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Boy, I'd sure love to teach in the University of San Francisco. 
Why?
Just read this article taken from Inquirer.net. You'll know why.
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Activism 101 for the "University of Spoiled Filipinos"
By Christian V. Esguerra
SAN FRANCISCO—A new park was rising in the South of Market three years ago, much to the excitement of the area’s long-time Filipino dwellers.
They were expecting the new patch of green to be named after Victoria Manalo Draves, one of their own. She’s a proud daughter of the community, a Fil-American who captured two gold medals for diving in the 1948 London Olympics, a first by any woman, and the only Olympic gold medal by a Filipino to date.
But word was that someone else— not from the neighborhood but who would be giving a large monetary donation to City Hall—would receive the honor.
The news angered the Filipino community. At the forefront of the protest were students from the University of San Francisco (USF), an upscale, Jesuit-run private school. It’s the city’s more affluent version of Manila’s Ateneo.
It’s occasionally dubbed the “University of Spoiled Filipinos,” a playful jab at the students’ elitist environment and their supposed never-care attitude.
But they cared, especially during those tense months in 2005 when they felt a compatriot was being slighted.
Role model
“Victoria Manalo Draves is our role model,” was their loud message to the powers-that-be at San Francisco’s City Hall. The students, some of them barely speaking a word of Tagalog, pointed out that not a public speck in San Francisco was named after a Filipino. To think that the city has been home to them for more than half a century.
The pressure mounted and in the end, the 80-year-old former diver got the honor.
Activism paid off for this group of Filipino students enrolled at a pioneering, if not, maverick, program at USF. In the school’s Philippine Studies course, they had apparently developed a consciousness for social justice as palpable in rallies as in female students sacrificing French tip nails for placards.
Not helpless
“Their attitude is—so we’ve learned about these things in the classroom, what are we going to do now?” says Joaquin “Jay” Gonzalez III, 44, a professor at the program and himself a veteran activist during the Marcos dictatorship.
The Philippine Studies Program teaches a variety of lessons about their native country - politics, history, economy, language, and culture. Discussions even tackle controversies like “Hello Garci,” human rights abuses, and the more recent broadband scandal.
In the end, besides earning a degree and big bucks, students develop the common attitude of doing something more. That explains their presence in protest actions on matters like the Filipino World War II veterans’ issue and the “Desperate Housewives” slur on Filipino doctors.
While they can only watch the worsening condition in the Philippines from afar, they’re not exactly helpless. They turn to issues closer to their home in San Francisco and try to make a difference just the same.
Their program at USF was itself a product of student activism, according to Gonzalez.
Back in the 90s when more and more Filipinos were enrolling at USF, they began demanding a curriculum specific to their needs, a counterpart of programs like Latin American studies.
“It’s about discovering their own roots,” says Gonzalez. “Students were in search of themselves and their culture.”
It wasn’t difficult to lose one’s identity in a highly diverse culture like America’s – especially when, for one reason or another, many Filipino parents were deliberately wiping out traces of their children’s native roots in a desperate effort to integrate them into American society.
It showed when kids were told to speak English—and only English. The attitude created an impression of inferiority of the Filipino language, even if parents probably wanted only to spare their children of possible discrimination.
But as the children grew older and began seeing America in their own eyes, they realized that something was amiss. Why did the Chinese, for instance, remain proud of their heritage when Filipinos weren’t? Latinos loved their language, too, and America had to adjust to them.
Defining moment
Gradually, Gonzalez says these kids developed a consciousness that defined themselves in the company of other cultures: “Yes, I am an American, but I am a Filipino-American.”
Such was the attitude with which Filipino students petitioned the USF administration for a new academic program. Bolstered by an endowment from Ambassador Alfonso Yuchengco, the school acceded and initially offered a Philippine history class in the fall of 1998.
For all the noise created by the petition, the experimental course attracted only 19 students. It turned out that they were looking for something more relevant, something that would not only inform them about their past but also teach them about being Filipinos in a foreign land.
The curriculum was revised to offer subjects like Fil-Americans in US history, Filipino Politics and Justice, Filipino Culture and Society, Tagalog, Filipino-American Arts Exposition, and the pioneering “Knowledge Activism.”
It also had “Barrio Fiesta,” a performing arts course that was once assigned to movie/stage actor Bernardo Bernardo.
‘Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang?’
True enough, the “perked-up” Philippine Studies Program generated huge enrollments, so much so that it is now a “major” at USF, meaning a program with at least 40 units.
So what becomes of students majoring in Philippine Studies?
