playful

I’m a bit upset knowing that as I have reviewed the prospectus of the course that I was planning to shift (again) this Summer, I’d still end up being a freshman. FTW! After two years of Engineering subjects plus this new course, once I change and update man status, I’ll still be a First Year? I can pass of one when I shave but hey, this ain’t no laughing matter for me. I’ll try to look for alternatives on what I can do to hasten the process; maybe attend a university online. I thought I only had 3 more years to go. sheesh.

Merry Christmas! spent the time at the office. Am I that lame? Nah, don’t think so, I have a friend who’s studying cosmetology that’s more preoccupied than I am. I take this as a temporary respite already. I can just savor the cold Christmas air without any worry. Besides, home is where I am; and I am happy.

Break from work, break from school. For around 9 days, I won’t have to worry about exams and quotas; heck I won’t even have to worry about being late in school or at the office. I can be the lazy bum I’ve always thought I could never be. But definitely I’ll be blogging about stuff again. But I plan to go out somewhere in order to reward myself one way or another. Afterward, I can try scouting for an online university degree that would fancy me. But for now, it’s all break!

Woohoo!

I have to hike to the Arts and Sciences building. Not one of those cosmetology colleges that people may think this is but it’s better than nothing.

Need to take a pee break first.

Ah, a 15-inch cathode ray tube.

Now let’s learn how to make a text file. lol

This is my class schedule for this sem. pretty tiring if you ask me.

Somehow, I am not always lucky when picking a blocked sked. Obviously, I’m not a regular student. Still, at least I’m able to maximize all my subjects for now. It’s kinda sad knowing that my body doesn’t get enough sleep as much as it needs to. But I know it’s only how many days left until the semester ends. I’m glad.

Looking at it makes me want to puke. Makes me wonder if  I could just attend an online university or something.

I am a student. I came back to school just to get a diploma. I still have 2 years counting to graduate, and that’s if I take full load every semester and sacrifice all my summers. The reason why I stopped schooling is due to financial matters. And right now, since I’m back on track, I just need a piece of paper for formality sake. I hope I can get some Online Degree Programs after but it’s taking up much of my time just to research that I don’t know where to start.

I am an employee. I work in a nocturnal industry where I sacrifice a number of hours of sleep. My body gives up on me every now and then but I do my best to rest on weekends.

I am a blogger. Wait, make that a psycho with a multiple personality disorder. I have 3 other personal blogs. I blog in order to express thoughts as well as earn extra moolah in the process.

The reason why I was able to go back and study is because of the company. They’re the one’s paying for my education. I’m not a scholar, I don’t have an IQ of a genius; that’s just one of the great benefits of the place where I work. Since I also blog, I’m able to earn some extra income as a sideline.

My goal for this site is to be able to chronicle my life as a student, as an employee and as a blogger. I have a 9-hour shift on weekdays, I couple it with 20 units of school activities for this semester, and the rest would be devoted to blogging. I live a boring life. But if you’re interested, feel free to comment.

A forwarded email as I was browsing through my Yahoo! account. It got me thinking on why I went back schooling with a shallow purpose. Reading the article made me feel like an jackass because of why I’m doing what I’m doing. When did practicality overwhelm idealism?

What’s education for?
By Conrado de Quiros
Published on page A14 of the January 31, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

GILL Westaway, British Council executive director, had an interesting thing to say last week. The Philippines, he said, could be suffering from too many colleges and universities. “There could be an oversupply in some areas. In a country like the Philippines, where resources are scarce, it’s better to have fewer universities with quality rather than allowing hundreds of universities that are diluting the overall quality.” Westaway based his remarks on a one-year study made by the British Council with funding from the Asian Development Bank.

Well, if the point of education is merely to enable students to find jobs, then I agree with this wholeheartedly. A college or university education in this country is superfluous, even counterproductive. It is four or five years’ waste of time and effort. A couple of months from now, thousands of college graduates will line up before their school officials to get their diplomas, and we will hear again, in editorials and various commentaries, about how so few of those hopeful faces will turn radiant in the next few years. Most of them will end up glum from unemployment. There are simply no jobs available for most of those commerce, accounting and communication graduates.

If the point is landing a job abroad, then the four or five years spent in colleges and universities are just as well a waste of time and effort. You won’t be working as a doctor, lawyer, or media person in other countries anyway. They won’t take you in those capacities simply because you have a degree in medicine, law, or communication from a Philippine university. Your employers are not entirely to blame, to go by the Newsweek ranking of colleges and universities some years ago, where Ateneo, UP and La Salle landed among the lower rungs of the ladder, a far cry from 30 years before when they were among the top 20 in Asia. You have a degree in medicine, law and communication from a Philippine university, you will work as a caregiver, a bank teller, or a fast-food attendant anyway.

