Christmas around the world.

Hello everyone!

First of all, Merry Christmas to you all! As these days are special ones, I also wanted to publish a special entry. Of course it is about Christmas. However, I am not going to tell you the same old story about why it is celebrated or what we usually do. This time I do not want to focus on how we celebrate Christmas but on how other cultures or countries do it. 

Picture by eGuide Travel from Flickr

The first country I want to explore is Australia. Did you know that their Christmas starts at the beginning of the summer holidays? For me that sounded awkward, because in Spain we relate Christmas to winter so I think it must be really different and amazing to have this festivity in the summer. 

Australians also decorate their houses with lights and Christmas trees and they also use 'Christmas Bush' a native Australian tree. Moreover, in each State capital, city carols are sung, even sometimes by famous people. These carols are broadcasted on TV. I guess that carols' lyrics must be different from the ones we sing because they do not talk about winter, snow and so on. Furthermore, Santa's clothes must be a little different too taking into account how hot it must be there!

Another country I am interested in is Canada. This is a large country and it is influenced by many cultures and so is Christmas. Many traditions of this festivity come from France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Norway and Ukraine.

Picture by Alex Indigo from Flickr

It is usual to send Christmas cards to your friends and relatives, same as in the UK. In Spain we normally open our presents on Christmas Day, but Canadians do it on Christmas Eve. They usually eat roast turkey, differently to their American neighbors who reserve this food for Thanksgiving Day. A funny tradition which takes place in Canada is one in which people wears Santa's costumes and go over the neighborhood until someone finds out who they are.

Picture by Luisa from Flickr
Roscón de Reyes

Finally, a curious thing I found out is that by the end of Christmas, in Quebec they have a celebration called La Fete du Roi in which they bake a cake and put a bean in the middle of it. Whoever finds the bean turns into the king or queen. It is curious because this is a tradition similar to one we have in Spain, this festivity is called La noche del roscón de Reyes. We do the same with a kind of cake but instead of a bean we put a broad bean and whoever finds it has to pay for the cake.

The last country I am going to focus on is the United States of America. As Canada, their Christmas are also influenced by traditions from UK, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland and Mexico. As said before, the traditional meal is not normally turkey but ham with cranberry sauce. 

Americans love to decorate their houses with Christmas motives and lights. The typical image of a house full on lights we see on films is not a hyperbole. Curious data: some Americans use pop-corn to decorate their Christmas tree! Another interesting fact is that in the south of Louisiana, families along the Mississippi River, light bonfires to help Santa find their way. They call him Papa Noel because that is the name he has in France, and this state has a deep relationship with the French country. Moreover, they do not say 'Merry Christmas' but 'Happy Christmas'.

In conclusion, even though Christmas is a festivity celebrated in several countries, there are many differences among them. Traditional dishes, the opening-time of the presents, the parades, the decorations are divergent. However, there is something that unifies Christmas all around the world: it is a time to spend with our family and beloved ones, it is the time of the year when you meet your relatives and friends to have dinner together, open presents and share moments. It does not matter if it is summer or winter, if you are eating turkey or roscón, Christmas is always a special time and we should enjoy it. 

Picture by Johnny Lai from Flickr

If you want to know more about Christmas traditions all over the world visit Why Christmas page, where I have found all the information of the post. I hope you liked to learn something about other cultures. 

Merry Christmas, Happy Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Bon Nadal and Joyeux Noël to you all!

All are teachers, all are learners.

Good  and rainy morning everyone!

In today's entry I'll like to share with you this inspiring video about education. This clip is done in TED talk format. These are short presentations about interesting topics. In this case, education is the main focus. There are many TED talks about education, but I found this one unique because the presenter is a teacher herself, and she starts the talk based on her experience with one student that did not want to attend her lessons. He hated school, he said.

Sadly, nowadays this is the case of so many students, and as teachers we should try to do something to fix that. It is no conceivable that, for instance, the distribution of the classes remains the same after 20 years of education, and the same for the methodologies used. Society has changed, our students have changed and so should we. 

Firstly, we live in a world made of technology. We wake up at the sound of our alarm, we cook using cooking robots, we talk with friends who live miles away thanks to our phones, and before sleeping we check our social media and email. If technology can be so useful and helpful for our everyday life, why do not we apply it in our lessons?

However, as Kayla Delzer says, we should not use technology for the sake of using it because then, our lessons would be the same but more technologic. Instead, we should leverage the advantages of technology. In spite of making our students read a history article, lets make them do a WebQuest about the topic they have to study; in spite of making them study the characteristics of an epic poem, lets make them compose an epic poem; lets make them elaborate their own project about a topic they are interested in. For these tasks, they can use technology in order to help them find information. 

We have to transform our classes, our methodologies, make them interesting for our students so they come to class wanting to learn something new. As teachers we have to change our minds, be aware that we do not know everything and we never will. We are there to teach our students but we can learn something from them too. Actually lots of things. As Delzer proposes, a good task is making them learn something so that they have to teach it later to their mates and even to the teacher. In this way, they feel they are contributing to other people's learning, they are not there merely to listen and absorb information. They can be something more than a recorder sitting on a table, because, as students, we have sometimes felt like that: we only listen and reproduce.

Living in the 21st century means something more than being surrounded by technology, it means knowing how to use it, but using it properly. We can use social media to teach our students. They can do lots of activities such as Skyping people from other countries to learn new languages and knowing new cultures, they can play ludic games, watch interesting videos, make WebQuests, look for information in to order to produce their own projects. There is a wide variety of ways of making their learning process more interesting and appealing to them.

Finally, I would like to highlight something that Delzer says at the end of her presentation. Society and education change, they get transformed all over the years, but there is something essential in education that always remains and that we should keep in mind, despite of the changes in society: 'relationships between students and passionate teachers always remain.'