The economic side of it, Gonzalez concedes, may not produce incomes as big as those in the medical or legal profession. But in America’s continuously changing environment, Filipinos are becoming more and more relevant, if not indispensable – thus the logical importance of the course.
Companies, for example, are targeting Filipino consumers, a market now difficult to ignore because of their enormous presence in places like the Bay Area. Gonzalez says knowledge about Filipino culture would prove valuable for applicants for such companies.
Knowledge activism
The same is true in the field of health services.
Once, Gonzalez had a Chinese-American student in his first semester Tagalog class. The boy, student of Nursing Cedric Chew, made friends among his Filipino classmates and was soon falling in love with the culture.
He started to love Filipino music, too, to the point that he began singing Ogie Alcasid’s “Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang?” from start to finish.
The tune and his overall exposure to Filipino culture came in handy during his internship at a hospital staffed mostly by Filipino doctors and nurses. They all loved him, especially whenever he sang the popular Filipino ballad. Filipino patients were requesting for him as well.
‘Don’t forget your rosary’
Much of the success of the Philippine Studies Program is seen in the way it has transformed students into socially commited individuals. They not only see the world outside through textbooks, they look at it in the perspective of change that is just and humane.
Consider “Knowledge Activism,” a subject practically created by students.
Gonzalez says it began as a “teach-in,” meaning with a group of students gathered for informal discussions about Filipino-related issues. Occasionally, they would invite professors for more inputs until Gonzalez decided to turn the gathering into a formal subject.
The guy who started it all, then student Glenn Andag, now manages the Filipino Education Center, an after-school program offering lessons on language and culture for newly arrived Filipino kids.
Like many other alumni of the Philippine Studies course, Andag owes much of his social awakening and transformation to mentors like Gonzalez ("Aral kay Jay,” as they put it).
In Gonzalez, students have a full-fledged “tibak” (activist) to teach them the value of social change and the nitty-gritty of achieving it. He brings to his classes a wealth of experience as a veteran of the anti-Marcos movement in the 80s.
Gonzalez’s own epiphany came in college while he was a student of biology and marketing at De La Salle University, school to many of the Philippines’ elite. His future in the corporate world was practically set until he began seeing fellow students marching on Taft Avenue on the way to Liwasang Bonifacio.
There must be more to life than the prestige and convenience of a high-paying job, he thought. He still graduated from La Salle, but as a political science major and with a better understanding of what he wanted to pursue. Gonzalez went on to hone his political action skills during his graduate studies at the University of the Philippines.
Soon he was a fixture in protest actions, naturally worrying his folks because of the violence that often came with the rallies. But they kept their faith in their son, reminding him often never to forget his rosary.
Rally 101
All the hard work paid off for Gonzalez and millions of his compatriots when Ferdinand Marcos was finally ousted in the bloodless revolution on Edsa in February 1986.
These are the stories that Gonzalez’s students—even non-Filipinos—love to hear. What a journey it’s been for America’s brown-skinned allies who now want to duplicate the struggle, even a semblance of it, in the context of their present environment.
Allow me to share an article by Prof. Michael Tan of the UP College of Arts and Letters (Diliman) who has a regular column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer. It discusses the impact of the newly-approved UP Charter, primarily on the said university's faculty members. It clearly mirrors my own experiences when I was a junior faculty member of the UP Division of Humanities at UP in the Visayas Tacloban College. However, I have to disagree with Prof. Tan on the issue of bullying by senior faculty members being a minor problem. In UP Tacloban, it is a major problem.
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UP's Brain Drain
“Congratulations on your salary increase.”
I got several text messages of that type last week when the new charter of the University of the Philippines (UP) was signed into law. I was surprised because the messages came from friends outside UP, including two Americans, suggesting that they were following the issue. When I brought this up with fellow UP faculty members, they in turn shared quite a few reactions to the new charter, and several—the younger ones in particular—said I should write about some of the issues in my column.
First, congratulations are in order for president Emerlinda Roman, who will be remembered in history for shepherding the bill through a not-always-friendly Congress, some of whose members opposed the charter mainly because of personal grudges. There was also opposition from some UP constituents, who feared the new charter might mean the commercialization of the university.
I have some fears, too, but it’s not so much about commercialization than not being able to tap the full potentials of the new charter especially with our human resources. The new law gives the university even greater autonomy than it used to have, including the area of salaries. Before the new charter, all our salaries—teaching staff as well as non-academic personnel—were tied to the government’s standardized salary scale, which meant that an instructor would get a gross salary of about P15,000 per month while a full professor (a position that takes about 30 years to achieve, if you’re lucky) gets a little more than P30,000.
