Stop the leak!

I really don’t know what’s happening in this building of mine. A few weeks ago, I woke up to find my house without a drop of water. The problem was fixed and I moved on. Well, apparently it wasn’t that easy. After that day, the building ran out of water on three other occasions, twice this week, being the last one last night.

On Wednesday, the plumbers were investigating where the problem was and they think there’s a leak in one of the flats that’s causing the inconvenience. I have noticed that there is a big stain on the garage’s ceiling right below the next door flat’s bathroom, so maybe that’s the source of the leak. However, the owner or tenant doesn’t live there, you know, it seems as if it’s a place to crash whenever the person is in the city. That actually happens a lot in this building. There is what I call “the Veranopolis Mob” living or hanging out here, every week you can see different cars in the garage and basically they come and go, lend the flat to friends and relatives and at the end of the day you’re not really sure who’s who, but they sure are all obnoxious people.

Anyway, I had no water overnight. I texted the person in charge of the building but she didn’t reply — I guess she is away — so I would have to contact the company that is supposed to help with the maintenance in the morning. I woke up this morning and there it was, water, running from the tap. I don’t know if somebody fixed it, if there’s some water in the water tank or some higher power just stated “let there be water…” What’s bothering me is that now every time I go to the kitchen or bathroom is gonna be a surprise: will I be able to flush, brush my teeth? Is today gonna be a shower or no-shower day? Clean or dirty dishes? Come on…

And the funny thing is that we ran out of water around 11pm, and some half hour later I started hearing cars getting out of the building, you know, as if people were just fleeing the scene, “no water? I’m getting the hell outta here!” So now I have to leave my own flat, for which I monthly pay a substantial amount of money, because they can’t fix the problem? If there’s a leak find the fucking thing and fix it!!! (I just hope they’re not as efficient as BP…)

Just one thing about Veranopolis. I’m not saying that everybody that lives in that city is obnoxious, I’m sure it’s a lovely city and there are hundreds of fantastic people over there, but it seems that these guys from this city were handpicked to make everybody else’s lives just miserable.

—

I have FINALLY finished writing the assessments… of the first group… Curiously, I read this fascinating article in the NYT about plagiarism. I know it focuses on college and university papers, but the timing couldn’t have been more perfect because of the cases I had while correcting their writing tasks. The second group is now in process of taking tests and I’ll interview them in a couple of weeks. A lot of those interviews will be over the phone and I wish I could record them, you know, to have something to refer to while writing the evaluations. A couple of years ago I did it through the speaker phone, the quality of the recording wasn’t great but it was excellent to get to listen to the conversation again. Now, do you think I have this at my disposal? I better start sharpening the pencil…

Not to mention that the distance classes thing isn’t going very well. I haven’t progressed one bit since I presented the first draft last month and I’m supposed to present the final project in a couple of weeks during my second visit in Santa Cruz. What really disappointed me was the unhelpful reaction I got from people that were suppose to contribute to the making of the project. The last thing I need is somebody telling me that this is something very difficult to pull off given our current situation and coming up with a list of cons. I know it’s fucking difficult, but it’s been okayed by the school and now it has to happen.

—

I have one more translation available on TEDTalks, reviewed by Rafael Eufrasio. Filmmaker Newton Aduaka shows bits of his movies, focusing on “Ezra,” which tells the story of a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Available here.

No longer unique (namewise, at least)

I’ve been trying to finish up all the work I have to do with the first group assessed but some things are just beyond my control, such as students handing in texts which were copied from the web. I’ve been doing this job for three years now but never before have I seen so many people blatantly copying entire paragraphs and including in the text. Some of the guys didn’t even bother making an intelligible connection between sentences and many parts don’t make any sense at all. So, what to do? My boss thinks I should have contacted the company about it and disclosed the names of the employees who did it, on the other hand I didn’t want to get them in trouble, so I decided to contact them individually and gave them a new task to do over the weekend. If they don’t send the new text, I’ll leave the writing task box blank and send the results to the company, which would probably contact me about the missing grade and then I would inevitably have to tell them what happened.

