The Construct

Google first. Ask later.

Someone else’s got the answers to your stupid questions. We can’t be bothered.

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Yup. Maybe we should start offering this as a basic course in college. Better yet, teach Googling as early as basic education.

I remember that our teachers use to discuss the Dewey Decimal System to locate books in a library. Forget that. How about teaching effective use of keywords when using search engines.

One of the huge reasons why I’ve become so jaded teaching in UP is the shifting demographics of the student population.

Usually, a discussion of starting salary’s one of the most interesting portions of my English 30 class. Everyone was keen on sharing their opinions on the matter.

Not these days. Today, it’s one of the shortest since the shared opinion is that “We don’t really have the pressure to earn so starting salary’s not an issue.”

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Facebook has been abuzz lately with the jejemon phenomenon. It appears that someone has finally decided to label those who use a local variety of leetspeak as “jejemons,” which, I believe is a blend of “jeje” (the variety’s phonologically-conditioned orthographic representation of the laugh “hehe”) and Pokemon (itself a blend of “pocket” and “monster”).

Since traditional media has now found social network trends newsworthy, the jejemon phenomenon (jejemonon?) warranted a writeup from Inquirer.net calling the so-called jejemons the new jologs.

So who are these jejemons anyway? I’d hate to cite UrbanDictionary.com but based on what appears to be Facebook consensus, the jejemons are the breed of computer-mediated communicators who use a hybrid code which draws from jologspeak, leetspeak, textese, and gamer language. The code is manifested through their use of media such as SMS and the Internet.

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It’s graduation time once again and I wonder how many kids will be walking tall just because they’d be graduating cum laude or its higher variants.

This might be a bit of sourgraping but it seems that it’s just so easy to get honors these days. The Revised Genereal Education Program (RGEP) has been the subject of controversy over the past few years.

Ever since students have had the “freedom” to choose the general education subjects, grade inflation has appeared to be a problem. We’ve seen it all over the Internet. What was once a Peyups.com phenomenon can be seen over many a social network – fora that discuss the recommended classes and professors mostly based on the “petiks” workload and “unoability.”

I’ve had my fare share inside the classroom and I’m pretty sure that my previous students would classify me (based on today’s grading standards) as “kuripot.” I can still count with my fingers the students to whom I’ve given the grade of 1.0. Barely scrape by in my class and you get a 3.0. Do a good job, 2.0.
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To think that I’ve spent the past twenty-two years of my life studying in a formal setting. Fancy that. Hours spent inside the classroom. I wonder if that should count as living at all. And guess what I’ll be doing for the next few years again.

Study.

Contrary to what some might believe, my real passion is computing. Ever since I keyed in my first DOS command some sixteen years ago, I knew that I’ll have a lifelong passion for these brilliant machines. Too bad my shitty law school pipe dream made me take up English Studies. Don’t get me wrong, I like applied linguistics and I’ve grown to be quite good at it.

Now, I want to pursue my real passion. The tricky part is knowing how to go about it properly. It has been four years since I actually coded a piece of software (aside from the minor WordPress PHP tweaks here and there). I have minimal understanding of basic principles of computer science and my math has decayed to somewhere below the level of high school algebra.

It’s not really practical for me to waste another three or four years to get a degree. Maybe I’ll just focus on the things that I like (web and game development) and try to wing it. Anyway, I could always approach some people to help me out.