The new charter allows the university to raise these salaries based on its financial resources, which comes from the government’s allocated budget as well as grants and other income. This is why my non-UP friends were texting in, thinking that new salaries automatically went into effect.
But salary adjustments are going to take time, as the university thoroughly reviews the options. I can see why our officials have to be careful because they can’t afford to just give higher salaries this year, and then adjust downwards in succeeding years if funds dwindle.
People within and outside UP tend to associate the new charter with these dreams of higher salaries, mainly because they think it will solve the problem of UP’s brain drain. For years now, we have been losing faculty to other good schools like the two around the corner on Katipunan Road, one on Taft Avenue in Manila and that one in Pasig City, where salaries are at least double those at UP.
But, there’s more to UP’s brain drain than salaries. In truth, many of our professors have found ways to supplement their salaries. I haven’t heard of anyone selling "tocino" meat yet, but insurance policies, yes, and paintings and antiques and real estate. Being a UP professor can also mean consultancies and invitations to teach part-time in other universities. You need permission to do some of these sidelines, but UP tends to be fairly lenient here, as long as these don’t interfere with UP duties.
Nurturance
Higher salaries, I hope, will mean fewer of those sidelines, but there’s more to keeping our faculty going. The bottom line is that UP needed a new charter to deal with what it had become, a strange and difficult hybrid. On one hand, we are larger than many mega-corporations with huge potentials and resources. On the other hand, we are hobbled as a government institution with bureaucracies that breed turfing and patron-client relationships and a tenure system that sometimes leads to complacency and lethargy. To some, maybe even large, extent, it’s these organizational management issues that contribute to our brain drain problem.
The ones who suffer most are our young faculty members, who eventually leave out of frustration. In the words of one faculty member who nearly left when she was younger: “It wasn’t the salaries, but the lack of nurturance.”
New faculty members are full of ideals, but also want guidance. Many have no inkling of what it takes to teach. Many of us had to pick up teaching skills on our own. Only in recent years, to the credit of the current administration, has the university intensified its orientation and teaching seminars for new and junior faculty and explored new teaching tools, including the Internet.
There’s more, though, than workshops on teaching methods. Younger faculty members need space to exchange ideas, and to innovate, but when they do this, the older ones sometimes react negatively, seeing these as demands or threats, rather than as opportunities to learn. Nothing pleases me more than passing on my course outlines, lecture notes, books and films to younger faculty members and then seeing them update and revise and create totally new modules.
Younger faculty members leave, too, when they see their careers in UP as a dead end, blocked by older ones when it comes to promotions and other perks, such as opportunities for further studies, or attending workshops and symposia. The best ones who have left were those who had languished in lower ranks. A few came home from overseas studies with a postgraduate degree but had to wait for years before a promotion.
The current administration has done a lot to correct these injustices. In the last three years, I’ve been pleasantly surprised when my department hires someone new and recommends him for a particular rank, and then gets a notice from university officials asking us to give a higher position because the new hire graduated cum laude or has a master’s degree.
All these—promotion, mentoring, collegial camaraderie—are part of nurturance.
Fighting cynicism
I think you can see here that the problem of younger faculty members leaving sometimes has to do with the senior ones. The bullies are the easy part; you simply ignore them. I worry more about the others who have tired out, or worse become jaded and cynical. The old system gave some security but little incentive, so professors ended up playing safe and teaching the same courses for years on end with little or no innovation, and certainly, even less willingness to let the younger faculty members learn to teach those courses as well.
Frustrations grow, too, when older faculty members become administrators and try to improve standards or enforce university rules, and end up being reprimanded for doing so. If they leave, with their years of experiences, the loss to UP can be great.
There were, even under the old charter, many reasons to stay in UP, especially greater academic freedom. But there will be greater incentive to stay if we see greater professionalism, where rules are enforced consistently and fairly and a meritocracy that rewards commitment and innovation, rather than “loyalty” (read: sycophancy) and conformity.
Some time back an administrator from one of the other good schools asked me if I had anyone to spare to teach in his university, even on a part-time basis. Before I could answer, he went, “Hey, please don’t send X or Y or Z.”
The other schools know whom they want, and don’t want. Do we know whom we want at UP?
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If you want to read this article yourself, simply click on this link.
I found this very insightful article on the forum of www.up.edu.ph that tackles primarily on cheating. It's kinda long, but it drives home the point that at times, even teachers themselves are to blame for driving students to cheat.
Read on...
