Monday, March 21, 2011

SEXUAL ATTITUDE QUESTIONNAIRE

Welcome to our etwinning questionnaire about human sexuality. This is an important item in order to develop sexual education with students in our etwinning project.
Questionnaire is a result of several contributes. It is based on Maria Sourgiadaki’s and Jorge Rocha’s work on a questionnaire of Maria João Alves (leader of PPES in Escola Secundária Henriques Nogueira) and on a sexual education guide, approved by the Greek Ministry of Education. Finally, there are some questions suggested by students.
Translations from Greek and Portuguese to English are not professional.
Please, answer questionnaire trying to be completely honest. Your opinion is important so that we get information from your sexual attitude in order to analyse and discuss upon it. The whole process of getting information and its use will be controlled by this etwinning project team, which gives you guarantee of confidentiality and anonymity. Data will be statistically processed in an aggregate way.
Click in Questionnaire so that you can answer. Thanks for your contribution!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Sex, values, culture and human freedom in action

«After reading the post «A trip back in time» we were debated with two different opinions. The grandmother and mother of Mary. The grandmother of Maria despite being a generation older than the mother of Maria agrees with sex before marriage, but the mother of Maria who is less of a generation does not share this ancient custom, which leads us to conclude our thoughts and our tastes are influenced by our culture and our beliefs because even by the same family being a mother and grandmother of Maria have different cultures and consequently different opinions.


Currently, our society is not as conservative, because with the changing times, the customs and way of thinking of most people is changing, and we are having a more open mind to the various matters that were previously more difficult to address. Given the situation of this post, we agree that our society is currently in disagreement with the fact that the woman be forced to have sexual relations with the Turkish leader in her wedding night.

However, there may still be cases of people who agree with this. These people may have historical and cultural conditioning or psychological make them agree with this. Taking the example of a pedophile. This does not give freedom to the person who chooses to satisfy his own sexual desire and is not free because it is conditioned by psychological problems. Now, consider this action good or bad depends on the values of each subject or culture (subjectivity of values) and ethics of each.

That is, people's opinion depends on their culture and their beliefs. As the culture and beliefs, are influenced in our thinking and our decisions. Right and wrong and good and evil are concepts that can have different meanings for different cultures, which leads us to think that at that time, the chances for the Turks was having sex with the woman on her wedding night that she did not agree. This is an ethnocentric culture, because they are only worried about their own pleasure , not valuing the views of women, even to the point that they cut the breasts if they did not take having sex with them.

Currently this is an unacceptable situation for our culture.»

Bruno Camacho

Beatriz Esteves

Cátia Santos

(10ºC, in Henriques Nogueira School)

International day of women - women in our society

            As said in the original post, on the 8th of March of every year we celebrate worldwide the International Women’s Day. These celebrations are expressed in different ways: some celebrate the respect, appreciation and love towards women, men express their love for women and others celebrate women’s economic, political and social achievements.
            The general assumption states that women are naturally passive, while men are naturally active. In our opinion, full human equality can only be achieved when men and women agree that those attitudes (passive and active) are appropriated for either of them.
            Like this, we can conclude that it is very important to educate ourselves as to the basic gender differences which exist between men and women and acknowledge that the differences exist. This way, we should use our differences to improve our relationship rather than to damage it. These cognitive differences should be recognized as long as we continue to make an effort to conserve and protect feminism and equality between the genders in the process.
            Many people question themselves why is there a global day of the women and not a global day of the men, due to the fact that on the human rights law we find the equality of race, gender, religion, sexual choice. However, in our opinion, we must look at this day by another perspective - there are profound reasons based on cultural issues that backup the existence of this day.
            In the Bible, the book considered blessed by most of the world population, we talk about God - powerful, unique, omnipotent and omnipresent - as being male. Jesus, the only son of God, is also a man, just as the first human created by God was Adam and was also male (Eve was made from one of Adam's rib). Popes, bishops and priests are always men, as well as the disciples were. Physically a man has by nature more physical potential, and it can’t be disproved scientifically, thus unwittingly giving men power in ancient societies in which the intellectual was much less important than today, and was therefore also considered the most capable and strongest to be the boss/leader of a group.
            In the animal life, for example, males of most species tend to be larger and are more able-bodied than females. Therefore when in flocks the leaders are the "strongest" males of the group. With this we mean that the superiority of men over women has always been part of the culture of most societies almost always. However, especially in the West some changes have been noticed in the practice of this ideal. Women have been gaining freedom, and therefore more opportunities to show their capabilities and limitations, that were blocked previously. It is with the incentive to promote opening opportunities to women that we believe that world women's day is important to exist.
            Currently, women have different rights depending on the region of the globe they are located in. In a Western perspective, the modern women have an active professional life, without letting the domestic life become passive. We agree with teacher Jorge when he says that men and women should be partners, both professionally and at home; this way, a woman can devote more time to her profession and rise to new heights in her career. In the Eastern perspective, women aren’t free and don’t have the same rights as men – they are professionally very limited and are "forced" to devote all their time to their domestic life, stressing that men don’t share their time with this activity. In the second perspective, women and men are not equal in terms of rights, duties and employment opportunities.
            In the recent decades, with the admission of young women in universities, women have manifested themselves better than the men at the academic level, which allows us to deduce that they are who will occupy the most important positions in the future society. It’s now that the woman may be expressed at a professional level.
            Today, in our day-to-day as Portuguese citizens, we've had women in senior positions. Our own school is an example of that, where the highest position is the executive director of the county and it is occupied by a woman. Us as students deal almost daily with male and female teachers - and according to our personal experience we could not discern any differences professionally and socially between teachers of different genders.  Hence we can conclude that perhaps sex has nothing to do with professionalism in a profession of intellectual character.

Comment created and posted by:
Inês Vieira
José Freitas
Tiago Rosado

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

International day of woman

March, 8th. This is the international day of woman. Congratulations to all women!
Anyway, this is time to think why is it necessary to have a day dedicated to the women. Then, we will find that women are discriminated all over the world. They're discriminated in accessing to education, discriminated in accessing to the working market, discriminated at home and primary victims of wars made by men. Equality and justice are great values that we still need to reach fight for, so that this intolerable situation can be changed. And we need to know that we have to be patient doing this fighting, because it is a long term job that must start now, immediately, because each minute passed, there are new injuries against women.
This fight must be taken by men and women and I believe that for me, as a teacher, and for my students, a good way to fight is doing a good job becoming ourselves more and more educated. Improving education is the best way to spread equality and justice in the world of men and women. So, students must know that in every day that they don’t do a good job in their studies, they are losing an opportunity to become our world better for women... and a better world for them is a better world for men also.
I'd like we (people of different schools and different countries) comment about the situation of women in the world of our experience: how is it working with our girls, mothers, teachers, etc.