Comenius 1-1: School Project

"Freedom and Limits - Conditions and contradictions for young people in Europe"

Hosting School

IES Jorge Manrique - Palencia (SPAIN)

Palencia

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News

Know something about IES Jorge Manrique History in our centennial // Aprende algo sobre la historia de nuestro instituto en nla celebración del centenario de la primera piedra.

You can download our new tones for your mobile. / Puedes bajar nuevos tonos o melodías para tu móvil lejos de los archiconocidos. Busca el enlace.

Learn some of the limericks made by clas-mates / Aprende algún "limerick" (poesía breve y jocosa) hecha por compañeros.

Have a look at the statistics compairing the use of the NEW MEDIA in our three countries / Echa una ojeada a las estadísticas comparando el uso de los nuevos medios entre la juventud de nuestros 3 países.

Calendar

Deadlines:

The questionnaire results (Deadline): Results should be passed on to the partners by November 30.

Background studies are done individually in the countries and with the subjects who want to take part (social science, literature, biology, etc.)

The results of the polarity profile must be passed on to partners latest February 28

The three best short stories must be passed on by March 26.

Conference in Palencia: 18-20th of April, 2007

Conference in Hamburg: Autumn 2007

Conference in Sliven: April, 2008

Links:

Report on the Palencia Conference
April 18th - 22th, 2007

A. STARTING POINT

All three schools handed in their renewal application to their National Agencies. We expect to receive the grant because we are fulfilling the conditions, and according to the published rules running projects will have priority.
We are pleased that (in case we will get support) we don’t have to apply again for the next two years. But we are sorry that it’s not allowed to add new partners (Przemysl, Sliven) to a running project.
 
In our three countries (and by the way all over Europe) basic reforms of the educational systems are on the way. That makes our work more complicated because we have to do it under changing conditions; furthermore it is more difficult to find colleagues for COMENIUS projects when many of them are deeply involved in reform work.

 B. Evaluation on Theme “Media and Communication”
        

In all three schools we got back an enormous amount of questionnaires about young people’s mobile phone habits: Palencia 624, Hamburg 200, Tørring 150. That created another (homemade) problem: Who should count all these results? Often the teachers did it in the end.
The results of the questionnaires were exchanged by e-mail.

For similar future projects we should think about cooperation with math or social science courses; these students could practice their skills in creating statistics out of original data material.

S (7 teachers involved): Students are not used to working with questionnaires: “What shall we do with this work now? Results can also be found in the internet.”
There was a too big gap between working on the theme, producing something and waiting for the results from the other schools.

More project work at the moment: ring tones, essays

D (7 teachers involved): Similar problems. COMENIUS must be better based in school (remember: this is the first year for KTG) to get a better cooperation.

DK (5 teachers involved): Delayed because of many school reform projects. Apart from from the questionnaires the students studied and wrote SMS poetry. A small competition was held and the winning poem will be published in COMENIUS NEWS.

A summary ought to be published in each school to inform about the results of the project. (e.g. posters)               

 C. Evaluation on theme “Work” 

 S: Many activities, but it is too difficult to place Power Point Shows in the net. 200 questionnaires were given back, but in the end only 63 were counted (time!).
Also some teachers had problems to understand this special form of a polarity profile.
Essays of the students are already written and will be sent out to the partners soon.

DK: After working with basic information about work and employment the class worked on the polarity profile and produced 26 essays on this theme. 6 of them won a local competition in the class.

D: About 140 polarity profiles were given back.
A summary of the common results will be published in COMENIUS NEWS.

We have to make more clear agreements how to present and how to deal with the results because in this case we chose three different ways.

 D. Theme “Illness – Wellness”

We started with a brainstorm on the theme in two different groups. Some of the most important ideas:
Students:
- no drugs
- sports
- no MacDonald
- take care for yourself
Teachers:        
- interview doctors: main illnesses – which treatment? / when is somebody ill?
- definition of pain/illness
- wellness centres: why do people go there? Overdoing wellness
- wellness and lifestyle
- diets / eating disturbances
- “functional food”
- self mutilation of young people, piercings, tattoos
- wellness and social relationships/families
- social/political control to live a healthy life
- trying to change yourself through medication

By evaluating the brainstorm in the plenum some more aspects appeared:
- What is the ideal of health when you are young?
- Is it combined with “beauty”?
- Role of media, laws and peer groups?
- Which kind of illness do you fear the most?
- Sometimes real ill people (e.g. cancer) ignore that they are ill.

