Maria's blog

Quote of the week: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." -Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence. We all have read this quote before. We hear it in social studies and literature class. Most of us have probably heard our parents talk about it at some point. We have heard it so many times before that sometimes we tend to take it for granted that this is the way things are, or should be. However, the truth is that things are not always just. We often times see injustices happening all around us. We say the Pledge of Allegiance every single day, and talk about a nation with " Liberty and justice for all".  However, often times we don't take into realization how we should behave under such a nation. Image source The truth is that most of us would probably agr...

Quotes of the week: "Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing." -Euripides "Beauty may be dangerous, but intelligence is lethal." -Unknown Reasons why school is prison (besides the terrible lunch meals) Image drawing and editing done by me . Have you ever sat in a boring classroom, with nothing to do but hear the teacher talk about the most boring subject ever, and asked yourself, "Why am I here?." As students, we sit in classrooms, in the exact same location that we're in, six to seven hours a day, five days a week, sometimes even more. A  friend of mine  once said that " Instead of striving to learn any of the vast curiosities that surround us, we drill in just enough to bubble in and scribble out the right letters to be passed along year after year, with no actual gain of useful knowledge more than facts that we will inevitably forget as we move along." The truth is that for most of us, it feels like w...

Quote of the week: “The knowledge of the world does not reside in the minds of old men, but in old books.”  Rafael Martinez You have heard it before. Your Spanish or French teachers have always tried to emphasize how "important" it is to learn a new language. They talk about the writing skills, the "great expansion" of vocabulary that you get, and the importance of communicating with the people of other cultures. Sure. That's something that you get when you learn a new language. However, I would argue that being bilingual isn't important because of any of these things. click for link to image credit I would say being bilingual is so much more than that. Being bilingual opens your world to a new way of understanding things. Not just through talking to other people, but also through reading. When I was about three, my mother gave me a book of short stories in Spanish from the famous author Rafael Pombo. These were children's books that c...