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Who really loses when a student cheats?
by Alicor L. Panao
In a country that cannot even hold a decent election, students cheating their way through college should be anything but surprising. But cheating has come a long way from the ingenious crib notes or codigo neatly tucked inside one’s pocket or discreetly scribbled on the desk. Nowadays, one can lift an entire paper off the Internet and pass it off as one’s own. With mobile phones and the Internet, technology is certainly giving students even more opportunities to cut corners.
In research, the most prevalent act of dishonesty is plagiarism, i.e., copying a work verbatim or misrepresenting it as one’s own. If a student downloads essays from various websites, cuts a paragraph or two from each of them, and comes up with a paper from the patchwork, that is cheating. If the student merely cites his or her sources yet maintains the patchwork without actually writing the paper himself or herself, that is still cheating.
Another form of cheating is the deliberate fabrication of data or information to suit one’s conclusions in a formal academic exercise. No doubt, the advent of multimedia and information technology has simply made this old practice more widespread and blatant.
However, some experts believe it is not just technology that is causing the epidemic.
Moral responsibility
“We even have graduate students who do not know how to take notes or conduct basic research,” says Dr. Zosimo Lee, Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy (CSSP) in UP Diliman. “How could they be expected to paraphrase materials, acknowledge their sources, or observe proper citations?”
Lee believes it is not just basic learning or research skills that are at issue, but the manner in which teachers have imparted learning through their methodologies. “Are we still teaching students to think for themselves? Or by sheer tolerance, are we, in fact, sending the wrong message that it is all right to simply rely on available online resources?”
He wonders whether professors are still teaching students to be critical and to question the veracity of ideas they encounter.
Lee, a philosophy professor, says the problem is not the lack of good professors but the way they pass learning on to students. A professor may be good in the sense that he is smart, knows a lot of things, and is frequently published, but he may not necessarily be effective in terms of sharing knowledge, inspiring students, and teaching them the value of scholarship. “We tend to teach by mere modeling—that is, we teach students to find the right answers, but not necessarily how to ask the right questions.” Although today’s common sources of information—television, videos, and the Internet—provide access to an overwhelming amount of knowledge, learning nevertheless remains passive. “In other words, there is learning but there is no inquiry,” says Lee.
Worse, some professors, especially in the social sciences where a lot of information is transmitted through multimedia channels, have themselves unconsciously become too dependent on these technologies.
This dependence has extended to the use of technology in the current wave of academic cheating. Nowadays, with just a click of a mouse, any student with an email account and a valid credit card can order term papers online on virtually any topic, complete with bibliography and citations. Crib sheets can now be sent either as images or SMS via mobile phones. Notes can be digitized as audio files and played on iPods or any other portable music players. And while academe has guidelines against academic dishonesty, these rules cannot keep up with the expanding use of tools and media in cyberspace.
Prof. Doi Rosete, former chair of the Department of Visual Communication and Industrial Design of the UP Diliman College of Fine Arts, explains that this is because the World Wide Web is changing the concept of authorship. Materials—which include written texts, stills, and moving images—are downloaded as fast as they are uploaded by online collaborators.
In UP, the fact that the Revitalized General Education Program made basic communication subjects optional did not help either. In fact, Lee feels it only made matters a lot worse, because professors now even have to worry about their students’ grammatical skills instead of just concentrating on the content of their papers. “We spend more time editing the papers than analyzing the research value of their content.”
The CSSP dean also takes note of students’ lack of competence in any one language. “Maybe the reason behind students’ copying is simply that they have difficulty expressing themselves properly to begin with,” he says. Communication is supposedly a two-tiered process of oral and written expression. An alarming number of students—even in the graduate level—are wanting in both aspects. According to Lee, this may be due to the fact that they are no longer taught to be competent in any language, not even in their native language. “Since students lack mastery of any language, they simply resort to borrowing, if not outright copying of other people’s ideas.”
According to Lee, a national language is important if only to make sure that in teaching core academic courses, students will be afforded clear conceptual understanding. “I know of no developed country that teaches critical subjects like Science and Mathematics in a language other than their own.” This does not mean, of course, that English should be relegated to the sidelines. In the Netherlands, he says, children begin learning English as early as in their first grade. The Dutch study English along with other foreign languages for only about two or three years. “And yet they are among the world’s most literate and multilingual people.”
Misplaced altruism
UP Diliman Vice Chancellor for Research and Development Dr. Luis Sison agrees that professors are partly to blame for cheating in the University. Students respect teachers who lay down clear, consistent, and appropriate policies on intellectual dishonesty. A good set of policies, according to Sison, is one that states definite and unequivocal consequences for infractions.
Teachers who are lenient for one reason or another—what Sison calls misplaced altruism—are unwittingly giving their students license to cut corners. Similarly, teachers who place unreasonable demands without giving appropriate support are also indirectly pushing students to break the rules.
