Nature and Me

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
There is society, where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar: 
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.. 

                                                                 William Wordsworth

Wordsworth described it perfectly. Nothing can be more healing than nature. I'm a person who believes that an hour of walking in nature carries more healing powers than hours of shopping and mixing with people. 

Nature listens well, accepts you with all your flaws and advises you like no other. It sends subtle messages to  heal the weariest souls. 

Next time you feel overwhelmed with the happenings of your day, step outside. Even if there is only one lonely tree in your area, don't feel down. It's God's gift to you. Listen well..

A Quote to Live By

Out of the many books I've read, very few ones keep on having a great effect on me. One of those masterpieces is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. 

💗💗💗💗

The aim behind this post is not telling readers what this great book is about, but I find it inevitable to advice every lady to read it. It is extremely empowering! 

One of the hundreds of beautiful quotes in this novel is the one I chose to discuss in this post: 

“I know my Leader; that He is just as well as mighty; and while He has chosen a feeble instrument to perform a great task, He will, from the boundless stores of His providence, supply the inadequacy of the means to the end.”

Whenever you feel that you can't go on, whenever you feel so lonely, go back to Him, the Lord. He is the One who knows you even more than you know yourself. He knows the reason why you exist, the blessing behind every obstacle and the wisdom behind creating the universe. 

When you're fighting a battle no one knows about, you're not alone. He is always there, helping you even when you're not asking for help.

He gave you those battles because He knows you are going to win. 

He is always there..

Picture retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/threadedbasil/books/ 

She's Hers, Not Anyone's..

One of the most frustrating misunderstandings of life is the habit of forcing girls to marry men they dislike. Parents have to interfere in their daughters' decisions when they realize that they are making wrong and dangerous choices. However, this interference has to be limited as much as possible.

Last year, I heard of a girl who was forced to marry a wealthy businessman because her parents were in need of money. I was terrified to know that these things are still happening around us, in the 21st century!

Brokenhearted, I wrote the story below..

The sun looked unusually pale that morning. Clouds seemed unwilling to clear the sky, nor her vision. 

The dying embers caught her eyes as she washed away the remainings of a sleepless night. Instead of calling her maid to check the fire, as usually does after such nights, she picked her shawl and opened the window. The freezing air of the gloomy morning stung her cheeks. In the distance, she could hear guests arriving. She was astonished to find out that it wasn't very early, after all! 

In the hall, everyone was waiting impatiently for the bride. Suddenly, music started and the huge, gold plated doors opened. The murmuring stopped and eyes turned to the main door. 

A smiling face, covered with a thin veil, entered the room. A tiny figure walking vainly; a straight back and a nose held high. 

As she reached the end of the aisle, a tall, handsome young man came out of the crowd to escort her to her seat. As he touched her shoulder, an incomplete, horrifying scream issued from the figure in white. A stern look from the young man was enough to change this unexpected expression of pain into a laugh. Both were thankful for the deaf audience, clapping and cheering for the two siblings. 

As she sat at the assigned chair, the monster in black sat to her right. Forced into conversation, she smiled and nodded. Then, speeches started. She raised her weary head to look at the speaker, wondering how she'll hide her grief when hers starts. However, she smiled innocently at the speaker, fearing a new scar would sprout on her right knee if she didn't.. 

RTP Workshops: Using Google Drive-Google Forms for Educational Purposes

On Friday, March 24th, the School of Education at LIU, Bekaa Campus presented a series of workshops for teachers in Bekaa region. The Reshaping Teaching Practices Workshops started last year, and a positive and encouraging feedback was given by participants. This encouraged for repeating the initiative for a second time.
We, the students of the Education Department, were responsible for assisting the instructors as they presented their workshops. And for the second year, I got the privilege of assisting Mrs. Amal Farhat in her workshop (I'm not saying this because she'll be grading this post; she does know how much I love her. And if I get an A on my blog, it's because it's interesting and satisfies the criteria Mrs. Amal will be basing our grades on! You can't get me guys! Come on! You already know you can't!).

Ok..
Back on track..

The workshop started at 9:00 a.m. and ended at 2:00 and included two breaks; one for Friday prayer. Mrs. Amal introduced the teachers to Google Drive, mentioning the benefits of using it for saving documents. She then introduced Google Docs and Google Forms as alternatives for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel respectively. All documents needed for the workshop are presented on a website created by Mrs. Amal especially for the workshop.

Teachers listened to the explanation of each part then applied it, while Mrs. Amal, my colleague Soumayya Hammoud and I walked between them and provided assistance whenever needed.

