Me Neither

How to Write a CV/Résumé

The document below shows very helpful guidelines on how to write a good CV/résumé in English.

Résumé = American English for CV (curriculum vitae)

How to write a résumé

The Importance of Feminism

A great Emma Watson explains the concept of Feminism before the United Nations assembly. Don't miss this opportunity to listen to her beautiful Oxford accent. 

Emma Watson On the Importance of Feminism

A great Emma Watson explains the concept of Feminism before the United Nations assembly. Don't miss this opportunity to listen to her beautiful Oxford accent. 

Shadowing for a Better, Cleaner World...

And to follow up on the same subject, here you have the video on How to Care for the Environment which Esperanza proposed to practice some shadowing with. I actually think it is a great choice to improve your shadowing mastery. Thanks Esperanza!

How Environmentally Friendly Are You?

Find below the video Esperanza used to introduce the topic of Environment in class last week. It is a very useful piece of material to revise all the new vocabulary and expressions we learned with her. And why not revising our three R's too? it's all about saving our planet!

President Obama's Getting Ready for a New Job Interview

President Obama is gettting booted from the White House soon... After 8 years of no job interviews nor internal promotions, he probably needs some tips to help him find the right answers at a job interview, don't you think?

Read this first

PS: I'd like to thank my friend and fellow English teacher Michel for sharing this with us. Thanks again, bro!

Extreme Interviews You Said? Check This Out!

Jobs have become harder and harder to get in this 21st-Century-Western World. That's probably why HRM (Human Resource Management) has come up with this new version of "extreme interviews" that we just started to address the other day in class. Check out what the Heineken Company did, to see how serious this can get...

PS: I'd like to thank my friend and fellow teacher Michel, for showing me this reality...

A Little More about Dyslexia

Your classmate Ana, who gave us a very interesting and well-prepared presentation about dyslexia the other day in class, would like to share with us the following interview made to Steven Spielberg, where he is asked to talk about what it is like to be a dyslexic, like himself:

I hope you enjoy the interview, and learn something new about this not-so-uncommon disease. Thank you, Ana, for lending us the opportunity to understand others, or ourselves, better!

People Watching: Humans of New York

Humans of New York, by Brandon Stanton

Will You Be my Valentine?

Valentine's Day is coming up soon, and our class mailbox will be full of love letters by next week! If you haven't written a valentine letter to one of your classmates yet , please do so over the weekend, you can still post it on Monday/Tuesday in class.

Remember it's an anonymous letter, and we all love to hear sweet things, so don't be shy to express those loving feelings for your classmate!

Short Answers to Hard Questions about Climate Change

Dear students,

Find below two articles from The New York Times and The New Yorker respectively, which will serve as your reading assignment for this week. Both articles deal with climate change, and the negotiations currently being held in Paris, in the twenty-first Annual Conference of the Parties, also known as COP21.

The careful reading of these newspaper articles will be the base for your monthly writing assignment: I will require that you think of a hard question to pose related to this topic, and make the attempt to answer it in one sheet of paper.

New York Times, November 28th 2015

The New Yorker, December 7th, 2015

Shadowing: Let's Start with a Loving Revolution

Shadowing is a learning technique where you listen to a text in your target language, and then speak it aloud at the same time as the native speaker, so that you become his/her shadow.

The basic concept is as follows: listen to the audio once or twice, to make sure you understand what it is about. Then you listen to it again a few more times and repeat the words with a minimum delay, then you write down the words the speaker says until you have the whole audioscript. After that, you play the audio again until you can read it confidently at the same time as the native speaker. Finally, you get up from your seat to walk around the house repeating the exacts words as if you were the native person yourself.

So, here's my proposal to get started in this new technique: Become the shadow of Patch Adams. Patch Adams is an American physician, social activist, clown, and author who has some really interesting ideas to share with us about living in a healthy world. Please, don't do this for more than 2-3 minutes at a time, we should start doing this little by little to avoid frustration, ok?

"I want a world where no one alive can remember what the word war means..."

Possibly tricky vocabulary

Still living at home?

More and more young people in their 20s and 30s all over the world are living with their parents, because it is too expensive for them to rent or buy a place of their own. Are you living at home? Are you happy with it? Post at comment at @stilllivingathome

Click on the link below to read the posted comments by your classmates.

Still living at home? Post your comment!