What really pisses me off here is that they thought I wouldn’t notice that, proving that they have no respect for what I do. Are they so stupid to think that I won’t notice that a person that struggles to make themselves understood cannot simply write a spotless, almost native-like text? Well, apparently some of them are and now my work has been delayed because of that.

—

You look around these days and you see that everybody is out there and doing stuff, so much information, so many copies that you think it would be nice if there were something unique about you: a physical trait, personality or whatever that would make you stand out. I thought I had something unique but now it’s all gone. It all started when my sister googled my name. She sent me an e-mail saying she had come across this page on Gazeta do Sul website. Gazeta do Sul is a newspaper from Santa Cruz, the very city the company I work with is based in. It’s the 17 February edition (my birthday) and if you scroll down to the “Bom Dia” heading you’ll find that my name is there. Now, how do they know when my birthday is?

Well, after passing the stage of wonderment, I decided to google myself. It wasn’t the first time, though, and let’s admit that everybody has googled themselves already, at least once. And if you tell me that you’ve never done it, well, you’re either my mother who’s afraid of turning on the laptop or you’re lying. So, I googled myself and I see the newspaper page, but there are also these webpages with some “Fernanda Gruendling” other than me. Huh… I looked into it and I have a namesake. She’s a student and lives in my city! I once saw my look alike and it was pretty weird, I tell you… And now this…

MY NAME!  Now look, you expect to see thousands of Joao da Silva, Ana Martins or Maria Souza, but Fernanda Gruendling? Come on! The only thing I thought nobody else had, this non-territorial Brazilian-German name, has instantly gone down the drain. Frustrating…

—

World Cup final today. Spain and the Netherlands. I guess it’ll be a good match but not really sure which team should win. The Netherlands beat Brazil, so maybe Spain should kick their asses. On the other hand, if the Netherlands beat Spain and win the Cup, at least we can say we lost to the world champion…

Spain or the Netherlands?

Back to busy

Back to busy, indeed. Assessment interviews started yesterday and it was a looooong day, I tell ya…

The whole thing started the day before. I went to work and focused on preparing the first draft of the proposal in order to show the guys in Santa Cruz what we have in mind for the distance classes. The irony of it all is that after quitting Journalism school, I’ll have to write scripts and produce content if the project becomes reality… Needless to say that I’m feeling a little nervous about it all.

I had already written down the main idea but I had now to be careful with the details. I must have read the whole thing over 20 times just to make sure everything was OK, but decided to give a last look at it at home just in case. I had cancelled the class with my students because I knew I would have to work on that a little more. So, I did my thing and turned in early because I would catch the first bus to Santa Cruz. That meant missing AC360… OK, I can live without it for a day, right? But I just couldn’t bring myself to sleep because it was too fucking early and because I kept thinking about the time I would have to wake up and I was afraid of not listening to the alarm clock in the morning and missing the bus… I couldn’t sleep because I thought I wouldn’t get up the next day. I know, I have issues…

After staring at the ceiling for half an hour, I looked at the watch and saw that the show had just started five minutes ago, so I thought, ‘Maybe the for 15 minutes only…’ I turned on the TV to see Billy Nungesser, James Carville and AC discussing about BP not being transparent and that the company didn’t think the number of barrels gushing out in the ocean wasn’t important and that BP had estimated 1,000 barrels at first but now the number is much higher and then I thought, ‘Is this a rerun?’ I know that AC has been anchoring from the Gulf the longest and his show is basically about the oil spill and it’s important to hold the BP accountable and report on what’s being done and what’s not, but can’t they dig up some other stuff? I mean, I had seen that same discussion at least 10 times before and I don’t thing it would make much difference if they placed life-sized cut-outs and rolled an audio from a show aired three weeks ago. So, after 15 seconds, I turned the TV off and went to bed.

4:30am, a very appropriate time to get up… if you are a morning show host! My bus to Santa Cruz was at 5:30am and I had a two-and-a-half-hour ride ahead of me. The only good thing is that at this time the bus is great, comfortable and empty, as opposed to the ones that operate at 6pm — the time I came back home — which are full, not enough legroom and stop at every single bus station along the way. And not only bus stations, the bus actually stops in the middle of nowhere and people get off. But I wonder where these people go, because there’s nothing around, nothing! So they get off the bus, some even carrying  luggage, and what do they do? Do they wander in the fields? Do they evaporate? Does the mothership come to pick them up?

