sounds of ximena

dias de luna…houston…rgv…back to houston…austin…back to houston….

tweet tweet

Not sure what to think of the twitter project. Tinkered with it today. I’ve enjoyed using facebook but not sure if I’ll be tweeting much for now. We’ll see…

zydepunks!

catch them if you can…you won’t regret it…

a place to be

crosses

¡¡¡QUE LA FELICIDAD OS ATROPELLE!!

volando vengo volando voy

transition

After seven years of teaching and completing a Master’s degree in Education, I have come to perhaps the most difficult, confusing and painful experience of this short teaching career.

I found myself in a situation that was far from healthy for me and, with the help and support of friends and family, made a very difficult decision. I have resigned from my teaching position.

I continue to love teaching and learning very much and hope this experience doesn’t take that away from me in any way.

meaningful work and curiosity…

As I enter 2009 I found the preceding interview of Gladwell on Charlie Rose very important for me at this particular time. I haven’t read his new book and to be honest, I don’t plan to at this time. I’m planning on going back to finish Blink and think about the relationship between rapid cognition, meaningful work and curiosity (important culminating point at the end of the interview) and how that affects not only my work as an educator but my day to day living as well.

I first discovered Malcolm Gladwell via his talk on TED on What we can learn from spaghetti sauce.

It’s hard not to love anything on TED but this talk was particularly poignant for me at the time. I am not an artist and have never claimed to be but this talk re-affirmed for me my interest in the importance of intentionally teaching creativity (or curiosity) in schools.

It also helped support my feeling that the fact that art and visual literacy is something that is merely taught at the fringe or in an extra-curricular setting significantly hurts our students. In an attempt to help students in the area of science, math and technology, we fail to see the importance of art, creativity and visual literacy in this age. Despite our efforts and investment in science, math and technology in this country, why are our students still so significantly behind? And, more importantly, why does so much creative work seem to come from those same students from those same countries that are so significantly ahead of our students in the area of science, math and technology? It seems like these students have no problem being strong in disciplines that are both right and left brain.

Dan Pink has something to say about that.

After that talk on TED, I began reading Blink and reflected on the importance of “rapid cognition” and how it was immensely related to his talk on spaghetti sauce and how that relation was significantly relevant to teaching in a web2.0 classrooms(whatever that means since, for the most part, they really don’t exist…sticking hardware in a classroom doesn’t count…and, it may, in fact, hurt more than help).

So, again as I enter 2009 I plan to go back to finish Blink and enjoy thinking about the relationship between rapid cognition, meaningful work and curiosity and how that affects not only my work as an educator but my day to day living as well.