The Construct

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.
(more…)

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.

It’s quite interesting how people view the Quezon Hall paint throwing incident yesterday. Facebook was practically a warzone between those who lauded the students’ move of throwing paint at a school official and those who believed that UP has really dumbed down.

As I’ve mentioned in a Facebook status post:

I wonder based on what “standards” are we judging these kids. Some of us call them “walang modo” and “bastos” but isn’t it just part of student activism? How far we you willing to go for our convictions? There will always be “better” ways of resolving things if we contemplate on the ifs and buts. Still, if most of us simply stand idly by, then who are we to judge a few hurled paint bombs?

Part of me appreciates the mischief and playfulness displayed by the kids. Activists elsewhere have done more “radical” things. Part of me thinks that there could’ve been better ways of addressing the issue. On a grander level, we can all debate about whether or not dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was the best thing the Allies could do.

We could just hope that we can get sidetracked by the issue. It’s simple strategy and tactics though. Never let your enemy exploit what you do to his/her advantage. I’m sure this will be used to direct attention away from the real ugly underlying issues that needed to be addressed.

How do you put out an oil fire? Start a bigger fire next to it. Self-immolation, anyone?

It really is a hard thing to come up with something original these days. That proverbial bucket in the sea of knowledge is a constant bitching reminder that no matter how much you read and learn, you won’t be able to match the billions of Google’s indexed pages.

Makes you wonder how difficult it really is to write a dissertation these days. I consider myself pretty well-read given my age for my field locally. And yet there’s still a lot of material that I am aware of and have not read, and material that that I haven’t even thought existed despite the thousands of bibliographic entries I’ve browsed. I hate to admit it but I’ve just recently come across Steven Pinker who is, by specialization a psychologist, but anchors many of his arguments on language.

And boy, how I hate myself for only reading about him just now. Quite a lot of my interests in language studies are actually dealt by his works – game theory, pragmatics, and even physics in language. Yes, physics! (Check this video of his talk at Google where he discusses ideas from his book The Stuff of Thought.)

That had me thinking about that joke I had in our graduate class in Semantics about establishing a field on “quantum linguistics.” I argued that deixis and tense can be related to the concepts of space and time. When I was joking about it, I wondered if that was an original idea. Turns out, it isn’t. According to Pinker there’s “space in our prepositions, matter in nouns, time tenses, and causality in verbs.” Humble pie for me.

Still, this has me thinking. How much original and world-changing thought can be conjured up by an ordinary mind? Perhaps that’s the reason why God only sends a genius like Einstein once a century. Maybe the world won’t just be able to deal with such revolutionary ideas if they come plenty and quick in between. The rest of us are just plain bound for mental mediocrity.

Part of the tasks of descriptive linguistics is to seek out patterns which shouldn’t be that much of an effort since humans are said to be innately equipped with capacities to seek out patterns. And the task seems to be easier with analytic languages like English where logic is tied to word order.

Some people are more equal than others in this regard though. Remember those scenes in A Beautiful Mind where numbers just pop out of all the chaos for John Nash? That’s just a visual depiction of everyone else’s inadequacies. And “everyone else” includes me.

I have to go through hundreds of sentences of GMA’s SONAs in an effort to extract patterns. I’ve already observed some but recently, ever since January struck, I just seem to be at a loss of what to make sense of all of these sentences.

Well, the biased social commentator in me would probably go medieval and say, “I see patterns! Lies! Lies and slander! And dead people!”

Maybe I should stop looking at it for a while. Yup. Maybe that would work. Just like those magic 3D images where it does help to relax your eyes. Only if I don’t have a deadline for my first draft at the end of the month.