An ill-prepared student fearing a failing grade may be pressured to copy from a classmate simply to pass. There are also teachers who cram too many topics in a single semester “without realizing that they have gone past the point of diminishing returns.” There are also those who view themselves, not as mentors, but more as gatekeepers whose role is to prevent the unworthy from passing through. “In all cases,” says Sison, “it becomes more likely for the student to rationalize cheating.”
The intense pressure to earn good grades, or at least keep up in a competitive setting, also drives students to cheat. For some, the pressure to excel academically for the promise of future career opportunities is enough reason to resort to anything, including cheating. “Students form the greater part of the academic population, and they have to compete for the distinction of being the best in a particular field,” Rosete explains. “And grades are graphic records of a student’s intellectual development.”
The situation, according to Rosete, is a lot worse when they leave the University and compete in the labor market. In the corporate world, intellectual integrity does not matter as much as the pursuit of profit targets. “Only in academe is intellectual development a pursuit and an end in itself,” says Rosete.
Public responsibility
But what about the University’s accountability to the public? As the national university, UP must be beyond reproach in this respect. The credibility of the research it generates and the integrity of those it graduates every year must never be in question. Those trusted with the education of the country’s future teachers, doctors, policymakers, scientists and engineers fail the country by allowing widespread cheating.
There are dire consequences, according to Sison. In engineering for instance, fraudulent data that leads to an improperly designed building or electrical system can put lives at risk. And if improper practice of profession can ruin individual reputations, the damage to the University is greater. “When a student cheats or when a researcher fabricates data, he is not only gambling his own credibility,” says Lee. “He is putting into question the credibility of the entire UniversityThe credibility of the entire University is also put into question.”
But it may be reassuring to know that UP has always denounced academic dishonesty and has tried to implement a strict policy of prosecuting and penalizing offenders—students and faculty members alike.
In 1999, for instance, the Supreme Court upheld the UP Board of Regents’ decision to withdraw the degree granted to a Ph.D. student who was found to have plagiarized a great part of her dissertation (UP BOR v Court of Appeals, G.R. No. 134625, August 31, 1999). Apparently, Anthropology student Arokiaswamy William Margaret Celine, an Indian citizen, had borrowed extensively from various sources “word for word and, at times, paragraph by paragraph without any acknowledgment of the source, even by a mere quotation mark.” But the University did not immediately strip her of the degree. It actually came up with the resolution only after almost a year of hearings and largely because of her own deliberate failure to implement the suggested revisions.
In 2004, the Department of Political Science in UP Diliman terminated the appointment of Gareth Api Richards as Associate Professor of Political Science due to his deliberate misrepresentation of academic credentials. In a statement, the department said that in his vita, Richards claimed to have a Ph.D. in Political Economy from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. An official verification made by the department chair, however, revealed that the prestigious British university had never conferred such a degree on Richards. When asked to explain in a meeting of the department’s tenured faculty members, Richards squarely admitted lying about his academic qualification.
Lee says that given all the measures the University has put in place to ensure academic integrity, it should not be difficult for professors to single out frauds. For instance, if a student who is not known for his writing talent suddenly comes up with an impeccable piece, a professor should be suspicious. The growing versatility of online search engines also suggests that professors can beat students in their own games. “In case of doubt, you can always google,” Lee says. Some commercial websites like Turnitin also offer instant verification services to determine how much of a document is “unoriginal” for a reasonable fee.
“Pero may nakakalusot talaga,” Lee admits. And this is largely due to professors’ tendency to be lenient in reading students’ papers. Moreover, the current system of evaluating theses—at least in the social sciences—leaves much to be desired. Typically, only the main adviser is apprised of the student’s progress and the rest of the panel members are able to read the work just a week or two before the oral defense. Lee suggests raising the financial incentive given to faculty members for advising dissertations and theses or sitting in defense panels. This will help to ensure greater commitment.
Caution to students
Sison shares Lee’s view. “The research adviser is in the best position to detect intellectual dishonesty,” he says. “Not only is the adviser frequently in touch with the student but as an expert in that particular field, he should be able to detect plagiarism or fraudulent data with ease.”
He suggests a “process-oriented” approach in evaluating students’ work to discourage cheating. Instead of basing the bulk of the grade on a single project like a final exam or a final paper, a teacher rates the student based on the latter’s progress throughout the semester. He insists that the approach is mutually advantageous, because it gives the teacher immediate feedback on the effectiveness of learning and provides the students with better mentoring. Asking for small but frequent “deliverables” also reduces the likelihood of cramming, which often leads to cheating.
