Author: Tuğçe BODUR

Educational Post #10

The beautiful sunflower is well-known for following the path of the sun. From the east in the morning to the west at night, the sunflower repeats this process each day with the bloom always facing the direction of the sun. 

Helen Keller, left blind and mute after an illness at the age of nineteen months, proves that attitude, and a refusal to accept life in “the shadows of the prison-house,” changes insurmountable challenges into awe-inspiring achievement. She wrote The Story of My Life so that she could contribute to society and help others learn from her story which reveals her desperate attempts to communicate and her many failures and confrontations en route to overwhelming success. https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/keep-your-face-sunshine-you-cannot-see-shadow-by-267032

My recommend to you is, first of all read that book and after just watch the movie “Black” and you gonna feel how deeply her life was…

What this quote this means is that people should be optimistic.  The idea of keeping your face to the sunshine is that you should always look on the bright side of life.  If you do so, Keller is saying, you will not see the “shadows.”  That means that you will not see the potential bad things that could happen to you.

If you do this, you will be a happier person.  You will not always be worrying about the potential bad things in life (the “shadows”).  Because of this, you will be free to enjoy the good things that happen to you.

Educational Post #9


Finding what you truly desire is so hard to come by. The perfect pair of shoes, the top that fits you perfectly, and the job that will make you the most money are trivial to what is actually essential in life. So many people are searching for the things they feel are indispensable to living a happy life, sometimes forgetting what they really need. In the Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, the little prince points out,
“People where you live,” the little prince said, “grow five thousand roses in one garden… yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…” “They don’t find it,” I answered. “And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water…” “Of course,” I answered. And the little prince added, “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart”.
As the narrator pulls the water up out of the well, and the pulley seems to sing to the little prince, the narrator realizes what the little prince was looking for by their journey through the desert. The little prince didn’t need to quench his thirst, nor did he enjoy walking through the hot desert, he enjoyed the company and the occasion in which they walked together. The saunter they had, the song of the pulley, the effort to get the water was what the prince considered a gift. The experience of friendship and bonding is what the little prince had been looking for the entire time. The narrator, like most people, had to realize that individual tasks do not led to happiness in life, it’s all the moments as a whole, shared with family and friends that is one gift to one another.
To sum up in life looking vaguely for what one sees is happiness is not uncommon. Feeling as though a hundred acquaintances are better than two close friends.

Educational Post #8

 Helen Keller’s quote is an excellent summation of what the education system should aim for. Simply stated, education, technology and finances are an interesting mix of disciplines. As individual fields of study operating in their respective silos, people have a strong and powerful understanding of their products, devices and services. It is when their goals and business objectives cross boundaries that areas begin to blur and become distorted. 

We all can concur that technology is changing how teachers instruct and students learn. The days of “chalk and talk” alone are over. Technology advancements are coming at us quickly, and we, as school leaders, have adapted accordingly to ensure that our children can remain globally competitive in today’s world – and tomorrow’s.  Personalization of learning will be driven rapidly by software algorithms that assess student progress and adjust learning tasks to one’s interest and capability, embedding visual and auditory stimulation.

And yes, it is true, “technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy.”

We must question, however, if the significant loss of individual privacy and the sharing of personal information accruing to the financial benefit of the technology giants is too great a price to be paid for these technology advances (Dr. Richard G. Bozza, 2017).

Once I read a blogsite and found this paragraph there;

“You wondered how to plant apple seeds, I think that is green thinking which is wondering. I think I used blue thinking which is new learning when I used the internet to search how to plant apple seeds-I didn’t know how to look after apple seeds.”

The children have begun to ask to put their thinking and learning onto the learning wall. In response to collecting Autumn leaves the children had these wonderings:

“Why do leaves fall off the trees?”

“What causes them to change color?”

These are thought provoking quotes about questions. I think this is the point which is all teachers would like to hear this because all teachers like to listen to questions from students so in this way teachers can evaluate how students understand the lessons or not.

“A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.” Helen Keller

“Judge a person [man] by his questions rather than by his answers.” Voltaire

The Learning Wall, constructing understanding of words with big meanings.

I ask questions because I want to find things out. Let’s watch out this video!

Educational Post #7

“I thought if I said yes to things, and got involved with people, then sooner or later they’d find out I’m not enough. I didn’t think I had anything to share. But now I know that what I have to share is pretty huge, and I want to share it with you. ” Jim Carrey.