At the end, teachers filled in the evaluation of the workshop on a Google form, instead of a traditional form. Well, that's the aim of the workshop..!

After the workshop, we had a delicious lunch and a family picture, including the students who helped in the workshops and several instructors ! <3

Webinar

On Friday, March 17, I attended a webinar titled You Know Better: Bridging the Gap between “Knowing” and “Doing”, presented by Jill Molli, M.Ed. 

The presenter of the speaker is a musician; he sang one of his songs before her presentation started! However, thanks to the poor WiFi connection in Lebanon, I couldn't tell any of the words he said! Happy days! :)

The speaker started her presentation with a very interesting question: Why do people know the right thing but not do it?

Then, she introduced the theory of Conscious Discipline, started by Rebecca Bailey.  To make things clearer, she presented a video containing short interviews with teachers expressing their thoughts about the effectiveness of applying this theory in their classrooms. All teachers praised the effects of applying this theory in the classroom. One teacher even told the story of how one of her students' mother stopped punishing her child frequently after being introduced to the concept of Conscious Discipline. 

To make long story short, here's a statement explaining what the theory is all about: When teachers become aware of the mental state of their students when they don't do the right thing, their discipline will become effective.

The speaker presented a picture of the three regions in the brain that affect the behavior of people through emotions:

She explained how the brain interferes in our behavior when we are in each stage. If we use threatening methods to stop students from misbehaving, they will move to the survival stage, and therefore try to defend themselves. This defense is manifested in even more misbehavior.

The speaker then presented 12 brain skills that we usually expect students to acquire from a young age. She explained that those skills need 24 years to mature; we need to stop using the expression "You should know this by now!" very often!

The speaker then moved to an extremely important point. She said that our children are not missing skills; they are only unwilling to learn new ones because they are in self-preservation mode. To solve this issue, my practices and responses to their misbehavior have to answer the questions below:

To make them feel safe, you may present the routines of the classroom visually or apply physical exercise before transitions. Another helpful practice is simply to ask them to take a deep breath before starting a new task. 
In order to help students feel that they are loved, they have to feel connected to the teacher, their classmates, and their class. That's why assigning students to roles can be extremely helpful here. Each student can be assigned a role for a certain period of time; each role has to help keep the classroom environment as smooth as possible. 

The more students are exposed to problem-solving tasks, the faster they develop their skills.
Students have to solve real-life problems, posed in real-life situations. This will make learning more meaningful. 

I really enjoyed attending this webinar. During the webinar, I participated in two polls posted by the speaker regarding our knowledge of conscious discipline. 
The speaker is really fun to watch. She kept a wide smile throughout the presentation and used clear visual aids (not all are included here). 
I'm looking forward to attending more presentations by Mrs. Molli and other speakers discussing pedagogical issues. 
*Pictures included in this post are all taken from the material the speaker used during her presentation. 

Once a Bookworm, Always a Bookworm

In this post I'll be discussing the important role books played in my life. Those bounded papers have always been a major part of my life. Our love story dates back to the day I was born <3 

On August 11^th, 1995, a not-so-tiny baby was born. She was the second girl in a family made up of two young parents, including an Armenian mother, and a four year old girl, called Hanaa. This little baby was destined to become an English teacher, just like her sister. This little baby was destined to be ME , so enjoy this brief description of how letters and print shaped me! 

As soon as I grew old enough to sit, I was supported, like any other baby, with pillows. But my parents chose me a lifetime support beside fluffy pillows: books. I was surrounded by books of every color, size, and genre. Arabic books, English ones, hardcovers, paperbacks, children books, and adult books were always around. As I grew up, I grabbed them, opened and smelled them. I stared at the black, mysterious characters. I then started to visit my father’s bookstore, which is located in the ground floor. The stuffed shelves amazed my little eyes each and every time. There I would sit with my late grandfather and read for hours. He would read for me and wait for me to repeat after him. With his eloquent Arabic and his relatively poor English, he created the love of learning in my younger self. At that time, English books dominated the Arabic books in my little world, as they still do! The Ladybird series, with its colorful pages and clear fonts left an indescribable effect in my life. I can still remember several drawings from this series. The pictures in The Little Red Hen and Jack and the Beanstalk, for example will forever stay in my memory. Before I went to school, I was able to tell the stories by heart; having listened to them hundreds of times at bedtime.  

My “official” adventure then began, and I was well armed and prepared.  

Books have always been my friends, and I'm really thankful to them, my mom, my dad, and my late grandfather for shaping the person I am! 