Ideally, it is not just teachers but the entire academic community who must make it their duty to safeguard academic integrity. “But in the end, it boils down to how the student exercises his free will within an ethical framework,” says Sison, “And to how we, their teachers, penalize the lack of such ethics.”
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To see the article yourself, simply click on this link.
I've always been loyal to my alma mater, the University of the Philippines, primarily because it was here where I had so many good memories in my scholastic and career life. And now that UP has finally reached its centennial year, I can't help but get caught up in the jubilation of fellow members of the vast UP community.For this blog entry, I'll be writing random thoughts pertaining to the UP Centennial, as well as my days in the premier university in the Philippine archipelago. (Sorry, Ateneo and La Salle folks: my school takes the limelight here.)--------------------Many non-UP people have always asked me why we have a man who revels in his unabashed nakedness for a school symbol. He is, of course, the Oblation, or Manong Oble, as we fondly call him. Originally made by Prof. Guillermo Tolentino of the UP College of Fine Arts, Manong Oble has become the school's symbol of academic freedom and the pursuit of truth and liberalism.I was surprised to find out that the "original" bronze Oblation in Quezon Hall of UP Diliman is not exactly the original one. It was merely crafted in a mold taken from the original which, according to Wikipedia.com, is now being kept in the upper floor of the UP Main Library -- the original site of the College of Fine Arts where Prof. Tolentino used to teach. Several replicas of the Oblation were then sculpted by National Artist, Napoleon Abueva, and are now standing proudly in most of the UP campuses scattered all over the country.During my days as an instructor in UP Tacloban, I remember having a running joke with a fellow female colleague about waiting for the leaf on Manong Oble to fall before we ever get married (in my case, again). Of course, that would never happen...but secretly I think we wished it would.--------------------I graduated with a degree in Broadcast Communication from the College of Mass Communication in UP Diliman in 19....never mind. But if you insist on finding out exactly how far back it was since I was in college, I'll simply give you my student number: 87-05354. The first two digits indicate the year when I entered UP. Yeah, yeah: I know I'm ancient...Confront a fellow UP alumnus/alumna about his/her student number, and most likely they will still be able to recite it correctly to you. --------------------UP students and graduates have always been branded as "activists," simply because of their affinity with the school. For the record, this perception is not always true. While liberalism and academic freedom is being practised in UP, it does not turn everyone there into screaming rebels ready to wage rallies against the Establishment. We have our own share of passive and even apathetic individuals who turned into the kind of people they are for several reasons: first, they are too scared of repercussions, like in the case of many of our UP Tacloban students who are privy to the many irregularities being perpetrated by some of their very own teachers, but who keep quiet to avoid bearing the brunt of their teachers' grudges. Second, they are simply uninformed, or refuse to be informed because they're quite satisfied with their respective comfort zones already. Third, they just don't care. (Die, you a**holes, DIE!)My UP experience taught me to open my senses to the goings-on in the world, so that I can properly analyze them and create a sound assessment. If I was contented in my high school days with simply having a roof on my head, food to eat, and a bed to sleep on (no thanks to our sheltered lives in Manila Science High School), UP turned my brain into a sponge of new ideas and schools of thought. It taught me to start asking philosophical questions and to create stronger mindsets.If this is what is called "activism," then I'm grateful to UP for giving me that.But I think former UP President Francisco Nemenzo has a better term for it: critical thinking. And this is the kind of thinking I espoused to my students when I became a UP teacher myself.Critical thinking: one of the wonderful residues of assimilating the UP culture. That is, if you were really serious about your being a UP student then.--------------------You are not a true UP Diliman student if you have never eaten in Rodic's.Along with CASAA which is located between Palma Hall and the Palma Hall Annex, Rodic's used to be our favorite lunchtime hub. It is a hole-in-the-wall eatery found in the UP Shopping Center. But don't be fooled by its rickety ambiance: Rodic's is actually one of UP Diliman's most popular icons. In fact, it goes down UP history as one of the longest-standing eateries within the UP Diliman campus. I was quite shocked when one time, I was relating to my parents about eating with schoolmates in Rodic's earlier that day and my dad interrupted me with a loud "Whaaatt?!" As it turned out, my dad revealed that during his days of studying in the UP College of Law in the 1950s, they'd also visit Rodic's. That was my turn to say, "Whaaatt?!"And yes, Rodic's still stands in its same location up to the present day. And I'm assuming that they'd be celebrating their golden jubilee anytime now.Just what made Rodic's so popular with UP people from way back up to the present? It's their very cheap yet delicious and filling silog dishes. Most commendable is their tapa flakes and their spicy dilis. Just writing about them makes my mouth water...