The Construct

One of the final touches a thesis writer puts on his thesis is the acknowledgements page. I find it interesting how many others (particularly the undergraduates) find it so sentimental to express their gratitude to people. And I do understand.

Much like long-winded Academy Awards acceptance speeches, acknowledgement pages would list all the people the writer considers “instrumental” (even those very remotely instrumental) to writing their thesis, religious deity, parents, siblings, clan members, advisers, panelists, teachers, lovers, friends, and pets included.

In my case, unlike my 150-page exposition, my acknowledgements page is made up of only a few lines. Just about a third in length of my BA thesis’ ack page. And I can think of a number of possible reasons why but I can’t pinpoint the exact one.

Maybe it’s the nature of the study. The graduate degree is basically “optional” and it isn’t what I would consider my “greatest achievement to date.”

Maybe it’s because there aren’t really many people who helped me finish my degree in the first place.

Maybe it’s my own devolution as a social creature for the past five years. God knows that many of the people I thanked in my BA thesis aren’t my friends any more.

Still, I feel that I have to give credit where credit’s due. That even if I refer to some people in vague generalities, my heartfelt thanks will always be sincere.

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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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.

I had an interesting discussion with my English majors last Thursday in a discussion on the language of politics. Hot off the USC elections, the group in charge made references to the parties and their campaign tactics. It was interesting how they dissected the language and the context and probed the factors that may have affected the vote.

Thoughts came out. The language/variety used in the campaign (English/Taglish/Filipino). The (faulty?) analogy of STAND-UP as the GOP of UP. Parties claiming to bring about change. The focus on student services over idealism. Issues of racism against Filipino-Chinese students prior to the election (during the SR referendum). The number of Filipino-Chinese students in KAISA (probably related to the race issues). The population and demographics of each college. The great number of “burgis” freshmen voting. The electronic voting possibly being rigged…

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I just came home from a forum on documentation and other scholarship. I don’t want to talk about much brainy-geeky suff issues for now so I’d rather discuss the other portion of the forum on e-library services.

So the Main Lib is beefing up its services by offering access to e-libraries and databases like ProQuest and WebFeat. Now I wonder why we didn’t get access to most of these when we were undergrads. I wasn’t too much of a tambay ng Lib for my the last two of undergrad years.

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