After discussing many different angles of the theme it was narrowed down to the plan which can be found in  annex 1.
deadline posters 16.11.07

 E. The Spanish Educational System

Sotero, deputy at Jorge Manrique, was so kind to explain the Spanish educational system to us  (annex 2).

He also showed us the “Palencia Tamagochi System”: Every teacher got a kind of small personal pocket computer which he takes to his lessons where he can mark the missing students on the screen. When at the end of the school day this tool is replaced to a special board in the teacher’s room a central computer sucks all information and transfers it to the personal data of the students. Also marks are given in that way.

 F. Practical matters
                                     
1. Comenius News
We agreed on the following articles:

  1. What is Comenius? (Ole)
  2. The partners: Kurt-Tucholsky-Gymnasium (Nanny)
  3. Tørring conference (Sara, Angela)
  4. Palencia conference (Shiva, Theano)
  5. New media (Lasse’s poem)
  6. Polarity profile (Michael)
  7. Harry’s corner (Dirty Harry)
  8. Calendar (Inger)

We will order 1000 copies at our usual print house in Tørring, Inger will distribute it to the partners.

It should be published in 
May 2006 because then lessons will stop in Denmark.

2. Addresses and Communication


We decided that students/teachers can make presentations of their work on their own web-site but links should always be sent to Tørring who will establish and maintain our central platform.
www.tag-gym.dk/comenius

Many interesting results can also be found on www.iesjorgemanrique.com:85/comenius

3. Next Meeting

The next meeting will take place from 26th to 28th of September (week 39) in Hamburg. We agreed that students from all three schools should take part in it.

     
G. Cultural programme

Our Spanish hosts surprised us again with a lot of cultural highlights: *****

We have seen Ampudia where they are restoring the whole village from the bottom to the top. Many old wooden columns are freed from their concrete surface and in the end the streets will get back their old appearance.
In principle the alcalde of Ampudia would have liked to show and explain the whole project to us, but he had bad luck and broke his hip when he was on his way to guide us. Even we were shocked by the accident of this old man we were also fascinated by the treatment he got from the local people. Instead of calling an ambulance immediately they placed the mayor on a chair and served him a cerveza and two different kinds of pills. Later they had to call the ambulance because the pills didn’t fit which each other.
In the end we managed also without him to visit some of the other local attractions like the castle, the cathedral and the museum of religious art.
In this village we also saw a memorial plate on the Spanish Civil War. Like so many other ones in Spain it is praising the heroes of Franco’s bloody coup d’état army.

Even it was not scheduled this time we had a meeting with Heliodoro Gallego, the alcalde of Palencia in the town hall. He avoided the fate of his colleague in Ampudia and gave us again an introduction into city life, history and culture of Palencia. The next day we all appeared in the local newspapers with photos from the meeting in the town hall.

The El Greco exhibition in Valladolid with its overwhelming paintings of “Apostoles” was great! Even “Kulturbanause” Harry was more than very impressed and bought the catalogue.

Lunch in IES Virgin de la Calle was a meal in a real alternative restaurant. The youngsters in this school for jobs in hotels and restaurants had to show what they had learned already. Not everything was totally perfect but it is a place where you can be sure that the future waiters will care for you all of the time.

All foreign participants were impressed by the amount of food we were offered. We had to learn that this is common for Spaniards. Nevertheless we all liked it – even we could eat it all.

The newcomers enjoyed the traditions from our previous meetings to have some evaluation beers in the night after well-done work in a bar around the corner of the hotel. They also liked the common breakfast at “Vienna”, the well-known bar opposite to the school (it almost works as a cantina of the school). It was a nice meeting with the owner Lino again, who is very interested in all foreign affairs of Jorge Manrique.

Inger Lehmann / Harry Wulff