My experience learning English at the university

Nowadays, English is in everywhere. I consider myself as a part of one generation that grew up in an environment bombarded with English. In fact, most of the famous musicians sing in English, and almost every movie or T.V series that I usually watch are spoken in English as well. We have a lot of words and terms that we use daily without notice that they actually came from the English, like “suéter” which derivate from sweater. In this global Era, knowing English became a really helpful tool, especially in academics terms, where most of the information is just available in English.

In general, I believe that the University’s English program is good way to get along with this language. During the course is possible to improve English’s skills as listening, speaking, reading and specially writing. A really good aspect of the course is that the little number of students in each class, which gives the opportunity for practice “speaking” to every present student. In fact, the number of students affects directly the develop of speaking skills, for instance, during high school was almost impossible to practice “speaking” during the class due to the number of classmates, I mean, there were forty-five of us! Apart from this, another really good aspect of the course was that we learn new things, like phonetic, something that I found necessary and useful to improve my pronunciation.

What I personally didn’t like of the course was keeping a blog. In one hand I find it a very good way for developing writing skills, and also very easy to check and correct for the teacher. In the other hand, I usually found boring to write in the same format all the sessions. Other negative aspect to consider was the class schedule; I wouldn’t mind getting up earlier in the morning instead of staying until half past seven in the evening at the university!

Taking everything into account, I conclude that there were great advantages on doing this English course. I must admit that I wasn’t really motivated to take this class, but now that is almost finished, I can hardly find more disadvantages than those two that I already mention. Apart of improving my English, through reading people’s blogs the course gave me the opportunity to know better some of my classmates. Finally, as a suggestion, I believe the course needs some more dynamic activities, like playing “The weakest link”! I really enjoyed that class!

Challenges in Anthropology

Well, the students of anthropology national meeting was held last week at our faculty. The title of the meeting was: “Ruptures, experiences and projections”, so students from different points of the country met to know what has been done , what is been doing in all the different anthropology schools of Chile, in order to propose general perspectives about how us, as students of anthropology, believe the career should be project toward the next future.

In my opinion, the perspective of the students from others universities was really different from ours. I don’t want to comment their way of how to make anthropology, or compare it with the way from this university, because I think is not appropriate (at least not in this moment). I think one big challenge of the discipline is to generate an open and critical discussion among the different points of view of the anthropology, especially among different universities. In fact, studying Social Anthropology in Valdivia than in Santiago is complete different, not only because they are immersed in different realities, but also because there are differences in the academic program and methodological focus of each faculty.

I cannot tell about technological challenges of the discipline because I’m not familiar with the technical or technological display, like computational programs, used in anthropology.

One important challenge of the entire discipline, especially of social anthropology, is the little work demand from the society (maybe I should use the word market instead of society, but I’m not comfortable thinking that your job opportunities depends exclusively on the fluctuations of the economical market). A lot of students enrol the career thinking that they can make a real contribution to society studding anthropology, but when they face the “work world” they discover that maybe is not possible to do what they really want, because almost nobody gives money to do social researches, and if they do, is because there are some economical interest on it. In a similar way, in our country forensic anthropologist don’t get the enough acknowledgment from their work as a forensic scientist (a doctor) could get.

Is true that anthropology is quite a new discipline (at least in Chile), but I believe is time for the society to recognise this discipline can help to solve serious matters, like the Mapuche conflict, and several more.

Being Wealthy

An usual and very common dream is to win the lottery. Sounds great having tons of money, but I believe it can have so many advantages as disadvantages. I would like to make a social research to find out if wealthy people enjoy having so much money.

The main advantage of being really wealthy is that you don’t have to ask yourself: can I afford it? If I were wealthy, I would spend most of my time and money traveling around the world with my family and friends (separately, of course). Also I would like to buy a lot of books without being worry about their price. Apart from this, I believe that with so much money I could help to solve some social problems. Particularly, I would like to build and maintain outstanding schools for children and people who cannot afford private education, especially poor children in social risk.

In the other side, having tons of money can be a headache. I imagine that wealthy people sometimes don’t know what to do with their money, so they spend it in stupid ways. What is more, some very rich people believe that they can buy everything with their money, even people, moral values, respect or happiness. There is a saying that mentions something like: more money, more responsibilities. In some aspects that can be true, I think that some wealthy people don’t have enough time to enjoy their money with their family and friends, because they can be really busy increasing their fortune, or attending to social events, that they might not have time to themselves.

In conclusion, I believe that if I were a wealthy person, I will be an eccentric one to avoid any socials expectation. In that way, I won’t have to follow the socials standards, which will give me enoght time to do whatever I wish with the money.

Something embarrassing...

