Youth and Education

Ghost teachers,’ phantom schools haunt education reforms in ARMM

by Jaileen F. Jimeno

LAWYER FRANCES Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi talks to distraught “dead” teachers all the time, but she makes it a point to crack jokes when they call her on her cell phone at night.

“I appeal to them, please don’t call me at night,” she says. “I’m afraid of you, you’re already dead.”

Guiani-Sayadi is the Solicitor General of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). She has been given the horrendous task of putting order to the chaotic records of teaching personnel in the ARMM.

Read more... | Posted Friday, May 16th, 2008

Las Piñas pushes school reforms despite lack of funds, teachers

by Karol Anne M. Ilagan

Second of three parts LAS PIÑAS CITY — When the latest results of the National Achievement Test (NAT) for Grade 6 students came out in June 2007, this southern Metro Manila city got the fourth highest score in the National Capital Region (NCR), adding yet another item in Las Piñas’s growing list of achievements. Three-part [...]

Read more... | Posted Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Millennium Development Goals

Maguindanao, RP fall behind key indicators for education

by Jaileen F. Jimeno

A TOWN IN MAGUINDANAO — Ten-year-old Dino and two younger boys were harassing a hapless chicken under a neighbor’s nipa house. Covered with dust, the boys obviously hadn’t had a bath just yet that day, and had chosen to go after the chicken while other children in this village trooped to a nearby river to soak and to play.

It looked like a typical village scene — only that it was the middle of a school day and Dino (not his real name) and many of the children should have been in class. But the classrooms in Dino’s school were shuttered because its four teachers were attending a meeting in the capital.

Read more... | Posted Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Whither the MDGs?

by Leonor Magtolis Briones

For the last several months we have been swimming in an alphabet soup of acronyms — NBN, ZTE, NEDA, FG, FGI, to name a few. And more keep pouring in; these days, the most oft-repeated one is NFA, or the National Food Authority. Yet what we should have been repeating like a mantra is MDG and its plural form, which stands for Millennium Development Goals. In 2000, the Philippines became one of the signatories to the Millennium Declaration, thereby sealing its commitment to meeting by 2015 eight goals that address development concerns worldwide. Last year marked the midpoint in the period allotted to the achievement of these MDGs.

Read more... | Posted Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Video

The season of protest songs

by Jaileen F. Jimeno

“BAYAN KO” is in vogue again, being sung by demonstrators on both sides of the political fence.

Out of the current political turmoil, the positive thing singer-songwriter Noel Cabangon expects is a healthier harvest of patriotic song. He says composers often become profound and prolific during these times.

Read more... | Posted Friday, March 14th, 2008

I am woe, man

by Alecks P. Pabico

I HAVE three things in common with former president and certified macho man Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada: the same birthday, facial hair, and the constant presence of women. But while he may believe being constantly around women is a good thing and could be a much needed boost to one’s masculinity, it’s a situation I have ambivalent feelings about.

Read more... | Posted Friday, September 7th, 2007

Favored as boys, disadvantaged as men

by Jaileen F. Jimeno

AS A young girl, Mercy Abad would be woken up every day before dawn, primarily because she had a long list of chores to go through. But decades later, what she remembers in particular is that while she and her two younger sisters were busy doing their assigned tasks, their brothers remained snug in bed, fast asleep. And when the boys woke up, “it was my job to fix their beds,” recalls Abad, adding that in most homes then, boys and men were “waited on hand and foot.”

Read more... | Posted Friday, August 24th, 2007

Still strangers in their own land

by Rorie R. Fajardo

SHE SAID it was a crucial journey for her children’s future.

Weeks before classes opened last month, Myrna Verde packed few clothes, gathered her four school-age children, and boarded a bus for Manila, some 138 kms from their village in Zambales. It was their first time to travel that far from home, but Verde, 57, had a mission: to look for kind-hearted city people who would give her money or any kind of help so that her children — all blind since birth — could continue going to school.

Read more... | Posted Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

The perpetual ‘guests’

by Isa Lorenzo

IN HER school uniform and with an accent that is more Sandra Oh than Sandara Park, Sarang Lim does not look or sound too different from the rest of her schoolmates at the country’s oldest university. But the 24-year-old is part of the latest foreign invasion to hit the Philippines, although her countrymen, contrary to public perception, have not been flocking to our shores only recently. In fact, Koreans have been coming over in significant numbers for at least two decades now, many of them making the trip as families.

Read more... | Posted Friday, July 20th, 2007

A stunted market for kids’ books

by Jaileen F. Jimeno

YOU CAN tell which generation a person belongs to by how they learned to read and the books they loved as kids. For the prewar generation up to martial law babies, it was either Pepe and Pilar in English or Nene at Benito in Filipino. These books also caused several generations of dogs to be named either Tagpi or Bantay, although sometime during the ‘60s, children in private schools began learning to read without the help of Pepe and Pilar or Nene and Benito, but may recall John and Jill, and a dog named Spot.

Read more... | Posted Friday, June 29th, 2007

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