A very proud city!!!

Just couldn't help sharing to show pride in my hometown and university :)))
A deserved award, no doubt about that!!!



Check the site of the printscreen above at http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1387/ for further info (description, maps for location, documents, gallery with some more pics and indicators) as well as the article http://portuguese-american-journal.com/award-university-of-coimbra-granted-word-heritage-status-unesco/.

Here is the candidacy statement, here you find the updated list of World Heritage Sites in Portugal and also here and in English there is plenty of info on the University of Coimbra (Facts and Figures).

If it's true that Coimbra long deserved this world recognition and award, it's also true that with it comes the heavy responsibility of preserving our historical and cultural heritage. Are we up to this?

Hope so, as do future tourists / visitors. We are waiting.

Reading Challenge with vocational students

As you all well know, I've been challenging my students to read regardless of their age.
As I posted here a couple of days ago, besides my senior students, my vocational students have also been invited to allocate some time to reading (but in class, with me ;)), in other words, every friday and for about half an hour, they would read either the book they had chosen and brought into class or any of the ones I already had in store in case they "forgot" theirs.
Have I been successful? I would say yes, but I won't lie; I have no illusions and again and again as teachers we face the same situations: not all have managed to finish the books they started... either they were absent from class, involved in different activities or... they simply "forgot" it! Whenever that happened, I would show them some others and they would pick one to read - they would start a different book without ever finishing it. Others though have read more than one - some more slowly, others a bit faster - and one of the students accomplished the feat of reading 5 books. For these classes and for the time we had, it's not bad, believe me!
Let me show you how it was in a clear and simple way:

Now have a look at them reading:

As for the student who read more books - Sónia Leite - she read 5 books in class throughout the year, but I spotted her reading several books in Portuguese and so I truly believe she deserved her REMARKABLE READING AWARD: she got not only a certificate but also books, a notebook and a computer mouse thanks to Oxford, Cambridge and Pearson.
Yet let me tell you the following before finishing this blogpost: no student ever thought I would make use of the collected data much less that I would award anything because I didn't want it to work as a kind of bribery: I challenged them to read for pleasure and not expecting any kind of reward though in the end I felt I should praise those who had read more books / pages.
And here is our winner, Sónia

Hope you all keep on reading, if not the traditional printed word, Gutenberg's precious heritage, then online magazines, newspapers and ebooks.
Never stop, never give up! Wish you all the best, folks!
Teacher Alex