I’m not the kind of person who gets embarrassed easily. My best friend is completing different: everything can be embarrassing for her. I remember one time that we went together to buy a lot of stuff to one supermarket. We were walking to the bus stop with really heavy bags, when suddenly one of the bags that my friend was carrying got broken in the middle of the street. All the things were all over the street and, of course, all the people were looking at us. My friend said something like “Oh No!”, and then she covered her face and walked away really fast from the place, so I had to pick up the stuff from the street alone. Once in the bus stop, my friend said something like “please forgive me, I’m really sorry! I felt so ashamed that I couldn`t do something! I just wanted to disappear from the place! “. I don’t think that the situation was so embarrassing, but for her was awful. She always runs away when she feels ashamed! One dramatic situation is when she gets a pimple in her face. If that happens, she won't go out of her house at least is extremely necessary. The same thing happens when she gets a new hair cut! I remember during winter holidays we planned to go to a pub one night, but she rang me in the afternoon and said: “I cut my hair and look horrible! Is too embarrassing to go out like this! I will wait until my hair grows again to go out!” Was hard to convince her that she didn't look like a monster, but at the end we went out, we had a nice time even when she tried to hide herself all the night.

Maybe she is the reason of why I don’t feel ashamed very often, is clear that she over exaggerates and someone have to give her courage!

The library of my faculty

I must say that I’m not really proud of not being aware of all the things going on the faculty… Last year during the student strike I participated in some activities, meetings and stuff like that, but in my opinion those kinds of discussions didn’t finish in a really productive way. At least during the last year, the movement lost power in long and boring meetings, where usually the people said the same thing but with different words several times… Maybe because of that experience is that this year I don’t really participate in the meetings of the faculty where is supposed to discuss the problems of the faculty… The other reason maybe that I feel really uncomfortable with the way of how the student unions run the sessions; I think I might have a problem with the political speech of most of them.

I think one of the problems of the faculty is the poor library, and I say poor because it is actually really poor! I mean, there are not enough copies of the book for the students, most of them are in a really bad condition, and some of them are so old that some pages are detached. If you go to the on line catalog of the library, there appears some books that they are not really available in the library, If you go and ask for the book, the most probable thing they must say to you is: I’m sorry, the book is in reparation, but happens that some books have been more than one year in reparation!!

I heard that during the military government a lot of books from the library were burned, and that is why now the faculty has so little amount of them. But how long has been since then? We have been more than fifteen years under a democratic government and the university is still in a lack of books! This faculty (I don’t know the situations of the others) really need to improve their library, it will benefit all the students, the teachers, and of course the environment because the people will need less photocopies.

"Second Stonehegne discovered near the original"

So, we were told, as homework, to choose one news or article related with our future career from www.guardian.co.uk. Right now I’m in the basic plan of anthropology, during the third year of the career all the students have the option to choose their specialty among: Social Anthropology, Physical Anthropology, and Archeology. I have no doubt that I will choose Archeology, because I just love it!

I selected one article from the 6^th of October, the title is “Second Stonehenge discovered near the original”. It is about a new find discovered by archeologists in the surroundings of Stonehenge. The new site has been called Bluestonehenge, it is placed on the west bank of the Avon river and is less than 2 miles away from the famous monument. The excavations made in the place suggested that in past there were big stones forming a circle of 10 metres in diameter. Those stones were removed long time ago, but the archeologists found that there once was a circle of bluestones by looking at the sizes of the holes in which they stood. Bluestonehenge was erected much earlier than Stonehenge, when those stones were put up and when they were removed is still a mystery. The team who has been working at the site is waiting for the radiocarbon dating to find out if those stones were removed to build the inner circle of Stonehenge.

The new find may proof how important was the river for the people who used Stonehenge as ritual and burial place. So, all the old theories about the use of Stonehenge that don’t consider this new evidence should be rethought.

If you want to read the complete article, click the following link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/06/second-stonehenge-discovered

A favorite movie

I really love movies!! Usually I watch one every weekend, and during the Holidays I can watch more than one per day if I stay at home. I like going to the cinema too, but recently wasn`t many good movies on the billboard, it has been more than a month since the last time I went to cinema.

I discovered one of my favorite movies per accident. One boring Sunday I was doing some sapping at the TV when I caught one strange car persecution. There were these two men all dressed in black, driving a really bad looking car at high speed. Behind them were hundreds of police’s cars following them. I can tell what happens later, because there is not fun telling the end of the movie. The name of this musical comedy is “The Blues Brothers” directed by John Landis and was filmed in 1980. It is based on a musical show created for the TV by John Belucchi and Day Aykroyd (the two main characters of the movie).

The movie is about men who rose together as brothers on an orphanage. The story began when one of them get out of prison and wanted to visit their childhood home. Once there they found that the orphanage has serious money problems, so they decided to get somehow the money to pay the debt. By inspiration of god one of they found the way to getting enough legal money: they will reform their old blues band to give a concert! Getting the band together and preparing the concerts isn`t simple at all! And at the end they get into a lot of troubles!
The whole movie is full of funny situations that will make you laugh. The music is fantastic, you will enjoy watching and hearing singing famous musicians like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Cab Calloway. The cast is full of famous people and actors like Carrie Fisher, Henry Gibson, Steven Spielberg, Twiggy, John Candy, Frank Oz, Kathleen Freeman, among others.

There is a second part of this movie (The Blues Brothers 2000), but I recommend to watch the first one.