developing countries

Congratulations to all my friends for accomplishing seminar 2.

I must say, I was very interested to see all the similarities found between developing countries when it comes to education. I was impressed how if we could simply take out the name of the country and replace it with another developing countries it will not really matter.

I personally was in a catholic christian school called Sacree Coeur where I spend my first years of primary school. For me it was a nightmare because I could not cope with the educational system. I had always felt that it was me to blame for this, for not putting a lot of effort, for not being able to memorize. When I transferred to an international school AIS, it was an eye opener for me. I was actually getting As on my report card. I realized how significant it is to to have an educational system to suit the needs of the students beyond the scope of the curriculum. There are many skills I have acquired from school that I still use today in my masters program.

When I became a teacher, it was my dream to work back at AIS, to give it what it has given me, but after researching I have discovered that since I do not hold an international passport I cannot work there. This presentation has also clarified some questions regarding a few teachers that have crossed my path, especially my IB physics teacher who let one of the bright students explain to us higher level theory of relativity which was part of our curriculum. I remember explicitly that he said, you better find a seat next to Adam Caroline if you want to understand "theory of Relativity." It was a shock to me, and a more vivid shock was when I found out that the next year after I graduated he became our detention disciplinarian and left teaching altogether. This has now been explained on the idea that the qualifications of teachers does not matter in Egypt.

To be honest, I never knew we even had Islamic Schools in Egypt, this was a new piece of information I discovered about my own country :)

I loved Othman's presentation about Yemen with all its images, and I really look forward to visiting it someday.
                                          
I did not understand the relationship between child mutilation and teacher education from Merriam's presentation. For me this topic is horrid and it breaks my heart each time it is spoken of. I was volunteering in a rural area in Egypt as a math, social studies and living values teacher for a group of girls in 1st secondary. When it was time for living values, we discussed hygiene because they only showered once a month due to the lack of water supply to the village then of course the topic of boys got opened. Well two things left me speechless until this day. First, the idea that the entire family lives in one room where everyone has sexual intercourse with anyone and the girl has no say (meaning that the uncle could be living in this house and sleeps with the girl, so does her father and brothers). In addition was their mutilation and how it was a celebration even though they hated it, they kept referring to it to be similar to what boys go through. They had no idea that when that happens to girls its different than boys.

Looking forward to see the differences between developing and developed countries. 

Democracy :)

It really made me laugh. it might be just a cartoon, but this is truly what happens.

Pregnant delivery

I must say, I never felt so pregnant with ideas and thoughts from one source. It took me all week to think of what I want to share with the class, and still while we first started and Dr. Joyanne commenced to ask us what are some of the things we took out from the presentations I was still lost and said the first thing that came to my mind. I must admit that thought is long gone and got mixed by all the other thoughts my classmates shared, but the only thing that remains is love. I strongly believe that love conquers everything. If I love the person in front of me for who they are and I feel no threat from them. What has been going on around the world is the effect of threat that is being felt. People go around with a motto to guard yourself and protect from any harm. This is what they are doing, they guard and push back as strong as they can. Many religions have spoken about unconditional love so I believe we have a clear example of that, but we as humans put restrictions to that claiming it is impossible. If it is not impossible, people make it impossible because when you love unconditionally they hurt you back, thus the feelings of guarding and protecting yourself emerge.

One of my most successful classes which I am still teaching, the same group of kids for the past 3 years is a class that is based on independence. I have reached a mutual understanding with the kids for knowing why they are here, what they need to learn from here and how they can search, and extract knowledge on their own. When that stage was completed now, I am simply a facilitator. In addition to that, I created a bond of love between us all. We care and love for each other to an extend that goes beyond the class. If we want to make a difference then we have to be the difference ourselves. We talk, we argue about reform but we don't reform ourselves. The main question remains, to which extend am I willing to reform myself? For how long will I keep doing that? I believe our main problem is that we have guarded ourselves for so long that we forgot how to open up.

When wanting to teach others about diversity, social justice, equality, reflection, technology we need to step down from our pedestals and get our hands dirty. We like to live in a world of grey, where we can always question and say that what is right and wrong is not really distinguished but it all falls under the umbrella of uncertainty. It helps us to do what we want to do without feeling guilty about it. We like to talk about things but when we hit the reality check button we back off, we stop, we think it over. We might as well get used to being objected to, ridiculed, threatened, because when we decide to really step up and talk about those topics and implement them in reality, people will not like it.

What we are doing in Humanity and our made up countries, is very similar to the story Lord of the Flies, where a bunch of boys got stranded on an island after a shipwreck and they created a society on this island. They came up with laws and ideas which seemed very reasonable, but in the end, it all ended in brutality. What was astonishing is how this ended up being the norm. They forgot what was right and things just went down from there. This is what's happening to society. The idea we need to keep in mind when we are creating Humanity is that how will we deal with corruption, how will we keep those ideologies from being forgotten? People not only need love, but understanding even to those who are fighting against them, the mean ones.