And thanks everybody for your excellent work on conditional structures!

If you don't have enough time...

Our last debate in class dealt with those important things that we tend to miss in life, while being caught up in the daily grind. To the proposition "if you don't have enough time, [...]", people gave a full set of different answers, showing how different we really are when it comes to searching for solutions. 

"If you don't have enough time, stop watching TV", reads the famous poster in the picture. Well, your classmate Sergio sent me a link to a video which tries to shed  light onto another ridiculously time-consuming activity... Guess which?? Click on the link below!

A News Story About People, not Trees

After reading the most incredible news story about trees in class, here follows the most outrageous news story of the year. The link below takes you to the International Business Times newspaper. The headline reads:

"Spain: 11 Immigrants Drown After Border Police Fire Bullets"*

No words can follow this headline

Read the News Story here

* Where it reads 11 immigrants, you have to read 15 now.

Stop Evictions!

What follows is a brief summary of the presentation on House Eviction your classmate Mohamed gave in class the other day. He wrote up the following text for you guys. So just read on to find out more about his work.

On Monday December 15th, known as the Black Monday, the LEHMAN BROTHERS collapsed, then the banks stopped lending, and the credit dried up, which caused a big impact to the rest of the world's economy.

In Spain, according to many analysts and other observers, the main cause had to do with Jose Maria Aznar's land act of 1998, which freed up the land market, leading to a housing bubble, which grew very quickly, due to an easy access to credit and low interest rates. Spain had built in one year more houses than France, Germany and Italy all together. According to the Association of Registrars, 90% of the population became mortgage holders in 2006.

More than 400,000 families have been evicted from their houses since Spain's Property Market crashed in 2008, under the unfair mortgage law of 1861, reformed only in few cases as 1946 and 2012.

In 2012 the number of evictions broke record and reached 517 evictions a day in Spain. That means an average of 21 per hour, or an eviction executed in Spain every 3 minutes. As a consequence of this, more than 119 suicide cases are directly linked to these evictions.

The Platform of Mortgage Victims have been fighting against the evictions, demanding urgent reforms through a Popular Legislative Initiative which collected 1.402.854 signatures. On February 12th 2013, this was knocked down by the Popular Party.

THe PIL /ILP contains three measures as the minimum rules to put an end to this eviction hell.

1- STOP EVICTIONS.

2- HAND OVER YOUR HOUSE KEYS TO THE BANK AS REPAYMENT IN FULL WITH RETROACTIVE CHARACTER . 

3- A PUBLIC PLAN FOR A SOCIAL HOUSING.

SO, It's clear, IT'S NOT A CRISIS IT'S A SCAM.

Also, check out the video "Spain Evictions and Homeless Crisis", by PressTV Global News. There you can see your classmate from minute 17.32 through 20.18. Thanks a lot for your work, Mohamed!!

More on Stereotypes

This idea that men's and women's minds work differently when it comes to dealing with our daily life has been a cliché all along our lives, hasn't it? Women's supposed ability for multitasking, for instance, is allegedly absent in men's list of skills... But how true is that? This post is especially dedicated to your fellow student Amador, who really seemed to be enjoying the debate. Subtitles are in Spanish this time, but it's just the exception!

A Tale of Two Brains

What Kind of Healthcare do We Want?

Yesterday, after her presentation in class, Rocio asked the whole group the following question: What kind of healthcare do we want? Indeed, her talk prompted many of us to speak about such an important matter as our health, and our healthcare system. We all agreed that it is indeed everybody's concern.

Here follows the documentary directed by film-maker Michael Moore about the Healthcare System in the US back in 2007: Sicko. I recommend you watch it, and see if you detect any similarities to current reality in Spain. It''s two-hour long, I mind you, but is probably worth the while.

Sicko by Michael Moore. Part 1

Sicko by Michael Moore. Part 2

Dedicated to all the musicians in the world...

                        ...who make our lives better... and theirs too!!

Remember the mood-food debate in class last week? We all had the chance to reflect on how food actually affects our mood, right? Now I would like to show you a piece of research which deals with another very important nutrient for our brains: Music. You're going to listen to a news story about the relationship between music and the human brain. Click on the link below to hear and read all about it.  And thanks, musicians, for being around!!
NOTE: To listen to the news, click on the slower listening speed.

Music and the Human Brain: Read and Listen