A pug’s mug

Diliman is rarely as pretty as it is these days, with the fire trees in full bloom and five-minute showers lending the late afternoons a fine silvery sheen. For a couple of weeks every June, I remember and I realize why I chose to teach in Diliman instead of anywhere else; I hate to say this, but it’s really the place more than the people (no offense to anyone, folks) that makes me stay here: the gentle chimes of the carillon bells, the bistek and the nilagang mais at the Shopping Center, the beer at the PCED patio (now the spiffier University Hotel).

The rhapsody, of course, soon passes when the realities of the classroom set in. That moment came rather quickly for me, on the first day of school, when I walked into my Contemporary American Literature class and asked 20 students when the United States arrived to conquer the Philippines, just to ground them in the hundred-year history of our love-hate relationship with that country. How many people do you think knew the answer? One. (It gets worse. On a hunch, I asked them what they thought the population of the Philippines was. "Two million?" offered one student.) My work was cut out for me. (I’ve often argued – even and especially in courses involving literature and reading – that we Pinoys have as much of a problem, if not a bigger one, with innumeracy as we have with illiteracy. We have a very poor head for figures – even those that practically control our lives and determine our future, such as our population growth rate, our per capita income, and our foreign debt.)

On the other hand, I was glad to see some old friends and acquaintances – now in their late 40s or early 50s – return to the university to finish their ABs or to get an MA, having set their studies aside for nearly three decades to heed the more urgent clamor of politics, families, and jobs. I myself took 14 years to get my bachelor’s degree – a feat easily outdone by Steven Spielberg, who only recently got his arts diploma from Cal State Long Beach 34 years after dropping out of film school (and after five honorary doctorates, one of them from Yale just three days earlier).

These balik-aral people don’t really need college degrees for their professional advancement, if truth be told; if you’re engaged in writing, the arts, journalism, or political advocacy, academic degrees don’t mean all that much. But with age and maturity comes a longing to complete unfinished business, to find worthier reasons for educating oneself beyond the promise of a piece of paper. And one thing you can say for these 40- and 50-somethings is that they know their history, and how it will help the future. I’ve always advised my own students to set a few years aside for real life and living before returning to school for their MAs or PhDs. You’d be surprised what time away from school can do for your education.

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I should’ve known what to expect when I paid just P100 for a CD of MP3s as a gift for myself on Father’s Day. (MP3s, as all the kids know, are music tracks in a compressed format that can be read and played by computers.) I have more than a gigabyte of what I call "old-guy" songs (Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, etc.), but this CD was different; it was advertised as "The Classical Legends 2002," featuring works by Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and a host of other classical masters. I bought it pronto, and only back home did I realize, on closer (very close) reading of the back cover, what my CD promised to contain. If any of these titles sound familiar to you, heck, they sure sound familiar to me as well – but isn’t something just a wee bit off, here? Here they are, verbatim, as their Chinese (or, as these things go, their Indonesian) encoder typed them:

Concerto for Hacn in E Flat
Barcode by Offembach
Prelude in C Charp Minor by Rachmaninov
Liebeectraum No3 by Kisrt
18th Vacation by Rachmaninov
Nutccccacker Suite
Miniture Overture
Dance of Sugar Plum
Walts
Symphony No All in C Minor by Beethoven
Syphony Know All in C by Mozart
Minuebbo

Thankfully, the music itself turned out all right – except that they all had titles on the CD itself like "Track001???!!!.mp3," which made it difficult for me to figure out exactly which one of them was the eerily prescient Barcode of "Offembach."

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As a follow-through on last week’s piece featuring candid student evaluations of their teachers on www.pinoyexchange.com – and before our colleagues in La Salle, Ateneo, and UST get too smug for seemingly having been spared public (well, at least on-line) embarrassment – let me report that there are, indeed, other "threads" or running discussions on the same website devoted to the best and the worst of other institutions.

The full URLs (Internet addresses to most of us) are way too long and complicated to type out here for you to copy, but you can go to www.pinoyexchange.com/forums/forums and look for these threads: "Best and Worst Profs in DLSU"; "Your Favorite or Most Hated Professors in UST"; "Best and Worst Ateneo Teachers"; and "My Most Unforgettable Professor." To balance things out, there are also threads on "Teachers – Our Turn!" (amen!) and "Should Teachers Be Paid More?" (Is that even subject to discussion?) Thanks to Mads de Guzman of Pinoyexchange for the information. Mida and Ben Azada also wrote in from Hong Kong to alert me to another interesting website, www.ateneodummies.com. You find or figure out what that site contains.

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Speaking of intriguing websites, another friend of mine, filmmaker Gil Magnaye, alerted me to the hidden wonders of www.rexnavarrete.com. I’d never heard of Rex Navarrete before – I thought for a minute that he was that "Bad Boy from Dadiangas" boxer and ex-champ – so I looked and sure enough, there was this indisputably Pinoy guy with a pug’s mug smiling at you in that, uh, Ruben "Divine Master" Ecleo way, except that this was apparently a Filipino-Canadian comedian with a flair for what we can only call baduy chic. Advertised on his site are some downloadable songs whose descriptions, quoted below, suggest where the humor of overseas Pinoys is at these days:

– Ipasok Mo (a hidden track on "Husky Boy," Ipasok Mo is a simple and beautiful melody that conveys the Filipino soul as sung by Tito Boy)

– Brown Skin Lady (legendary Pinoy rocker Bobby Banduria unleashes this track for the Rex Website. Contact him at bobbybanduria@hotmail.com for the album "Shiny Silver Jeepney" off Jeepney Dash Records)

– Maritess vs. the Superfriends (the now infamous "what if?" story of what might happen if the Hall of Justice was kept in order by a Filipina domestic worker, available on the "Badly Browned" album)

– Rex Navarrete - Let’s Party Like It’s 1904 [e:trinity dumb hard house remix] Download MP3.

Party on, Pinoy dudes!

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I can’t reprint or personally answer all the impassioned and insightful messages I received from people responding to my recent series of columns on improving English language teaching in this country, but I can at least acknowledge and thank the people who wrote in, among them George Chua, Alice Sun Cua, Roli Talampas, Cecile Diamante, L. E. Johnson, Ruth Villamarin, Andrea Lim, Mike Rivera, Rona Manguerra, Auggie Surtida, Mhabi Tan (or was that M. Habitan?). Ging Clamor, Sarah Boncan (not the "Sarah" I quoted), and Meg Francisco. I’ve saved your messages and would like to assure you that they haven’t been wasted; it’s real-world responses and ideas like these that we at school can discuss and use to fine-tune our teaching. I expect to be drawing on them at our next faculty workshop. Again, thank you all for writing in.

Many of you wrote to ask me to recommend someone who could help you with your English language skills. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend anyone or any group without personally knowing what their objectives and methods are. But do ask and look around – look for someone who emphasizes grammar and reading rather than pronunciation or conversational skills, unless that’s what you think you need. The best long-term (and largely free) solution to your language woes is really just to read well and to read a lot, and to practice your writing. Here’s one tip: always try to complete your sentences, whether in speaking or in writing. For me, good language really means a mastery of sentence structure and then of word choice. Start from there, and end there.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.