They say that if you have a friend, you have a treasure. And I would like to add: if you have a sibling, you have an even greater treasure. I´m extremely lucky in that I have not one, not two, but four siblings, two brothers and two sisters, all of whom I had the pleasure of spending time with this weekend.
Dear siblings, I´ve learned so much from all of you, and I have so many things to thank you for that I don´t even know where to start. Someday I´ll write down a list. For the moment, here are a couple of quotes on siblings that resonate a lot with me:
Siblings: children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together.
Sam Levenson
They say that no matter how old you become, when you are with your siblings, you revert back to childhood.
Karen White
To the outside world, we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.
Clara Ortega
Thanks so much, Javi, Ángel, Mamen and Cristina, for looking after me, teaching me and loving me always. Here´s to all of you, and also to our eldest brother, who loves us and looks after us from Heaven. Big hugs.
Today I´m writing to you from a beautiful village on the Mediterranean coast: Nerja.
(Sea views from the garden at Nerja´s Parador)
It´s a place I keep very close to my heart, for several reasons. The main one is that a long time ago, when I was a teenager, my family and I came here once for an Easter holiday, and I loved it. I was looking forward to coming back and bringing my daughters with me. As we walked around, we got to remember their grandparents...
By the way, I knew that Nerja was a well known place, but I never imagined the amount of tourists that actually come here, and we found three Irish bars! Guinness, Tayto, beach and good weather - the best of both worlds.
Another reason why Nerja is well known is because the TV series Verano Azul, a great success for Spanish television in the early eighties, was shot here (the title means "Blue Summer"). Verano Azul is in the collective Spanish culture in the same way Father Ted is in the collective Irish culture: absolutely everyone knows it. The kids in my generation (the ones who studied "EGB") grew up with this series; they replayed it on TV almost every summer, and years later, many of us watched it again with our children on video or DVD.
So the girls and I got excited today when we bumped into the statue of Chanquete (one of the main characters), and remembered a few scenes from the show, which in many ways was ahead of its time, touching topics that went quite deep and were even controversial. There was a phrase in particular that caught my attention back in the day; I still remember it every now and then: "when you have, you give; when you need, you take".
What about you? Did you ever watch Verano Azul? What´s your favourite scene or song?
Are you currently enrolled in any interesting training courses?
I´m about to finish the first of three modules in a training path I´m absolutely loving (I´ll get into the details in a future article), and in May, I´ll resume another course I had to leave unfinished last year. Interestingly, my youngest daughter, who´s now ten years old, is very surprised at my willingness to keep taking course after course, and she asks me when I'm planning to stop...
I guess she finds it strange that someone would voluntarily decide to "keep going to school" when they could be doing something else. And now that I think of it, when I was her age, I was convinced that adults were really lucky because they didn´t have to do any homework! (Of course, I didn´t realize all the other implications of being an adult; I only saw that they had much more freedom to do "whatever they wanted").
(Photo of a mug I saw at our school, I found it very funny: "Keep calm and pretend it´s on the lesson plan").
To be fair, nowadays it´s a lot more common for us to continue our training in adulthood, both for personal and professional reasons. It´s what we call lifelong learning (translated into Spanish as "educación permanente"), and it´s tremendously helpful for a variety of things, some more obvious than others:
Expand our knowledge, acquire new skills, adapt to an ever-changing work environment.
Broaden our perspective, grow as professionals, and more importantly, evolve in our personal lives.
As if all that was not enough, lifelong learning has another huge benefit: learning new and interesting things gives us renewed curiosity; it helps us to stay motivated and active while exercising our minds, which in turn will help us to maintain good health and quality of life as we age.
Here are a couple of quotes to reflect on this topic, both from the same author: a self-taught thinker and philosopher who, despite never having attended college, went on to achieve a Nobel prize in literature.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer
The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
If you´ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that every now and then I like to use the metaphor of a computer (or a mobile phone, which is basically the same) to explain how the human mind works. That´s why I couldn't miss the opportunity to share with you what I learned this weekend.
On Saturday, I took my daughter Alicia to the Irish national final for Bebras, an initiative she was participating in through her secondary school. I had not heard of this before; I only knew that we had to be at Maynooth University at half past nine, and that while our kids were doing "the challenge" (a series of timed activities on a computer), the parents were going to attend an informational talk.
(Slightly blurry photo of the cover of one of my college books, from a subject called English for Computing.)
Bebras is an international initiative aiming to promote Informatics (Computer Science, or Computing) and computational thinking among primary and secondary school students. The informational talk was really interesting (thanks, Kim!), starting with this definition:
Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form that can effectively be carried out by an information-processing agent.
This definition may seem a bit convoluted, but at the end of the day, it refers to problem resolution processes, utilizing skills like logical reasoning, abstraction, pattern recognition, decomposition of complex tasks into smaller steps, etc. These are skills that we all have: in fact, "the challenge" is made up of tasks that any person can solve; the challenging part is resolving them in a short period of time.
What I loved about the talk was how they explained the connection between these skills and life in general, not only in relation to academics. Abstraction allows us to eliminate unnecessary details and focus on the essence of a problem or a story (and depending on the context, the essence may involve different sets of details). Decomposition allows us to tackle a big, overwhelming task step by step, or to distribute the work and collaborate on projects, having each person do their part. And understanding and creating algorithms allow us to use them as tools to accomplish our desired results, with flexibility to adapt them to each circumstance or need.
You may have noticed that the definition above doesn´t specifically mention computers, only "information processing agents". This is because humans are also information processing agents (that´s why I like that metaphor so much). Even the word computer was initially used to refer to a person whose job consisted of making calculations (often women, by the way, and if you haven´t watched the movie Hidden figures, I recommend it).
Back to modern times: during the talk, it was mentioned multiple times how quickly technology is changing, and with it, the world. Our kids are preparing for jobs that don´t exist yet, and we don´t know exactly what those jobs will be. But we do know that we will need lots of people who can adapt and communicate effectively with other information processing agents, be it computers or people. Who can understand and make themselves understood. And above all, who can add the creativity that machines lack (despite what anyone says, and this particular comment is just my own), in order to find solutions to the problems of the future.
And the best part is that we can practice all these skills in a fun way, with challenges and exercises like the ones in Bebras. They reminded me of some of the activities they used to publish in magazines way back when, where you had to make deductions based on the clues you were given... Can you think of a better way to keep your mind active and at the same time prepare for the future?
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