How to prepare for your trip to Havana: Conner Gorry's interview on NPR, her blog HereIsHavana.com, and her writing as a Lonely Planet guide

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Conner Gorry's HereIsHavana.com blog is my latest pleasure.  
"Oh, this is what I should have done!"
"I was right down the street from this place!"  
"If I had only known..."

She was interviewed in this 2009 piece on NPR

She used the phrase "Anthropological Tourism" (the first time I'd ever heard the phrase) in the interview and I realized, "Hey, that's what I've been doing."  

Here's her blog:  http://hereishavana.com/about/

Link to Conner Gorry's blog

Her description of her bicycle is central to what I understand about the experience in Havana:  it's a barely walkable city -- a bicycle would REALLY help.   

To give you some visual interest, here's a screenshot of her Havana blog 

and a shot of one of her articles

Link to the Cuba Absolutely article about dinosaurs

As a teacher, my job is to look for mentors for my students and I can think of a number of recent students who could use a role model like Conner Gorry.  She has that spunk of "Free Agent" (described by Dan Pink) and the determination of the person with initiative (one of the 7 global skills that Tony Wagner writes about).

Here's her "about" page on her website

Why not click and read some of her blog posts?


And for iphone and ipadders:  Havana Good Time iApp

The unusual stone "pyramid" street signs in Havana, Cuba

The stone street "signs" or markers are about 1.3 feet on the side and about 1.2 feet tall, then there is a slope of about 30 degrees to the tip of the pyramid.

that's about 16 inches

that's about 14 inches

Somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees

A walk along Maso Street, starting from 20 de Mayo Boulevard in Cerro District of Havana, Cuba

A fan of Hemingway typed the following excerpt from a book by Mary Hemingway.

this feature covered a circular window on a second floor of a home

note the bar on the roof to aid the pulling up of materials

Broken sidewalks mean that many people walk on the road.
Innovative two and three-wheeled vehicles keep people moving

The "M" motif appears in the window bars and the railings

Number 367 Maso

Flowers in the ironwork

This private café serves items at 24 pesos per dollar

multiply by 4 and you'll get the cost in cents (multiply by 100 and divide by 24)

a sandwich for 48 cents (Euros)

Guayaba (GUAVA) and Cheese for 20 cents

I turned right on this intersection and went one block
to Panchito Gomez Street

This is the return up Panchito Gomez.

This looks like a fire trap

where are the railings?

I'm at the cornerof Panchito Gomez

Gaps between the homes reveal the relationships
between neighbors.  This gap looks more accessible

Swales provide shade on some side streets

A block farther up on the left is a sausage factory

One out of four apartment owners decided to paint

The sausage factory

There's a generator under that roof.   It turned on often
to provide power

somebody wrote that hemingway was shirking his duties as a US citizen by living outside the country.  he replied:  

This is the starting point of our walk.  Maso and 20 de Mayo

i always had good luck working in cuba... i moved from key west over here in 1938 and rented this farm and finally bought it when for whom the bell tolls came out...  it is a good place to work because it is out of town and on a hill so that it is cool at night.  i wake up when the sun rises and go to work and when i finish i get a swim and have a drink and read the new york and miami papers.  after work you can fish or go shooting and in the evening mary and i read and listen to music and go to bed.  sometimes we go into town or go to a concert.  sometimes we go to a fight or see a picture and go to la floridita afterwards.  winter we can go to the jai alai.  mary loves to garden and has a good flower and vegetable garden and fine roses... i lost about five years work out of my life during the war and i am trying to make up for it now.  i cant work and hang around new york because i never learned how to do it.  when i hit new york it is like somebody coming off a long cattle drive hitting dodge city in the old days.  right now im driving cattle and it is a long tough drive.  but this fall when the old man and the sea comes out you'll see some of the result of the last five years work.  you find me a place in ohio where i can live on top of a hill and be fifteen minutes away from the gulf stream and have my own fruit and vegetables the year around and raise and fight game chickens without breaking the law and i'll go live in ohio if miss mary and my cats and dogs agree.  

The fan had these comments:

Lovely flowers on Panchito Gomez

interestingly i never found in him the stuff about the cuban people and culture that keeps me there.  not that he wouldn't have appreciated those same things i don't think, but i suppose because those were different times:  consumerism hadn't taken over the world and there were lots of places where people were still people.  it didn't make cuba particularly special.  

Highlights from a workshop at University of Havana (April 2013)

This is the invitation letter from
the University of Havana

This is an example of the type of information that
was shared in the workshop

The flipped classroom is a topic of interest in Havana

The participants learned about the features of
reducing the amount of time spent in lecturing

The group was asked to think about how to get the
same results without using the Internet

 

Pablo E. (left) is the dean of "external professors" who teach English
for Special Purposes

Renier commutes two hours by bus each direction to get to his
work at the university.

Frank teaches English for Special Purposes at other departments

Many of the videos were downloaded from
YouTube using KeepVid.com

The certificate program included a description of projects
and portfolios.  This is a view of a classroom in Florida
designed by Dennis Yuzenas.

What qualifies the instructor to deliver this information?

You can see the channel at Youtube.com/Freeenglishlessons

The posters on the walls were copied by several of the participants.

It was interesting to deliver a workshop in 1998.  The participants used pen and paper to take notes instead of using a mobile phone to snap photos of the posters that I put on the walls.  

This definition of instructional technologies invited participants to focus on the USE and
EVALUATION of RESOURCES and PROCESSES

Sixteen participants are planning to obtain the certificate of Applied
Instructional Technology by compiling a portfolio of performances
of understanding.

Start with the prior knowledge of the audience.

The Foreign Languages department invited a teacher from Florida to deliver a workshop about the use of technology in the classroom -- without Internet.  
These photos give a sample of what was presented to the group of teachers who wanted to learn about principles of educational technology.


Imagine that you were asked to go to the year 1998 (15 years ago) to deliver a talk.  What would the sixteen people be doing during the lecture?  Checking information on a laptop?  Looking at a text message?   Quietly leaving the lecture hall to make a call?  Hunting for the smartphone, trying to turn off the annoying ring tone?

Not at all.  The teachers devoted two hours each day during the four days of instruction to following instructions and doing homework to prepare for the next day's activities.