--------------------UP's grading system is set from 5 to 1, 1 being the highest grade one could achieve. A 3 is considered as barely passing, or in colloquial terms, pasang-awa. A 4 is a conditional failure, but one could still appeal to his/her teacher to have this grade changed.But a 5 is a 5. That's the end of the road for any appeals a UP student may want to make.I never got a final grade of 5 in my student days, and when I became a UP teacher myself, I somehow expected the same from my students. While most of them managed to make the cut, there were those who just kept slacking away. And when grading time came, I'd give them their just dessert: a bloody-red 5.Other faculty members would approach me, saying that I may just be a tad too stringent for giving 5s. According to them, having a 5 on the student's Transcript of Records may provide a problem for the student concerned, especially when he/she starts looking for work. My argument is that these kids should have thought about that before they decided on cutting my class and not passing the course requirements.Oh, and I've had several of these slackers visiting me in the faculty room, begging on their knees to let me change their grades of 5. So far, all of them (male and female alike) would leave the faculty room in tears, fruitless in their appeals.Two of these slackers were big fratmen who sobbed like little boys when I showed them my Class Record to let them understand exactly why they got a 5. Then as a piece de resistance, I closed my record and say, "Now, give me a good reason why I should change your grade."If being just in my grading system makes me a terror teacher, then so be it. --------------------And if you think I was a colorful UP teacher, there are other UP teachers even more colorful than me.Prof. Winnie Monsod, according to my orgmates from UP Sidlangan, would come to class smoking her cigarettes.I have a colleague from the Division of Humanities who is a self-proclaimed witch of the white order. She sees dead people, auras, and otherworldly beings because of her open third eye.I used to have Pinoy Big Brother himself, Laurenti Dyogi, as a teacher in my Scriptwriting class. Maria Ressa also was a former Scriptwriting teacher of mine. I had former teachers and colleagues who came to class in Hawaiian shorts and shirts.I remember my Communication 1 teacher, Prof. Filonila Tupas, who scared us out of our wits with her terror tactics. Many years later, she was massacred in her own home.My Spanish 1-2 teacher, Prof. Paz Miciano, often berated me for my relatively slow understanding of her Spanish lessons. But at the end of our classes (and after my taking two makeup exams), she whispered in my ear and said, "Señorita Rodriguez, I expect you to become a cum laude when you graduate, comprende?"A former teacher who taught STS in my time (He's dead now, bless his soul...) became (in)famous for coining the phrase, "Kwarto o kwatro?" He eventually landed in jail for lascivious acts.--------------------Speaking of STS, this is a subject that up to now, I have yet to comprehend. STS is Science, Technology, and Society, and it is a GE subject, meaning that all UP students have to take it before graduating.
STS has a little bit of Social Science, a little bit of Natural Science, a little bit of Biology, a little bit of Physics, a little bit of Chemistry...technically, a little bit of everything UP students have already taken in their earlier years. Honestly, I think this subject is quite pointless.
The STS final exam is primarily a reflection of how pointless this subject is. Case in point, one question in the exam which goes like this: "How many fairies would it take to dance on a pinhead?" Duh to the nth power...
I have to admit, I did learn something from my STS classes: how to sneak out of the lectures when the professor isn't looking (Thank God for the overpopulated classes and the strategically-placed back doors of the College of Science auditorium.), and memorizing the answer key to the STS exams. (Answer key is handed down from batch to batch, by the way. Just goes to show that they barely changed the exam contents in my time.)
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Hey you UP peeps, don't tell me you don't recall the lyrics to the UP Anthem, UP Naming Mahal! It goes a little something like this:
UP naming mahal, pamantasang hirang
Ang tinig natin, sana'y inyong dinggin
Malayong lupain, atin mang marating
Di rin magbabago ang damdamin
Di rin magbabago ang damdamin.
Luntian at pula, sagisag magpakailanman
Pagdiwang natin, bulwagan ng dangal
Humayo't itanghal, giting at tapang
Mabuhay ang pag-asa ng bayan
Mabuhay ang pag-asa ng bayan.
Thanks to our very own Nicanor Abelardo who penned the lyrics of UP Naming Mahal. I hope we UP alumni are still living up to what we sang during our respective graduations.
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When I was in my graduating year in high school, we had the liberty of choosing from any university we wanted to take their entrance exams. While my batchmates took the exams for all the best universities in Manila (UP, Ateneo, DLSU, and UST), I only took exams for three out of four of these schools.
