Daily chores sometimes bring us a lot of trouble! Generally, I enjoy doing housework and making my home cleaner, fresher and better looking. But there’s one thing which I really hate doing and always try to escape from. It is ironing. First of all, I have some terrible childhood memories about it. When I was in secondary school, I used to be forced to do a lot of ironing! And, finally, I really do not like ironing as an exceptionally boring and very monotonous work.

Well, thinking about an incident from my early childhood still makes my palms burn! When I was 3 or 4-year-old child, I accidentally touched a very hot iron, which my mom had left on the ironing board after finishing her ironing. That was really very painful and my palm was simply burning, so my mom had to place potatoes and some anesthetics on my burning skin. Certainly, so much time have passed, but still whenever I see an iron, I remember that terrible pain and fear. This is my first reason to hate ironing.

I have to say that my family is rather large. I have two younger sisters and I had to take care about them since my teen ages, because my mom used to have a second job in order to make the ends meet. In addition, she used to rely on me in doing some basic housework, including ironing. Therefore, at the weekends, instead of spending time with my friends and having fun outside, I had to take our clothes from the laundry and iron everything myself. This is another important reason to hate it.

Actually, even if to forget my sad childhood experiences, ironing would be still nothing else but a torture for me. This work is too very monotonous, too tiresome, and I really can’t stand on it! It takes so much of efforts to iron a dress or a skirt (especially if those are made of a natural fabric), but the next day it is wrinkled again! Finally, I am usually short of time, even for cooking something or writing e-mails to my family and friends.

That is why I always try to do everything possible to avoid ironing or do it only in cases, when it is really necessary. A prefect solution for me is buying the clothes, which do not need ironing at all. Definitely, me and ironing are not friends, but it is something universal, I suppose. People are getting used to miraculous modern technologies, so we are waiting for some revolutionary device, which would make us forget about hand ironing.

Many teachers and educators have recognized the benefits of learning from the classmates, as a new format of our educational concept. They point on its effectiveness for the improvement of educational process from many perspectives. However, many teachers ask their students: who can it be, the mate you would like to learn from?

To my mind, the most important personal characteristics of an ideal classmate I would learn from should include strong communication skills, abilities to explain and exemplify, and, certainly, friendly behavior and good personal connection to me. First of all, this person has to earn my respect and trust with his/her behaviors and reactions, and, in turn, I should feel the response and friendly attitude towards myself  from this person, too.

Abilities to be plain and clear in communication and get the ideas across are not less principal. It is hard to learn something from somebody, who can not express his/her thoughts clearly. In addition, the person I would learn form must have some wide spectrum of interests and hobbies, which would be interesting for me as well, so we would have many common points and things to share. I guess the process of learning is much more effective and challenging, when it turns into exchanging of the ideas and knowledge.

I do not think it matters a lot, what is ethnic origin, cultural or religious community membership or economic opportunities of this person. On the contrary, it would be interesting to learn more about other religions, customs and traditions. Therefore, I still consider personal characteristics and communicating abilities to be the most important factors for establishing good ties for peer-to-peer learning.

Of course, the best way to learn something new is learning in the groups. In such case students can effectively help each other with some unclear points, discuss some key details of new material, and everybody can express own opinion and point of view. Learning from the classmates is a brilliant and very resourceful technology, based on cooperation and mutual assistance. It helps not only to achieve good progress on different subjects, but also to create strong and friendly relationships between the class mates, to improve the discipline and to make lessons more challenging and interesting.