you on a completely different continent, you are much closer to places you might otherwise not have had the opportunity to visit. Some more structured study abroad programs even have field trips planned in or around the curriculum.

3. Study abroad allows you get to know another culture first-hand. Cultural differences are more than just differences in language, food, appearances, and personal habits. A person's culture reflects very deep perceptions, beliefs, and values that influence his or her way of life and the way that s/he views the world. Students who experience cultural differences personally can come to truly understand where other cultures are coming from.

4. Study abroad will help you develop skills and give you experiences a classroom setting will never provide. Being immersed in an entirely new cultural setting is scary at first, but it's also exciting. It's an opportunity to discover new strengths and abilities, conquer new challenges, and solve new problems. You will encounter situations that are wholly unfamiliar to you and will learn to adapt and respond in effective ways.

5. Study abroad affords you the opportunity to make friends around the world. While abroad, you will meet not only natives to the culture in which you are studying, but also other international students who are as far from home as yourself.

6. Study abroad helps you to learn about yourself. Students who study abroad return home with new ideas and perspectives about themselves and their own culture. The experience abroad often challenges them to reconsider their own beliefs and values. The experience may perhaps strengthen those values or it may cause students to alter or abandon them and embrace new concepts and perceptions. The encounter with other cultures enables students to see their own culture through new eyes.

7. Study abroad expands your worldview. In comparison with citizens of most other countries, Americans tend to be uninformed about the world beyond the nation's boundaries. Students who study abroad return home with an informed and much less biased perspective toward other cultures and peoples.

8. Study abroad gives you the opportunity to break out of your academic routine. Study abroad is likely to be much unlike what you are used to doing as a student. You may become familiar with an entirely new academic system and you will have the chance to take courses not offered on your home campus. It's also a great opportunity to break out the monotony of the routine you follow semester after semester.

9. Study abroad enhances employment opportunities. Did you know that only 4% of U.S. undergraduates ever study abroad? Yet, the world continues to become more globalized, American countries are increasingly investing dollars abroad, and companies from countries around the world continue to invest in the international market. Through an employer's seyes, a student who has studied abroad is self-motivated, independent, willing to embrace challenges, and able to cope with diverse problems and situations. Your experience living and studying in a foreign country, negotiating another culture, and acquiring another language will all set you apart from the majority of other job applicants.


10. Study abroad can enhance the value of your degree. While abroad, you can take courses you would never have had the opportunity to take on your home campus. In addition, study abroad gives your language skills such a boost that it is normally quite easy to add a minor in a language or even a second major without having to take many more additional courses after the return to your home campus.

Teaching ‘Character’ To Kids And Why It Matters

January 8, 2013

POSTED BY: YOUR TEACHER

AUDIO LINK:     http://snd.sc/X2N2MK

The effort to improve public education over the past decade and a half has been about standardized testing. Ever since No Child Left Behind became law, students and schools have been under significant pressure to meet academic benchmarks.

Once upon a time, character education was one of the guiding principals of American education. From Thomas Jefferson to Horace Mann, the country’s earliest intellectual leaders saw public education as a means to foster values like civic engagement, self-discipline, perseverance and compassion.

Today, as schools try to do a better job teaching the basics, character education has been pushed aside.

Along with reading, writing and math, should schools also teach character? One Harvard professor of education guest says the answer is yes — and that at least three schools in Boston are leading the way in the effort.

Hypochondria: An Inside Look

Hypochondria: An Inside Look

Posted by: Gina Martí

By WOODY ALLEN

Published: January 12, 2013

MAUMONT

WHEN The New York Times called, inquiring if I might pen a few words “from the horse’s mouth” about hypochondria, I confess I was taken aback. What light could I possibly shed on this type of crackpot behavior since, contrary to popular belief, I am not a hypochondriac but a totally different genus of crackpot?

What I am is an alarmist, which is in the same ballpark as the hypochondriac or, should I say, the same emergency room. Still there is a fundamental difference. I don’t experience imaginary maladies — my maladies are real.

What distinguishes my hysteria is that at the appearance of the mildest symptom, let’s say chapped lips, I instantly leap to the conclusion that the chapped lips indicate a brain tumor. Or maybe lung cancer. In one instance I thought it was Mad Cow.

