What have you done?

We at UP Mindanao spent the whole day today (I could only attend the afternoon session, though) cooped up at one of Gran Meng Seng Hotel’s function rooms for the “Consultative Forum on the Roadmap for UP’s Next 100 Years.”

One of the questions posed by the participants from outside the academe was UP’s contribution to the educational development of Mindanao. Apparently, UP Mindanao has not really made a dent in the region’s education sector. And I would tend to agree. We haven’t really done enough — given the financial and manpower constraints we in the University face.

But we do try. Just like when we were given the opportunity, last summer 2008, to share our faculty’s expertise through an “Advanced Study for Enhancement Program in English Proficiency” that we organized, with funding from DepEd Region 11 and the Compostela Valley Provincial Government, for selected high school teachers.

The teacher-participants were game in going through exercises that would train them how to make their classrooms more student-activity centered rather than the usual “banking method” employed by most high school teachers.

The teachers had a great time throughout the three-week training workshop, and they professed to having learned a lot from the UP teachers. (I just hope what they said really translates into them replicating the techniques they learned in the workshop to their classrooms back in ComVal.)

So, yes. UP has done something to help develop the education sector in Mindanao. And I wish we can do more.

On food assignment

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Imagine this: you get served a restaurant’s specialities for lunch — that means around four to six dishes, not counting dessert and drinks. There’s only you, the publisher or editor, and the photographer to eat all the food. Then even before you have fully digested what you ate for lunch, you need to go to another restaurant for dinner.

Tiki Wacky Chicken Salad and Belly Buster

Would you envy my job, then?

Here’s some pictures to help you visualize what I mean (photos by C):

 

Mocha Maja

Deep Sea Pasta

Triple Blizzard

That’s just the appetizer of my assignment.

M. Life and Living in Mindanao

Here’s to M. Life and Living in Mindanao that is coming to your favorite newsstands this April 8, 2008. Edited by UP Mindanao Creative Writing and Media Arts teacher Jean Claire A. Dy and published by the cr8tv minds inc. (that includes an old student of mine from Silliman U), the magazine promises to be quite an engaging read for its articles as well as totally eye candy for its swanky design. Bong Segovia, who did the art direction, also gives you this teaser:

Why am I in this “business,” and why in Mindanao?

Once, while making small talk before the start of a meeting, conversation drifted to everybody’s workload. My favorite complaint is not having enough time (what with all my administrative tasks), and so I complained about not being able to accommodate friends’ requests to handle some editing jobs for them. Somebody then mentioned, out of the blue, about ghostwriting the theses of graduate students. I was flabbergasted, to say the least. I mean, I know that happens, but to mention that after I had just made a comment on doing editing jobs? Where was this somebody coming from? And so I said: “Not even if I’m jobless would I do that. After all, that’s one reason why I moved to Mindanao. The education services here is so dismal, why anybody would contribute to that is beyond me. After all, we’re in this ‘business’ not really to earn money, right?” Fortunately for that somebody, conversation drifted to other topics — otherwise, I’d be pontificating about what this country needs, etc.