I interviewed people all day long, 24 in total and no breaks. It didn’t feel so bad, only at the end I felt like I was going to faint. I had a great surprise in terms of the employees’ level, all of them seemed to have made progress. And I got to eat some of the delicious cakes they make in the city! Even brought some home…

Well, now I’m really gonna be busy. Assessments, proposal, winter workshops, college… I just hope I can manage.

—

Very disappointed in the English team. Really disappointed. They were my biggest hope and what about now? Well, I’m rooting for the underdog, if either Paraguay or Ghana win I’ll be very happy! (Neither will…)

—

We Feel Fine: “I can say that I think I wanted to feel some of these things but I’m not terribly sure I really did At the end of this post I talk about holding my feelings and allude to the idea that I think it’s what’s best” (2 hours ago)

Students as customers

I got up this morning to find myself without water in the house. None, zero, all dry… With my beautiful morning face, I went downstairs to check out what was going on, if they were cleaning the water tank and hadn’t let anybody know. Obviously, the only good-looking guy in the building was going to work and had the privilege to see such beautiful image… Well, I contacted the guys in charge and they’re still figuring out what happened. In the meantime, I called the school and said I was stranded because I just couldn’t go to work as I were! No shower, no-show.

Alright, working from home then, which isn’t so bad because I’m watching the World Cup, England’s playing Slovenia and I do hope the boys win! You already know how I feel about who should be the World Cup winner!

I read this fascinating article yesterday in the NYT about university teachers in Texas having a “contract” with students and abiding by that contract. Also, the implementation of teacher evaluation based on student’s feedback. This is all wrong, man…

I’ve been a teacher for seven years now — there was the year-an-a-half break in London, but I was a student there, so still in classroom — and I can’t help wondering what’s happened along the way. I do a different job now but whenever necessary I teach, I prepare classes and I research material. In fact, I’m coming up with all the activities for the winter workshops the school is offering… Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that I couldn’t help thinking about our situation at the school after reading that piece.

When our school had a change in management — a hostile takeover perhaps — teachers became mere puppets, having no control over the material and the classes. I was in their shoes up to a year ago and can tell you that the situation is brutal. All teachers now have to treat the students as customers and they (the teachers) are evaluated by the number of people that come back for another term. Tough situation… So, the difficult part here is getting teachers and students to meet halfway. While teachers try to get them to communicate and put into practice what they’ve studied, the students don’t seem to be willing to help, because they think that showing up for class means they will learn automatically and further practice outside the school isn’t necessary. So, obviously the lack of SOME dedication will reflect in their results. Students really get mad and blame the TEACHER for their poor results. And the fact that there are language schools popping up everywhere isn’t helping either, because teachers go to class having in mind that if they aren’t just what students want them to be, if they don’t do just what students want them to do, they run the risk of losing these guys to other schools that promise people they can be fluent in English in just six months. I’m sorry, but the only way you’ll be able to speak English in six months from scratch is by going to England (or Canada or U.S. or whatever other country) and living there for six months and having no contact with Brazilians whatsoever. And I still have my doubts whether somebody would be able to pull it off in six months…

So, the “contract” is that in six months, or one year and a half in most cases, the student will be an advanced speaker of English, even though their writing is laughable and their speaking is just a frustrating translation from Portuguese into English, which can sound really weird in most cases. But what’s the teacher supposed to do? If they tell students that they’re not making any progress, the students go look for another school that offers what they want just to find out that in six months they haven’t learned anything for the same reasons they didn’t back in the other places. If teachers DON’T tell students that their English sucks and just keep allowing them to advance to the next level, the students will find out about it the hard way, in a job interview or when they travel abroad and figure out that they can’t communicate with native speakers or foreigners.

The question is: is it OK for the student to be a customer? Should we keep them happy so that they come back the next semestre or the next month in order to keep our based-on-results jobs? Or should we treat students as students, working on their weaknesses, pointing out their strengths and assisting them, not worrying if you’re being funny or not?