The point is, I am always certain I’ve come down with something life threatening. It matters little that few people are ever found dead of chapped lips. Every minor ache or pain sends me to a doctor’s office in need of reassurance that my latest allergy will not require a heart transplant, or that I have misdiagnosed my hives and it’s not possible for a human being to contract elm blight.

Unfortunately, my wife bears the brunt of these pathological dramas. Like the time I awoke at 3 a.m. with a spot on my neck that to me clearly had the earmarks of a melanoma. That it turned out to be a hickey was confirmed only later at the hospital after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sitting at an ungodly hour in the emergency room where my wife tried to talk me down, I was making my way through the five stages of grief and was up to either “denial” or “bargaining” when a young resident fixed me with a rather supercilious eye and said sarcastically, “Your hickey is benign.”

But why should I live in such constant terror? I take great care of myself. I have a personal trainer who has me up to 50 push-ups a month, and combined with my knee bends and situps, I can now press the 100-pound barbell over my head with only minimal tearing of my stomach wall. I never smoke and I watch what I eat, carefully avoiding any foods that give pleasure. (Basically, I adhere to the Mediterranean diet of olive oil, nuts, figs and goat cheese, and except for the occasional impulse to become a rug salesman, it works.) In addition to yearly physicals I get all available vaccines and inoculations, making me immune to everything from Whipple’s disease to the Andromeda strain.

As far as vitamins go, if I take a few with each meal, over time I can usually get in quite a lot before the latest study confirms they’re worthless. Regarding medications, I’m flexible but prudent because while it’s true antibiotics kill bad bacteria, I’m always afraid they’ll kill my good bacteria, not to mention my pheromones, and then I won’t give off any sexual vibes in a crowded elevator.

It’s also true that when I leave the house to go for a stroll in Central Park or to Starbucks for a latte I might just pick up a quick cardiogram or CT scan prophylactically. My wife calls this nonsense and says that in the end it’s all genetic. My parents both lived to ripe old ages but absolutely refused to pass their genes to me as they believed an inheritance often spoils the child.

Even when the results of my yearly checkup show perfect health, how can I relax knowing that the minute I leave the doctor’s office something may start growing in me and, by the time a full year rolls around, my chest X-ray will look like a Jackson Pollock? Incidentally, this relentless preoccupation with health has made me quite the amateur medical expert. Not that I don’t make an occasional mistake — but what doctor doesn’t? For example, I once convinced a woman who experienced a mild ringing in her ears that she had the flesh-eating bacteria, and another time I pronounced a man dead who had simply dozed off in a chair.

But what’s this obsession with personal vulnerability? When I panic over symptoms that require no more than an aspirin or a little calamine lotion, what is it I’m really frightened of? My best guess is dying. I have always had an animal fear of death, a fate I rank second only to having to sit through a rock concert. My wife tries to be consoling about mortality and assures me that death is a natural part of life, and that we all die sooner or later. Oddly this news, whispered into my ear at 3 a.m., causes me to leap screaming from the bed, snap on every light in the house and play my recording of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” at top volume till the sun comes up.

I sometimes imagine that death might be more tolerable if I passed away in my sleep, although the reality is, no form of dying is acceptable to me with the possible exception of being kicked to death by a pair of scantily clad cocktail waitresses.

Perhaps if I were a religious person, which I am not, although I sometimes do have the intimation that we all may be part of something larger — like a Ponzi scheme. A great Spanish philosopher wrote that all humans long for “the eternal persistence of consciousness.” Not an easy state to maintain, especially when you’re dining with people who keep talking about their children.

And yet, there are worse things than death. Many of them playing at a theater near you. For instance, I would not like to survive a stroke and for the rest of my life talk out of the side of my mouth like a racetrack tout. I would also not like to go into a coma, to lie in a hospital bed where I’m not dead but can’t even blink my eyes and signal the nurse to switch the channel from Fox News. And incidentally, who’s to say the nurse isn’t one of those angel of death crazies who hates to see people suffer and fills my intravenous glucose bag with Exxon regular.

Worse than death, too, is to be on life support listening to my loved ones in a heated debate over whether to terminate me and hear my wife say, “I think we can pull the plug, it’s been 15 minutes and we’ll be late for our dinner reservation.”