If you do not watch that movie I strongly recommend you to watch “Yes Man”.

Besides, I choose this quote in order to draw attention as we grow older we unfortunately forget our childhood and even play in the playgrounds like kids do.

Educational Post #5

This meaningful quote belongs to “A Room of One’s Own” book which was written by Virgina Woolf. Another one from this book which I extremely affected “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The phrase “a room of one’s own” has gained such a stronghold in our culture that it has almost become a cliché. With this line, and the entire book, Woolf has touched off one of the most important assertions of feminist literary criticisms. 

Going back to one chapter’s short summary;

Back in London, Mary goes to the library to try to sort out all these pressing problems.

(Libraries, Shmoopers, were these archaic buildings full of books where people used to find information before Google 🙂 The one Mary goes to probably even has a card catalog.)

So, this is good: there are a ton of books about women.

But… they’re all written by men. Not so good.

If you’re dealing with this kind of books I actually wanna recommend a book called “The Madwoman in the attic” when you start reading this awesome book but although it’s quite thick but it’s worth to it.

And what weird is that women tend to not write books about men. 

We get a few examples of wildly contradictory statements about women by famous men like La Bruyère and Napoléon.

She realizes that the books she has consulted in the library are worthless because “they were written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth” (2.12).

Translation: one woman did these guys wrong, and they decided that all women were fickle and untrustworthy.

Over lunch, Mary wonders why these men are angry. She thinks it might be that the men are just really focused on making themselves feel superior. 

Time the pay the bill. Mary is lucky, because she has an inheritance from a dead aunt, also named Mary Beton. 

It’s pretty awesome—and weird—that she never has to worry about money because of this inheritance. 

One especially nice thing is that she doesn’t have to depend on a guy to provide for her. That means she’s got free time to write and think about stuff.

She wants to look at the lives of women during the Elizabethan era (Shakespeare’s time) because it blows her mind that there weren’t any women authors when it seems like every dude with a quill pen was writing amazing sonnets.

What were the conditions in which women lived [during the Elizabethan era], I asked myself; for fiction […] is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. (3.2)

A Room of One’s Own. Virgina Woolf

A spider’s web wouldn’t work if it weren’t attached to anything. This is a nice metaphor helping us see that fiction may be delicate and ethereal, but it’s still connected to solid stuff.

Educational Post #4


Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on The Learning Revolution at TED Talk Conference

Last semester while I was searching for my assignment, I came across with this Ted Talk and especially this part of that speech caught my attention:

”And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. I said, “What do you do?”

And he said, “I’m a fireman.”

I asked, “How long have you been a fireman?”

“Always. I’ve always been a fireman.”

And I said, “Well, when did you decide?”

He said, “As a kid. Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman.” He said, “But I wanted to be a fireman.” And he said, “When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn’t take it seriously. This one teacher didn’t take it seriously. He said “I was throwing my life away if that’s all I chose to do with it; that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that.” He said, “It was humiliating. It was in front of the whole class and I felt dreadful. But it’s what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted. You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher, because six months ago, I saved his life.” He said, “He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife’s life as well.” He said, “I think he thinks better of me now.”

http://sirkenrobinson.com/bring-on-the-learning-revolution/

As I understood from that speech, we shouldn’t force the students to enter a university or to have a profession. Let them see what they want to be, let them give a chance to imagine and maybe in this way they can reach their goals and dreams, who knows?

Educational Post #3

W.B.Yeats was such a talented man that I was extremely impressed with his poetry. Besides his poetry&books he had such quite inspirational quotes in education.

 Instruction should not be about dribbling drops of knowledge that students collect as they move from course to course. It should be more like gathering kindling, letting students play with matches, encouraging them to take risks and hoping that for some the materials burst into flames and become lifelong interests. 

This won’t happen to every student in every class. It won’t necessarily happen when students or professor expect it to. But if it happens occasionally it makes a good quality education worthwhile.

I would like to add a famous poem of W.B. Yeats below this post; in this poem you see his unrequited love..

he wishes for the cloths of heaven

had i the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
enwrought with golden and silver light,
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths
of night and light and the half-light,
i would spread the cloths under your feet:
but i, being poor, have only my dreams;
i have spread my dreams under your feet;
tread softly because you tread on my dreams.