I’m just glad that the guys I teach are a little different and I still have some freedom to prepare my classes…

—

Comedy show Fox & Friends is the gift that keeps on giving! Unfortunately I missed it today trying to figure out what had happened to the water in the building, but I’m glad that Time magazine made the highlight available online. Basically, according to Gretchen Carlson, being the president is just like being a TV anchor. Yeah, I can see the similarities… But that isn’t as surprising as seeing that Fox News is actually defending BP and slamming the government over the 20-billion-dollar escrow fund. Or is it really surprising?… Media Matters explains.

—

Another TEDTalk available in Portuguese. I’ve translated this great talk by Brian Cox where he shows the importance of space exploration and the investment in this area, accompanied by great images! The reviewer was Fernando Marinheiro and the talk is available here.

P.S.: England qualified!!! This is the year! It was actually the first time I enjoyed watching a game during this World Cup…

Am I supposed to be excited about the World Cup?

It’s been a tough week. First part of assessment is taking place and the employees do an online placement test before moving on to the written task. With the whole changing of system thing, we’ve been experiencing a few bugs along the way and the frustrating part is that I have no control over it whatsoever. Any change that needs to be made I have to contact the guy that developed the thing and he doesn’t work at the school, it was an outsourcing kind of thing. The real problem is that when I do contact the guy he doesn’t even bother responding the fucking e-mail with a ‘I’ll get back to you.’ If it’s something urgent and I depend on that to keep my job, well, I better check out the job ads because I won’t get a response within at least five days.

People seem to be excited about the World Cup. I’m not. I gotta say that I am watching Argentina vs. Nigeria right now because there’s nothing better to watch on TV. What surprises me is that I’ve never been like that before. During the last World Cup I was living in London and I remember not giving a shit about my work because I wanted to watch the matches, especially Brazil. I would make deals with my manager to be able to leave earlier to get together with friends and watch the games. We even almost missed a Roger Waters gig in Hyde Park because I wanted to watch Brazil vs. France — and thank God we didn’t miss the show because as everyone knows Brazil was sent home on that day. Obviously I would like my country to win, but at the same time I think they shouldn’t get to the finals, you know, there’s much more to the world than stupid football matches.

And I think what irritates me the most about this is that I inevitably have to go broadcast if I want to watch the games and during half time they insist on showing those ridiculous takes from wherever in Brazil with a bunch of people rooting for the teams that are playing. And the questions are the best: ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Are you excited about the game?’ ‘Do you think they’ll win?’ NO, YOU MORON! I’m watching the game because want my team to lose!!!! I think that’s almost insulting… You know what? I’ll tell you honestly that I’m rooting for England. The boys should win a second Cup, shouldn’t they?

I came across this hilarious piece of news on The New Republic website. I guess it doesn’t need further explanation if you take a look.

A lot of TEDTalks were finalized but for some reason they haven’t been published yet. There is one talk, tough, translated by Daniel Sollero and reviewed by me that is available and totally worth watching! Steven Levitt analyses the economics of crack and proves that, different from what many might think, it doesn’t pay off being a drug dealer!!! Very funny and interesting talk to watch!

We Feel Fine’s randomly selected piece of story of the day: “I’ve gotten to see my best friends a little more often Life is pretty laid back and I think I’m loosening up quite a bit more from the rigor of the semester so my life is feeling quite a bit more laid back which is definitely nice”

What the…

So, I got home earlier today because at precisely 8am I was at the school doing an assessment with one of the employees from Santa Cruz who’s going on vacation next week, therefore he won’t be at the company for the big line-up of interviews — 20 something people whom I need to speak with for 15 minutes and decide which level they’ll be placed. Fantastic…

My students cancelled the class tonight, so I had some time to go online and check the news, and I came across this article from CNN’s Hala Gorani about how writing letters has become almost obsolete. I totally agree with the fact that we’ve been losing the ability to focus, at least it happens to me: e-mail, tweets, podcasts, IMs, all happening at the same time and all of a sudden you forget why you went online to begin with. I do like having the possibility of contacting people fast or accessing information with a few key strokes, but I do miss the time when there wasn’t anything technological at all around us and we would have to wait until the next day for news coverage in the paper or check the mail box for cards and letters — not only bills!

