During this term I’ve been involved in the mentoring activity with primary school. I really enjoyed stayed with my class from grade 5. The purpose of this activity is to interact with the children and create a connection with them in order to learn, from my side , new learning techniques , and to let them have the chance to know me and discover about my country and m
y culture. I met my class two times since the beginning of October and I talked with them about my hometown and what impressed me the most when I first arrived in Singapore, also I taught the class about games from my country and I talked them about my experience in grade 5 back in Italy. Also they explained me about and the activities and the subjects they study all along the year and how primary school works. Throughout this exchange both sides learned about how education can be different looking at different culture and environment. I really glad of this experience because it gives me the possibility to learn and teach at the same time and to be aware of the whole community of UWCSEA, which is not only composed by the high school where I belong to, that involves and educates since the kindergarten.
Month: October 2017
Culturama Mexico
I decided to join Culturama because I think it is a great activity!Even before coming to the school I knew about Culturama and when I saw videos of the event I couldn’t wait to join it in the new year.I did the audition for the mexican dance and luckly I got in.I loved the dance since the beginning and with practising I started getting better and better.Doing culturama has improved my skills in dancing and team working, in fact our performance requires coordiantion between every person who is involved: the times, the steps and the movements need to be done and executed in a fixated moment due to obtain the best performance. I’m looking forward for the final show and I can’t wait to collaborate more with my dancemates
Cuban salsa dance !
The Cuban salsa dance class is what I choose as an activity. I always enjoy dancing, but I’ve never attended a regular course or lessons.I joined this activity because, when I was little, I’ve seen several salsa performances and I really liked it, so I want to challenge myself trying to do imitate those dancers that I saw when I was a child. After some lessons, I can say that I really enjoy it! We already learned things that I thought I would have never able to do. Also, we dance with a partner so, I learned throughout having it, to collaborate and create a relationship that let us have a better connection and so a better performance.Also on the next lesson, as a class, we are going to film our dance! I’ve uploaded to this post a short video showing our dance so what we have learned during the lessons.
Equality Focus Group reflection!!
I joined the equality focus group because I want to understand more, throughout this year, about LGBTQ community and experience more of what happen around it.In my previous country, Italy, I’ve never had the chance to join a group like this because there is not sensibility for this community and there are still a lot of misconceptions and prejudices about people with different sexual orientations.During our meetings we discuss and explore about the definition of gender and sexuality, and I realized that there is much more than I thought! I’ve been raised following catholic and western values that restricted my mindset about the concept of sexuality and freedom.This group is very inspiring, it lets everyone express themselves and discuss about facts concerned sexual orientation. Being part of this community has opened my eyes to those issues and concerns that I ignored before.I’m building, thought the discussions and confronts we have, my own opinion about sexuality and I’m really happy that I can do it with wonderful and kind people as the Equality focus group ones.
Vaccinations cause autism?
The thought that autism is provoked by vaccinations has been growing because the rate of autism diagnosis increased widely in the last 20 years as well as the percentage of vaccinated babies.People started thinking about those parallel percentage as there was a correlation between them.The fear that vaccines cause autism spread from that point for the following decade.
In 1998, a UK physician named Andrew Wakefield published a paper that claimed he found a correlation between autism and MMR vaccination(for rubella,mumps,measles).The study was about 8 children that after one month from the vaccination started showing autism’s symptoms.Wakefield stated that MMR vaccine caused intestinal inflammation that led to the release of specific molecules to the bloodstream and, later, to the brain, where they affected development.
The disagreement about this evidence consist of the method used and the depth of the research,in fact 50,000 British children per month received MMR vaccine between ages 1 and 2 years—the same age time when autism typically presents and is diagnosticated—coincidental associations were inevitable.
This makes Wakefield research less believable: the age range of children who are vaccinated is the same of the children that receive autism diagnosis.That means that there is an high possibility to find a child who has received an autism diagnosis and who has been recently vaccinated as well, but this does not necessarily mean that vaccinations affect brain development,so autism.Furthermore Wakefield conduct his research on 8 individuals,too few to affirm his warming assumption.Another fact that could led to less reliability is that in the period of the research, Wakefield was trying to apply to a patent for a new measles vaccine. He had conflict of interest about the current vaccine.