Chilean educational system

Everyone is talking about the students protests because of the problems we have in our educational system. Since 2006 we have been demanding a reform of the entire system and finally the government has decided to hear its society, but not all the people agree with it.

Some think that the problem lies in people who can profit with the system. Others think that the problem lies in the quality of the education.

I believe that one of the problems we have is the social segregation and our educational system is just a reflection of that. Because we do have good schools and good teachers, the problem is that they stay in the private sector. This means that the people who can pay for these schools will have good education and good education means good jobs.

Obviously there are some teachers who work in public schools. The problem with those schools is that they select the students who enter, and they always keep with the best of them.

In universities the problem is almost the same. First, as primary and secondary education, our country has good universities and bad universities and most of the people who enter a good university come from a private school. But the worst thing about it is the tuition. Nobody with a salary of two hundred pesos can pay that which implies that students, and their families, must get into debt with more than 3 million pesos every year for five/six years. Do the math, somebody who studies for five years must pay 15 million pesos in tuition! This explains why the country is claiming for free education in all the educational system levels, not only for universities. The state grants are not enough anymore. Education is for everyone not just for a few.

A Saudi women who dared to drive

The speech is about a personal experience of Manal al-Sharif, a woman from Saudi Arabia who started to be an activist in 2011 when she realized that religious laws in her country (the Sharia law) are not fair for women. 

Some day she was talking with a work colleague about the harassments when she needs to go back home. Then she realized that there wasn’t a law banning women from driving, only religious traditions.

After she broke the ban, she received threats from the society of her country. The religious and politic authorities arrested her in many times and some men raped women who drive.

After a few months, Saudi women dare to drive in their country and finally nobody arrested them. It was the beginning of a new era for the women of Manal al-Sharif country.

She questions the traditional Saudi religious law about the women rights, but she also questions her society, because nobody knows why women can’t drive in her country, they just accept the Sharia law. The only reason why women couldn’t drive in her country is because they believe their inferiority.

Finally, in February 2013 the Shura Council accepted for women to drive, but the religious authorities (The Grand Mufti) said that it’s not recommended. Manal al-Sharif won the fight and women of her country realized they need to question their religious traditions.

This is just an example of what the society forces the women to do. We don’t have these problems in Chile, but we do have some pressure about the things we supposed to do at certain age, like get married at 30 or don’t get pregnant when we are teenagers or when we are 20, because we “are too young for it”, but everybody knows that is the perfect time for our bodies to have babies.

Movie Review: Earth 2100

Name of Movie: Earth 2100

Describe/list/ outline the main themes of the movie.  (50 words)

The movie is about the consequences of greenhouse gases in the environment, specifically in the climate and in the humanity (as starvation, massive migration, drought, plagues, etc.). The greenhouse gas is produced by industry, vehicles, and from other sources. This causes the global warming phenomenon which is another of the main topics of the movie.

 

Write a review (200 words) of the video.  Highlight the importance of the movie’s information/ themes/ topics to your own personal experience and professional perspective. 

The movie talks about global warming and how we have been destroying our place of living because of our habits. To show us the consequences of our bad acting, the documentary describes the life of a woman called Lucy who was born in 2009 when the greenhouse gases were already a problem to our planet. She narrates the collapse of the Earth until the year 2100 and how she managed to survive in this apocalyptic scenario.

The most interesting part of the documentary for me is when it talks about the green cities solutions. This a topic that we often discuss in the city planning subject, because many architects are talking about sustainable cities right now. I think that the solutions they suggest in the documentary are not enough, because they only talk about green roofs and farmlands to produce our own food, but they never talked about building design solutions and sustainable planning, which is very important to fight global warming and other problems that can cause our civilization to collapse.

It was interesting when they talked about how to control the water level in New York City building barriers in three different places, which is very unreal. But after that I watched the movie, I saw in a newspaper the same solution so I realized that it wasn’t unreal after all.

List a minimum of three facts, pieces of important information or “other” from the video that you would like to remember and would want to tell a friend about.

1.  The documentary shows a possible unfortunate future of our planet in 2100.

2.  It talks about the collapse of humanity because the global warming and other inhuman habits that we have (as consumerism).

3. The movie gives some solutions to fight this unfavorable future as farmlands, green cities, smart houses and other technology that could mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases.

Holidays with my boyfriend!

Hi everybody! I am Katherine but you can call me Katty. I am an architecture student and like almost all of my classmates I choose to study this profession because I like to draw and physics. Also I like yoga. I’ve been practicising for 7 months and sometimes I play the guitar too.

Me and my cat Mimi. Say hi, Mimi!

This time I’m going to talk you about my holidays. Last summer it was fantastic. The first month I stayed at home because I wanted to share with my family. The bad news is that I had to start a diet because I must lose weight. The good news is that I lost 6 kg already!

In February I went to my boyfriend’s house in Temuco. I stayed there for the whole month. It’s always great to travel there because I enjoy traveling and that’s precisely what I did. Every weekend we went to a different city of the south of the country. We went to Futrono, Valdivia, Osorno, Chiloé and Villarica. Definitely the journey to Chiloé was the best because I’d never been there before, it was my first time. I could visit the churches and other historical architecture from the island, taste the local food and buy some artisan crafts.

Me traveling back from Chiloé to Puerto Montt :C!

I had to work too. Every day I woke up at 7 am, can you believe it? It was painful. Everybody knows that I love to sleep. I sleep everywhere and every time, even in classes! It’s something I can’t control. Anyway, I can’t complain about my job, it wasn’t hard because my boss was my mother in law. She’s such a sweet woman. She treats me like her daughter.

Finally I learnt the silkscreen technique. My boyfriend studies graphic design and he wanted to make custom t-shirts for us (and for selling, hi, hi, hi!). Maybe I make some t-shirt for you but you have to wait until next holidays!

Some of the silkscreen stretchers we made