But anyway, I had a few things to do around the house so I went on to organise some stuff, and the TV was on Beck’s programme — you know, I need the reminder! — and I heard him talking about Robin Hood and…. no, sorry, Robin MAO Hood, saying that he was the guy taking from the rich and giving to the poor, a true socialist. He was taking from the elites and giving to the people that had nothing. And he went on to say that folks should tell the story to their kids… What the… I didn’t really get if Beck was okaying the story, which would sound odd because of the MAO thing, or if he was scolding the guy or scolding the elites… Bottom line is: there’s so much nonsense coming out of that person that I don’t think I’ll ever waste my time trying to pay attention to what he says. I’ll let Jon Stewart do the dirty work for me!!! Welcome back, man!!!!

I have another TEDTalk translation published, with a little help from my friend Volvey Faustini, who reviewed the work. Nathan Myhrvold and his group of smart people spend most of the time inventing, not only for fun and profit, but also to help people around the world. They present a series of inventions that could really lend a hand when it comes to reducing preventable diseases in developing countries. And the malaria mosquito is the main target of their studies — literally! Fascinating talk!

We Feel Fine’s randomly selected piece of story of the day: “I flourish in that God has assigned to me I feel I am truly following his will” (2 hours ago)

12:51

I can’t believe that I’ve finally, FINALLY, sent all the feedback on the Immersion Program to all the participants — some people had been waiting since January for that — and we’ve managed to finish editing both Podcasts, they’ve turned out to be pretty good, actually, with the added music and the effects. However, I’m nowhere near catching up with all I’ve gotta do.

And speaking of work, assessment season has been officially opened. So, I’m looking at pretty busy couple of months, which made me wonder about something important: what about my vacation? We all went on forced vacation time last year in December for 10 days, which was a good break but everybody was broke — me maybe being the shattered glass on the floor — so there was no work but there was no play either, and no work and no play also makes Jack a dull boy, right? I’m guessing that I might be forced to take some time off between the assessment and the first immersion Season 2010-2011.

It took me a long time to fall asleep last night, not surprisingly. I hate when I turn in kind of early to try to have a few more hours of sleep and inevitably end up staring at the ceiling and rolling over every five minutes. But I guess what really bothers me is that, almost every time I roll over, I look at the clock and see what time it is, you know, so that I know how long I have unsuccessfully tried to go to sleep. And one thing that bothers me even  more is that almost every night I do it, one specific time is showing: 12:51.

“12:51” is the name of a Strokes song, which I’m not particularly fond of,  and these numbers seem to haunt me for some reason. As I’ve mentioned before, almost every night I look at the clock and there it is. This afternoon, after having finished my class (at 12:45pm), I kept on talking with the guys for a little while before heading for the school and, as I looked at my mobile to check the time, guess what it was? No kidding, 12:51. I really don’t know… I think when I heard the song for the first time I might have embedded the number in my head and now, involuntarily, I seek for a clock or watch whenever the time is approaching, and it makes me feel surprised, or annoyed, every time I see the number 12:51.

What freaks me out now is that I don’t wanna become the “12:51 crazy lady”, you know? Going so crazy for being haunted for four digits that ends up in an institution, repeatedly saying the time over and over and over again… 12:51… 12:51…

Speaking of crazy, as I scroll down to see the headlines, there’s this piece on Sky News about the Gloucestershire’s cheese rolling going on even though some people dub it dangerous because of safety issues. Well, it IS dangerous, people leave the place on stretchers. But what caught my attention was the comment right after the report. It reads: “good for them or yet another English tradition will die…” Interesting. A few days ago I read this article about one traditional game played in pubs being banned because it encourages binge drinking. It’s called dwile flonking and two teams basically need to hit each other with a beer-soaked cloth, having to drink up the beer fast if failing to do so. Well, I guess people just want to put an end to the funniest things and I’m not supporting it! Let them break their neck rolling down a hill chasing a piece of cheese; let them try to hit each other with a cloth as an excuse to drain their pints as fast as they can! That’s what makes the UK such a great place!