I would like to end with this picture. What we want is to look in the mirror and see things in the correct way, but lets not be fooled into the correct way by taking the short cuts and the fastest and easiest solutions. Dig deep, work hard and don't give up!

had to share it

This is actually what I have been feeling throughout my master degree so far. I feel that the more we dig deeper into understanding the more we realize that the sea is so much more frightening than the reality of it.
I came across this picture on Facebook and it broke into my heart.

those are representatives of the world getting an education. The first one is Arab, second American, third European and fourth African  The teachers asks a questions : "what is your opinion about the lack in food supply to the rest of the world?"
the Arab says: what does "what do you think"mean?
the American says: what does "the rest of the world"mean?
the European says: what does "lack"mean?
the African says: what does "food" mean?

the idea is, we may all be speaking the same language, but unfortunately this is the reality we live in..

just thought of sharing!!

Diversity

This was a topic I was waiting to hear more from...

Coming personally from a very diverse community at home, in school, among my friends and work. It may seem that diversity comes easier to me.
I do accept everyone as they are, and I do acknowledge their differences and gain more understanding and compassion towards them in that way. I strongly believe that there is a difference between understanding diversity and living diversity.

Understanding diversity is when I do know that people are different than me due to their color, race, ethnicity, gender, social class and so on.
But living diversity is a much harder task. I may accept people for being different but to which extend I allow that difference to merge within my norm.

Diversity is like paint spilled with different colors everywhere, could those colors stay away from each other for long or will there be a merging point?

When we decide to live in a world of diversity, then we need to accept that this will sooner or later be merging and that should be accepted not cause conflict.

In another class, we were watching a documentary about Serbia, Yogoslavia and Bosnia and what astonished me was a girl who says that, I live in Bosnia but I am Serbian. That does not mean I am Bosnian because I am Serbian, but when I go to Serbia, I'm not Serbian because i'm Bosnian , then who am I.

This is what we create when we only acknowledge diversity and not believe in it and accept it.

A great struggle faced with diversity is religion.

Many religions defy and go against each others in belief, then how can we unify and still allow freedom and equality and not become the next France? 

I must quote Mike and say, those past two presentation classes made me pregnant with thought! I believe I will be even more pregnant when I try to fulfill those ideologies i have into Humanity. 

How can I allow people to freely express themselves while respecting others but at the same time make them understand and believe that if someone wants to merge those two extremes then it is acceptable even though the norms might go against it. 

For example, I might know and live with GLBT people but my religion defies it. I might choose to accept it as long as it does not affect me personally, but what will happen when it is merge into my family? 

I believe many of us may accept something on concept but when it comes to actually being a part of it, it is different. 

To be honest, I do not think that any level of awareness is enough to make people accept and appreciate others for who they are. What should we do?? is a big question mark I still hold???

Social Justice

Creating a World or a Community where everything and everyone is considered equal. We are born different yet we need to be considered equal. 

From my friends' presentations about social justice. Many questions filled my mind. 

What we are trying to do in Humanity is create the perfect world, where we have a clean slate to do whatever we want. We do not have the common excuse off, it was just handed to us that way. 

Since we are created different, I imagine that Humanity will have lots of different people which is evident with the multilingual aspect we have established there. 

Social Justice aims for a community where everyone feels equally appreciated, their rights heard and addressed and there is mutual respect among all. 

I do support those theories greatly, but when we come to create a unified system, with all those diverse people, then who's laws and regulations would I place. I believe the struggle will be who's equality are we considering. Yest there are certain aspects we all agree on, for instance, right to life, education, gender, race. What got me thinking was the idea that justice is blind. 

Thus, it does not matter who you are, it considers everyone the same. Will my distribution of justice actually be equal? A picture that has been posted on facebook for a while talks about how it may be just to give each person a box to stand on but is it equal in benefit to do that? 

My other major concern is... equality and freedom, are they on the same side or are they pulling at opposite ends?

The idea is, as Humanity is diverse, then how will there be satisfaction from each party towards the justice and equality the society has place. I do not believe that everyone will see it as fair or as equal distribution over certain rules, which will result in conflict. Will it turn into a vicious circle?

Controversy

Controversy 

what a teacher needs to know vs. what the teacher has to know.

Mabrook to my fellow mates  your presentations were exquisite. You have set the benchmark so high, I am proud. We are all now Prezi experts :D

Civic Education.. to be honest, at my school we were never taught anything about EGYPT.
I remember we talked about:

• civilizations in grade 6
• geography and monuments grade 7
• world war 1 and 2 grade 8
• humanities (which was an integrated course between English and History, so we read about the history of the books we are reading) grade 9 and 10
• then in IB I never took History :)

It is quite astonishing, I have no recollection of ever taking Egyptian or American History except I guess about the Alamein War in World War 2. I don't even know any famous figures in Egypt or what they have accomplished  this is also due to my hatred towards History thus, even a struck of interest does not occur. 

This makes me reflect on the idea that I do not feel patriotic towards any country. I personally never felt I belonged somewhere but I always wanted to work for Humanity as a whole, regardless of place. 

I like that quote from the presentations:

"Education is the great equalizer of the condition of man"