Before the exams, I visited the three schools I chose (UP, Ateneo, and UST) to have a feel of how I'd fit in if ever I did pass their entrance exams. Actually, I just took the UST exam for the heck of it, not because I wanted to study there. When I went to Ateneo, I didn't like the atmosphere. It just seemed too...elitist. But when I went to UP, I felt at home with the crowd.
I passed the entrance exams for all three schools, but I chose the school that I felt would teach me something more about the world than what is stated in books: the University of the Philippines.
I never regretted my choice.
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Once again, to all of us in the UP community, a happy centennial to all of us!
I just got an announcement from my Eskwela.com profile, and it goes a little something like this:
"As part of UP's 100th year celebration, we are putting together '100 Kwentong Peyups', a series of columns which will appear in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Philippine Star throughout the year. We invite all past students of any of the University of the Philippines ' units to submit their stories. Submissions should:
1. Be a maximum of 1,000 words
2. Be a personal experience and written in the 1st person
3. Emotionally engaging---funny, sad, scary, etc.
4. Make the connection between the story and a life lesson that serves you well today
5. If possible, please include an old photo/scanned memento
Please include your name, College or Unit and Course, and year you entered UP as well as your email address. If you remember your Student Number, even better.
Send your submissions to 100kwentongpeyups@campaignsandgrey.net. You will be notified via email if your story has been selected for publication or for use in other Centennial celebrations.
Submissions will be accepted starting January 1, 2008. Btw, please feel free to pass this on to other UP alumni."
So, what are you waiting for, all ye UP peeps? Share your best (and worst) experiences from within the august halls of UP Naming Mahal! Just don't write about how I terrorized my former students, okay? (LOL!) On the other hand, maybe you should. That would be great for my "terror teacher" persona. hehehe...
One day, a former student of mine texted me to say hello. He said he's already into writing his thesis, and will be graduating very soon from the UIniversity of the Philippines in the Visayas-Tacloban College (UPVTC), the university I used to teach in. He added that he's disappointed with my departure from the university, considering that I was one of his "best" teachers.
Whew, that really made my day. I've been out of the academe for quite some time now, and yet my essence still hasn't left the university. I still get calls from former students like the thesis-writer who thank me for a job well-done. I must have done something right.
I have truly come to understand and appreciate the nobility of the teaching profession, especially after one particular incident. I was in media prior to my stint in the academe, and one time my former media colleagues and I had a reunion of sorts during one of my visits to Manila. All of them came to the venue in cars, while I had to hitch a ride with one of them. Just when the party was in full swing, one of them commented, "You know, you're one big fool. Imagine: if you stayed with us in media, your own car would be parked alongside ours. You'd always have money in your pocket. But you just had to go to the academe -- and how much are you being paid there?" Enraged, I retorted, "I may not have as much money in my pocket as you guys, but remember this: you people wouldn't be the professionals you are today if it wasn't for people like me!"
The rewards of being an educator, after all, cannot be measured by how much money one has in his/her pocket. In fact, a teacher who is true to his/her calling only has a take-home salary just enough for a decent subsistence. Also, compared to others, the teaching profession is a 24-hour job. Classroom work is but a mere fraction of what a teacher does. Spare time is spent studying and preparing for the next lectures, checking papers, researching to hone one's skills and to add to one's knowledge, and maintaining an interpersonal relationship with students that borders on becoming a surrogate parent.
Notwithstanding all the pitfalls that come with being an academician, seeing that "eureka" expression in my students' faces after explaining lessons of the day is worth all the riches in the world. Teaching even becomes more fulfilling when a student names me as his/her mentor after garnering an accolade. Now, this is something my former media colleague will never be able to equate -- not even with 10 cars and money in a Swiss bank.
In my four-year term in UPVTC, I would tell my classes at the start of every semester that lessons in my class are not limited to the four walls of a classroom. This is where I introduce the concept of critical thinking that allows my students to have a better understanding of the world through intensified use of their five senses (and even their sixth -- if they have one) and a thorough analysis of things they have observed in their environment. I also taught them about the higher value of a question as opposed to an answer. Questions have to be well-formulated to elicit significant answers. On the other hand, stupid questions also merit stupid answers. With constant injections of these two paradigms all throughout classes, I would finish every semester with my students armed with tools not just to guide them through the rest of their respective courses but also through the rest of their lives.
My former students -- including the thesis-writer -- may soon forget my name, but they will forever bring with them lessons I taught them in and out of the classroom. I am also happy that as my former students turn into the greatest minds this country has ever produced, I know that at one point in their lives, I was a contributor to their success.
Intangible as it may seem, this is the beauty of teaching.