The TEDTalk of the day is this translation by Christine Veras, reviewed by me. It’s a talk by Paola Antonelli, design curator at MoMA, who explains the work she does at the museum and also tries to create awareness of what design is — not only represented by the over-elaborate pieces of furniture, but ranging from candy to gas masks.

We Feel Fine‘s randomly selected piece of story of the day: “I no longer feel sad about our lack of relationship as the negatives far outweighed the positives”

UK dudes don’t put up with shit

Such an exhausting day… exhausting… and looks like all Mondays will be like that… “Tell me why I don’t like Mondays…” Not really! Monday is officially the most profitable day of the week and I hope it continues like that. Big news at work, but still an embryo project, if I may. If it becomes big, well, there will be a lot of work ahead of us, but I wonder if the paycheck will follow suit.

You know, everyday more I miss the UK. Like any other place in the world, it’s not perfect. It’s got many low points. But there are the little things that just make that piece of land so extraordinary. For instance, wouldn’t it be a great idea to make all the cabinet ministers take the tube or walk or carpool instead of riding the chauffer-driven government cars? That’s exactly what’s being proposed and I think it’s fantastic. I mean, when there was the whole scandal of MPs‘ expenses last year, they were later made to pay the money back, and I can totally picture those bald, 50-something construction workers with forearms covered in tattoos probably made in the 70s, drinking pints of bitter and NOT smoking hand-rolled cigarettes at the counter — well, but it’s spring now so they sit in the beer garden — complaining about the government and calling all ministers and MPs all sorts of words that I have no idea what they mean and dare not ask for their meaning either.

I should really have my throat checked out. Last Friday I started to lose my voice, had a sore throat and a miserable weekend, barely being able to speak on Saturday. Now, after having almost completely recovered my voice, I see myself having to deal with the most upsetting, annoying, irritating cough I’ve had in ages. I had to put up with that for two classes today, at some points being interrupted by the unstoppable coughing during the explanation, which made the students look at me with that ‘you’re not ok, right?’ kind of look. The down part is that I don’t see myself self-indulging in my regular binge drinking routine, even though alcohol can only help you not develop dementia — well, I know, only in small doses… but one can dream and distort a little, right? Just like some news organisations do…

And it’s TEDTalks time. I’ve reviewed this very interesting talk by Elizabeth Pisani about ways to prevent HIV from spreading, even though these ways might not be seen as the most appropriate by many. This talk was translated by Adelino de Santi Jr, whom I contacted for the final approval after having made some modifications to his translation. After more than 10 days (and reviewers are allowed up to 14 days to finish their work), I had not been contacted by him so I decided to hit the ‘publish’ button anyway. Well, this wasn’t my first review and isn’t certainly the last, meaning that I’ve got some experience doing it and adapting some of the sentences so that the viewer can better experience the talk. So, man, if you happen to read this, hope you’re ok with what I’ve done.

Is Beck the new Jason Bourne?

Yesterday I finished tabulating the immersion results, turns out that they were pretty good and I had some good surprises when it comes to new teachers. They are totally immersion material and I just hope they stick around for the next season, because turnover can be very high, and not only at the end of terms. So, thinking that this would be the good piece of news of the week at work, I got a call from a big company today looking for something similar to what we do in immersion classes. The programme is really successful but we’ve been basically working with one company for many years now and we want to expand to other businesses. If we could get this contract — and make it something permanent –, man, it would be w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l!

So, I was listening to the radio this morning and the news was that newly elected PM David Cameron is having a 5% pay cut in his salary as well as his ministers’, which is a far cry from the reality in Brazil. Last year, the Supreme Court ministers (yes, they’re ministers), had their salaries raised in September by 5% and then from February this year, extra 3.88%. I guess if you divide the pay raise in two installments, it doesn’t look so obvious to the population, right? So, altogether, they got 8.8% raise, but the original number was 14.09%, which was rejected by the Congress. Oh, that helped a lot, indeed… I heard that Congress also rejected the complimentary drinks bill, which could really save some big cash for the country!!!