What worries me most is winding up a vegetable — any vegetable, and that includes corn, which under happier circumstances I rather like. And yet is it really so great to live forever? Sometimes in the news I see features about certain tall people who reside in snow-capped regions where a whole village population lives to 140 or so. Of course all they ever eat is yogurt, and when they finally do die they are not embalmed but pasteurized. And don’t forget these healthy people walk everyplace because try getting a cab in the Himalayas. I mean do I really want to pass my days in some remote place where the main entertainment is seeing which guy in town can lift the ox highest with his bare hands?

Summing up, there are two distinct groups, hypochondriacs and alarmists. Both suffer in their own ways, and traits of one group may overlap the other, but whether you’re a hypochondriac or an alarmist, at this point in time, either is probably better than being a Republican.

The Hobbit

POSTED BY: YOUR TEACHER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlRbrB_Gnc

WELLINGTON — “Wellington has already proved it knows how to party, so this takes things to the next level!”

So said Peter Hambleton from the world premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in Wellington, New Zealand. It was an amazing spectacle with well over 100,000 people gathered on 600 meters of red carpet to watch the stars of the film arrive.

The event was carried live on websites around the globe with nine cameras, including helicopter shots. Some fans arrived early in the morning to choose the best spots in hopes of getting autographs and photos of stars such as Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage and of course, Sir Peter Jackson, the film’s director and co-screenwriter and the toast of the town.

Andy Serkis, who reprises his role as Gollum, also brought an enormous cheer when he showed up with his wife and a big grin and signed autographs for fans. Every actor seemed to make a big splash but Cate Blanchett, despite playing a relatively small role in the film, seemed to make fans the most manic for an autograph. She, like others in the cast, brought along her family to experience the wonder of the event.

Katie Jackson was also in attendance. In an interview shown on the big screen at the event, she revealed that she had not seen the movie yet, on the advice of her father who wanted her to experience it for the first time at the premiere.

The big showing was at the Embassy Theater, which featured high frame rate equipment, the latest in Dolby sound and RealD 3D technology. Attendee James Cameron quipped, “High frame rate is the future.”

STUDENT-RUN SERVICE LEARNING PROJECTS

POSTED BY: YOUR TEACHER
FROM: EDUTOPIA
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/service-learning-cafe-freedom-rosemary-owens-blake-oconner

A Formula for Creating Successful Student-Run Service Learning Projects

May 19, 2011

Editor's Note: Today's guest blogger is Rosemary Owens, assistant principal for curriculum at Freedom High School and Tampa FL.
  Tampa's Freedom High School was transformed by a student-led initiative beginning in the summer of 2009. A rising senior, Blake O'Connor, and I had the privilege of attending the Aspen Ideas Festival (AIF) on a scholarship from the Bezos Family Foundation. The AIF is an annual gathering of big thinkers from all areas of society, from the arts to science to religion, culture, economics, and politics. Each year, the festival challenges participants to tackle some of the more pressing issues of our times, and figure out ways to replicate solutions. 

Our Inspiration

The year we went the festival theme was "Exploring Ideas, Deepening Dialogue, Inspiring Action," and the scholars had lots of freedom in choosing speakers to hear and sessions to attend. Education, naturally, was important to our fellow student and educator  scholars. It was fascinating to listen to Michelle Rhee discuss her experience with D.C schools. Howard Gardner provided much insight on learning styles and Tom Friedman was a driving force in declaring the responsibility of youth to be agents of change in our world: "Get off Facebook and into peoples' faces!" A highlight was spending a scholars-only hour with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. New to his position, he requested the time to listen to us - educators and students - tell him about our classroom experience and hopes for its future.
As part of our grant, we were challenged to return home and create a festival for our own community, a Local Ideas Festival.

Turning Inspiration into Action

Inspired by the profound needs to improve literacy in our community and around the world, Blake and his peers created Café Freedom, named after the salons of the French Revolution. As a team, they worked to change local statistics: 35% of children in third grade were not ready to read when they arrived.   
This is an important year in Florida public schools, as third-grade students begin to take standardized tests that determine their placement in their own educational progression.   
Meeting with peers, faculty and administration at the beginning of the new school year, Café Freedom got to work. A plan was formed and implemented to promote literacy awareness through numerous stages.