If the point of education is to merely give students employment, here or abroad, we would be better off scrapping colleges and universities and putting up nursing and trade schools and schools that teach survival English across the country. Many colleges and universities are already doing it, opening up nursing departments in response to the demand for caregivers in the United States, Canada and elsewhere. And teaching functional English so the nurses and maids can communicate with their employers. I am not being entirely facetious when I say maybe we should also put up pop music schools. That’s our main export to Asia-musicians and bands.

But if the point of education is more than just employing people, then the problem becomes a lot more complex, one that isn’t solved simply by lessening the number of colleges or universities. The problem precisely lies in the fact that our whole educational system is now predicated on enabling students to find work. That is as narrow and unenlightened a view of education as you can get. The point of education is not just to enable students to work, it is to enable students to think. The point of education is not just to impart skills, it is to impart vision. The point of education is not just to prepare the youth to face the “outside world.” The point of education is to educate.

I grant giving students the skills to find jobs is important as well, particularly for a country like ours. I found nothing short of heroic the efforts of my mechanic some years ago to see his son through dentistry and his daughter through nursing school. At the end of the day, he would pull himself up from underneath the car he had been fixing, grimy and sweaty, to greet his kids when they came home from school in their smart all-white uniforms. People like him have every right to expect his children’s schools to give them a crack at a more secure future.

But that isn’t all that schools can, or should, do. Certainly, that isn’t all that colleges and universities can, or should, do. The business of colleges and universities is to bequeath to the world a generation that can think, that can aspire to know the what and the why and not just the how and the how-how-the-carabao. I remember again the irate letter-writer who demanded to know what I had against caregivers and maids-I had asked what we were doing turning ourselves into the toilet-bowl cleaners of the world-when both did completely respectable work. My answer then, and now, is that I have nothing against them, just as I have nothing against janitors and forklift operators. What I have against is the attitude that we can only exist in survival mode and that we can’t be better. What I have against is an educational system that imagines its role in life to be to cater to the export labor market by producing standard entrants to it.

I remember again too the non-joke about Pinoy and Chinoy college graduates. When Pinoy graduates meet, they ask each other, “What job have you landed?” When Chinoy graduates meet, they ask each other, “What business have you opened?” We can say the same thing about the graduates of our colleges and universities and those of other Asian countries. When they meet, our graduates ask each other, “Which country do you want to go to?” When the graduates of other Asian colleges and universities meet, they ask each other, “Where do we want our country to go?” The first is called resignation, the second is called ambition. The first is called desperation, the second is called direction. The first is called getting by, the second is called getting ahead.

We just want the first, let’s not bother reducing our colleges and universities. Let’s scrap them altogether

———-

True enough, one can get an online degree anywhere, but one should know the value of education in order to be truly wise and learn. Anyone can get a degree, but the process of application which we want to be part of our system, is a bit hard.

These are the subjects that I took for this semester

Psyc1: Psychology – I’m starting to like this subject but I don’t have to sweat it as much.

PE14B: Team Sports – We’re through with volleyball, basketball’s next.

AC11: Elementary Accounting – This is the most demanding subject when it comes to time, we meet 6 hours a week! Only it’s broken down to two days TTh, so it’s 3 grueling hours each; and that’s before I go to work.

ReEd30: Religion Education – Sheesh, I have to survive this?

CS11: Introduction to Computers – I don’t think I need this but for the sake of it being part of the curriculum, I should learn how to move folders, create text files, and other basic computer stuff. Toinks.

Hist15: Philippine History – The history of my country. bow.

Two weeks after the start of classes, I realized that I took all minor subjects which shouldn’t happen. I should’ve distributed them evenly so that I can maximize the time period. I don’t want to be in my Senior year and just take one major subject. But I had no choice, there were no available schedules left. I wish I could just earn some online courses out of them but I guess I’ll just have to deal with it for now.

Still have an issue with the header showing in Internet Explorer. Sigh. At least most people use Mozilla, I think. But still, I’d like everything to be neat and at least almost the same without too much distraction in different browsers.

I’ll be getting searching for online colleges after so I hope those programs won’t affect the browser as it’s hard to earn a certificate especially a degree.