The Construct

And we complain about the “poor” command of English our graduates have. There’s no reason to play chicken and egg on a problem that is caused by many wrongs on so many different levels. But one thing that the academe shouldn’t do is make matters worse by implementing obviously detrimental policies.

I just recently heard from my good friend Randwin (a fellow MA student, former classmate, and instructor at UP Los Baños) that their administration has allegedly mandated their division to turn all English GE courses to large classes of 160 students or more.

Any ESL teacher would see the flaw in such an arrangement. The lower the student ratio is, the better. For starters, it allows for more interactions between student and teacher. The teacher will also be more capable of monitoring each student’s progress.

Grading 25 papers on the merits of the good old Content, Oragnization, Style, Grammar and Mechanics is already a huge task. Imagine doing that for 160.

Obviously, some people at Los Baños are not too happy about the matter. Here’s Randwin’s take on the matter.

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Just a quickie. I just noticed that I get 180 prefix when I connect recently. Maybe starting around a week ago. I used to get the dreaded 203 or 222 prefix which meant that I’m on their oftentimes shared public IP.

I used to have such bad luck with Globe’s shared public IP addresses. That meant I can’t use file sharing sites Rapidshare and sometimes when some dolt Globelines user had been idiotic enough to get banned (by IP) in some sites, I’m locked out as well.

Those times, I had to reconnect for several times before I get a more decent IP address. But now that I’m getting the new 180 prefix. Still dynamic but it appears that I don’t have the shared IP problem with most sites. And my uTorrent is still getting that green notification meaning that my port forwarding settings are still good.

Looks like things are looking great.

I think I am not alone in saying that it is frustrating to be young academic at a university in a third world. Thanks to the Internet, we know that there are so many exciting studies and researches being done elsewhere. The reality that we are lagging behind has just become even clearer.

Even in the humanities, institutions elsewhere are factoring in technologies in their studies, even acknowledging the convergence, intersections and overlaps with the other fields. They have long employed trans-disciplinary researches.

But here are, continuing to dwell in Ivory Towers. We continue to claim exclusivity and authority while the rest of the world is thriving in collaboration. Some of us still even justify our pursuance of the field with our personal abhorrence for numbers and formulas.

It is 2010. And it is a damn shame if we still stick to 20th century thinking.

Check out Bennington president Liz Coleman on her call for a cross-disciplinary approach and the reinvention of liberal arts education.

That probably happened to you. You fancied trying out a restaurant for the first time. You plunk down on your seat. You flip through the menu from end to end. Then you flip through it again. There’s not one thing that you’d like to eat. Then you think whether you’d get up and leave or just settle for what you think is their most palatable dish even if it’s named “Binarurot na Tambakol” or something.

That’s exactly the feeling I have looking at the choices among the candidates for president in the 2010 elections. Here are my current takes on the presidential candidates.

• Noynoy Aquino – The guy thinks that the presidency is a birthright. Not to mention that he doesn’t have any accomplishments to boot. If this guy wins, Kris will be the most powerful woman in the country.
• JC de los Reyes – Uh. Yeah. This guy.
• Jamby Madridal – Not really aware of her agenda so pretty hard to tell. Has a bit of a leftist leaning.
• Erap Estrada – ~@_@~ (Not a big fan of emoticons, but come on…)
• Dick Gordon – Good administrator from what you can see from SBMA track record so he just might be a good chief executive. He seemed to have slacked off for the past years though. And he’s running with Bayani.
• Gibo Teodoro – On paper, one of the better candidates. But he’s running as the administration’s The Chosen One so he’s like steak with shit as gravy.
• Eddie Villanueva – I don’t seem to be comfortable with voting a guy who straddles that line between Church and State as Head of State?
• Manny Villar - The “I wuz poor” thing has gotten old. He’s been rich for so long.

The thing is, with a dish, you really won’t know if it’s any good unless you’ve tried it.

I feel so old in saying “How I wish we had the learning resources kids have these days.” The Internet and the availability of information has, I think, has pretty much the same effect as, say the photocopying machine or the word processor. I just can’t imagine writing a 100-page thesis

Just last night, my younger university colleague, Raymond and I were sharing a few of the ideas that are quite interesting research areas for us language scholars. Then we came to the issue of access to the latest ideas and resources. How can one do relevant research when we’re still quoting 20 year-old materials.

Wikipedia is up-to-date but still questionable for most as a “citable” resource. But who needs Wikipedia if you can get the actual ebooks and book scans online for free? Sites like Gigapedia (which has been online for more than a year now, wonder why only very few UP people know about it) have a better catalog for recent books than local libraries.

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