Well, I guess Glenn Beck is a subject that will constantly pop in the posts, unless he quits his job or, I don’t know, something happens to him. The latter is something that he himself talks about in his radio show, saying that his life is kind of “The Identity Bourne” movie. It’s kind of funny picturing him as Jason Bourne, you know, dodging bullets, fighting KGB guys, taking part in high speed chases… I don’t know, man, I don’t know what other talk radio shows are like, I don’t know what other kinds of non-sense stuff are said, but it couldn’t be something worse than saying that the population might be looking at mass murders, mass sterilization and forced abortions. I mean, seriously. When I think the line has been crossed, he manages to draw a new line and goes even further. He mentions something about the regulation of the population’s food intake in the health bill and I don’t know what the text is neither do I have the entire show. But, if the population was encouraged to add healthy food in their diet, so many people with serious health problems wouldn’t spend a lot of tax dollars on treating such problems. And, as he probably doesn’t care about the people’s health, I’m surprised that he doesn’t see it as a way to save money. Now I wonder: where will the next line be drawn???

Now, the good stuff. Two more TEDTalks available in Portuguese! The first, translated by Sueli Zardo and reviewed by me, shows Deborah Scranton talking about her documentary “The War Tapes”, where the viewer is immersed in the battle field by watching images filmed by the soldiers themselves, along with their personal accounts. The second, translated by Volney Faustini and reviewed by me… well… I don’t know what to think about. I’m sure it’s a fascinating talk for people that actually understood the content! Stephen Wolfram, a really smart guy and founder of Mathematica, wants to make a theory of everything… using computers and algorithms and, well, I guess images are involved in that… I need to confess that after doing the review I had a bit of a headache (not sure if I should’ve mentioned that…). Anyway, worth checking out!

What’s new, Arizona?

Another boring, bureaucratic day at the school. I’ve recently complained about being very busy and teaching for many hours during immersion and I wanna say that I like teaching, but I would also like to have some 15 minutes between classes to go to the bathroom or have some water as opposed to spending five consecutive hours with one student. I started tabulating the student’s responses to the programme and the results look pretty good. And this week I’ll have two more assessments to prepare, kind of a preparation for July, I guess. And, well, I gotta confess that putting the student’s feedback together is being stalled to the last possible day. I don’t know what’s worse: having to write some 20 texts about their performance or putting up with that duchebag, piece of shit neighbour of mine. Well, this is a subject for another post.

Well, Arizona just couldn’t stand being out of the news for some other wacko piece of legislation. This time, the bill that was signed into law put an end to ethnic studies, on the premises that these classes could segregate Latinos, teaching them that they are an oppressed ethnic group and as a result this could cause them to distance themselves from whites. The superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, was on AC360 and said that he believes in equality and he is a supporter of all races coming together and attending the same classes, but he went on to say that the schools shouldn’t be teaching “the downers” of history and I just went, “wait a minute, buddy.”

So, according to him, a person that believes the downers of history shouldn’t be taught, World Wars I and II should be out of the history books, right?, you know, all the death and persecution. Maybe they shouldn’t teach the Inquisition anymore as well, because that just makes the Catholic church look bad… Or, maybe,  they could scratch out all the soldiers that have been killed in the two ongoing wars and focus only on the “removal of a brutal dictator”, quoting Bill O’Reilly. This is insane. From what I gather, anyone could attend these classes, if the majority happens to be Latino, so be it. Is there anything wrong in learning about their heritage which would help them understand where they came from, what their ancestors have been through and how they have contributed to the building of the country they live in? And if I may take this a little further, myself, as a Brazilian, should only learn that Princess Isabel signed the end of slavery and not that the Portuguese started the whole slavery thing and also devastated millions of miles of our forests for wood, correct?

This whole thing reminded me of this Jon Stewart piece on a committee deciding, in Texas, what should be included and banned from textbooks. Unbelievable stuff, but I guess Arizona managed to crank it up a notch. And absurd things just have a massive chain reaction, such as cities boycotting the state.

Well, enough with the downers, right? One more TEDTalk translation available — we’re on fire!!! This time, I translated this fascinating talk by Jeremy Jackson, a coral reef ecologist that explains how we have destroyed our oceans within the past 100 to 150 years. Data is alarming and the future isn’t looking any good. The reviewer that helped this eye-opening talk be published fast was Giuliano Giordano. There are three more talks lined up but I’m still waiting for the final “OK” from the translators to have them published.