Language Death

Below is one of the papers I submitted for the Introduction to Linguistics course. It discusses the factors behind the death of certain languages. Enjoy :)

Language Death

   “All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.” This statement of Robert Louis Stevenson’s is the key to understanding the concept of language death. A language dies when nobody speaks it anymore (Crystal, 2000). Thus, language death is the result of various factors: human and non-human.  

     It is estimated that 90% of human languages will, in the long run, become extinct or be doomed to extinction (Baker, 2006). This expectation is based on the fact that 50% of the world's estimated 6,300 languages are no longer being reproduced among children. Therefore, many of these languages will die in the next 100 years unless some conservation measures are taken. Linguists maintain that, around 8,000 BC, there were more than 20,000 existing languages.  In 2012, that number was considered to be 6,909 (How does a Language Die?, 2013).

     One of the important human factors that intervene in the transmission of languages from one generation to another is the oppression of minor languages in some areas. For example, about three-quarters of the languages of the Americas are under the threat of extinction, and 95 % of the indigenous aboriginal Australian languages are declining extremely rapidly (Rosenthal, 2014).  Another example is what has taken place in the former Soviet Union. Many people in Kazakhstan are unable to speak Kazakh because they grew up in exclusively Russian-speaking environments. Those environments were nurtured by the laws of the former Soviet Union. In the 1950s the USSR implemented the policy of Russifiying its republics. Children from non-Russian speaking families were sent to only Russian-speaking boarding schools for ten months. Such policies are set from political and economic perspectives. Armies can fight together only if they share the same language, and it is easier and cheaper to market to millions of people in the same language (Raw, 2014).

      Another human factor is human conflict. During World War II, many islands of the Pacific Ocean lost their native languages as a result of their colonization by European countries. In South America, 1,500 indigenous languages that were used before contact with European settlers are reduced to 350 languages nowadays (Raw, 2014). Therefore, globalization is the main reason behind those policies and is actually succeeding in killing some languages. It is realized that languages of little economic power are more in danger of extinction. For instance, Spanish, English, and French are not in danger; they are rather killing other languages. In France, Breton, Allsatian, and Provençal are eventually replaced by French in schools; thus children are no more able to speak or write their native languages.

     Other factors that may lead to the death of some languages may not be human; that is, out of human control. Natural disasters have played a major role in murdering some languages. Tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanoes have wiped out hundreds of thousands of people along with their languages. In 1970, a tidal wave swept most of the inhabitants of the Andaman Island, which belongs to India. The Indian government decided to move the remaining Andamanese to a safer nearby island, a decision which affected the Andamanese language vastly. Andamanese, which was one of the oldest languages in the world, was no longer transmitted from older to younger generations. It died with Boa Sr, the only member of the Bo tribe who survived till 2010. She was reported to have lived alone as a result of her husband's death. Her children, on the other hand, did not acquire the language of their parents. "It was all because of the colonizer", she said a few days before her death. "They destroyed our language. And then came this wave. Everything is over" (Shaw, 2010).

 

      Although languages die because of human and non-human factors, some languages die because they don't help individuals of today to communicate. That is, some languages are not productive in terms of word formation; thus, they cannot satisfy the communicational needs of modern man. For example, Mlahso, a dialect of Aramaic, died in 1998 with the death of its last speaker in Syria. Nobody knows this language anymore except his nearly deaf sister who has no one to speak it to (Law, pp. 2,3).

      Different factors contribute to the death of language. With the high rate of language death, one language dies every two weeks (Rymer, 2012). Hence, governments have to take necessary conservative measures to keep their languages safe, because language represents one's history and culture, and predicts his future.

Works Cited

 

Baker, C. (2006). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Multilingual Matters LTD.

Crystal, D. (2000). Language Death. Cambridge University Press.

How does a Language Die? (2013, February 21). Retrieved January 11, 2015, from Languages.com: http://languages.com/2013/02/21/how-does-a-language-die/

Law, P. (n.d.). Langage Ecology. BBC , pp. 2-3.

Raw, L. (2014, November 11). Retrieved January 4, 2015, from The Official Memrise Blog: http://www.memrise.com/blog/why-do-languages-die/

Rosenthal, M. (2014, July 15). When languages die, ecosystems often die with them. PRI .

Rymer, R. (2012, July). Vanishing Languages. National Geographic .

Shaw, A. (2010, February 10). Last member of 65,000-year-old tribe dies, taking one of world's earliest languages to the grave. Daily Mail , pp. 1-2.