• Book donations: Freedom High students encouraged others to donate books to take to 12 second grade classrooms in Title 1 elementary schools. They asked for help gathering donated books from the entire school's educational community, including the PTSA, Liberty Middle School, parents, teachers and early childhood programs at nearby universities.
• Readings at elementary schools: High school students read books to the second graders, created "I Feel the Need to Read" activities and made sure they all received books that could be given away to each student.
• Parent Night: The targeted elementary school parents were invited for a discussion on how to raise readers and an exploration of techniques to make it happen. A panel of experts from local media, education university faculty and librarians were asked to share their advice, while separately their children were entertained by Freedom High School's Drama Club productions of children's stories.
• Day-long "I Feel the Need to Read" celebration The major push of the initiative was the Literacy Festival on Dr. Seuss' birthday in which 280 second graders filled the Freedom High School football field for a day of literacy-themed games, activities, food and prizes. Not only was each student encouraged to read throughout the day, but each also took a literacy oath and received a bag of books and school supplies to take with them.

Bringing the Literacy Project to Other Schools

Because of the overwhelming success of Blake's project, Café Freedom expanded their effort this year. Two additional high schools were supported to start their own literacy initiatives, reaching a thousand more elementary school students. In its second year, over 1000 students benefited from books raised by this expanded group. The second annual Family Literacy night drew close to 400 parents and students. Sponsorship of this program has expanded from the original Bezos grant to include local support from Target, Publix and the Rotary Club of New Tampa.

Is heaven real?

POSTED BY: MARIA MUIXI
FROM: NEWSWEEK

'It was a place of butterflies, joy and big puffy pink clouds' says Dr. Eben Alexander.

Dr Eben Alexander spent 15 years as an academic neurosurgeon at Harvard but he was struck with a nearly fatal bout of bacterial meningitis in 2008 and had no brain activity when he lay comatose for seven days at a Virginia hospital. During this days when he lay comatose he affirms had seen heaven. He explains his experiences in an article published on the Newsweek.

Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife

Oct 8, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.   

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am.

Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.

When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.






In this website you'll see a video where this doctor speaks about his experience while he was in coma.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html 




By: Maria Muixí

Imagine

Posted by Gemma Sanz

Silicon Valley-Imagine

ABOUT THE CENTER

Imagine Creativity Center is a center that identifies problems and suggests World Changing solutions. The ideas will be pursued by multidisciplinary team which will work in the Silicon Valley environment for one month.
During one month, dreamers will live a radical life changing experience while finding ways to make the world a better place. Imagine will open its doors to dreamers twice a year. In every edition, 12 talented people will be chosen to work on 4 disruptive projects. The results will be presented in a public event at the end of each edition and will be permanently exhibited in the center's showroom.

ABOUT THE PROJECTS

• In each edition of Imagine teams will work on 4 projects that propose disruptive solutions to different problems in the world.
• Projects are chosen by a committee of experts who evaluates the proposals submitted by applications. 12 talented people will work on these projects. The results will be presented in a public event and permanently exhibited in the center’s showroom.
• For this edition of imagine the following 4 projects have been selected: smart mobility, happiness, solidarity, collective intelligence.

PROGRAM OVERVIEW SUMMER
EDITION 2012

• 1 WarmUp weekend in Barcelona and Cadaqués.
  Creative group activities (15,16, 17 of June)
• 1 Month at Imagine Creativity Center at San Francisco (from 27th of June to 29 of July)
• Flight to San Francisco (27th of June)
• 4 Teams, 12 Dreamers (Different ages and backgrounds)
• Group of mentors (Stanford, Ideo, Google,…) + In-House Guest Sessions + 2 team directors
• 2 Stanford Interactive Sessions with Professors
• 8 Networking events around the Silicon Valley (chosen to fit each dreamers needs)
• Silicon Valley Company visits and Hotspots (Google, IDEO, Craigslist, etc.)
• 4 Outdoor Activities
• 1 Final Public Event to expose projects (26th of July)
• Flight back to Spain (29th of July)
• Reconnect meetings and presentation of the results to Spanish Media in Barcelona, Madrid, Tenerife, etc.