Oral Exams

At the moment Steph and I are occupied for the most part with Final Exams. Yesterday it was the turn of the senior students to have their Final English Oral Exam. This exam took the form of a mock interview.

When we first arrived back in October we sat in on the previous batch of students when they sat their Final English Oral Exam which was also a mock interview. Our first impression in October was that we had some serious work to do with the next batch!

I am really pleased to say that by comparison the cohort we examined yesterday are much improved. Some of them are still a long way off speaking competent English but none of them were lost for words or completely unable to understand what we were asking. At their best there are a few whose English is an equal of anyone else’s here. Considering that these are generally the less intellectually able students learning their second language the evidence of their progress is really pleasing. What has most obviously improved is their confidence, the students have grasped a freedom to speak not achieved by their predecessors.

Languages are subjects in which it is quite difficult to measure progress over the short term. Week to week there can seem to be very little difference. So it is really uplifting to see that, when all is said and done, they have been learning. The hard work has, thankfully, been worth it. These are the times which make being a teacher worthwhile.

So to MT73, IE46 and WFT59; a very big well done! 

The Challenges of Teaching - Part 2

It has been a few weeks since I wrote a post for this blog. The reason for this silence has been twofold, firstly the recent visit of our friend Janet and secondly the invigilating and marking of our final exams. Round one of exams is now complete and we have a few days of being a little less busy before starting the re-sit exams on Wednesday. This short space in which to breath is a chance for a little more reflection.

Seven months of being a teacher has set me thinking a lot about education and what it means to really educate another person. What is the point of education? The best response I can give at this stage is that to educate another person is to challenge and enable them to become fully alive.

Many of our students, before studying here, have spent years in different educational establishments being taught, and yet they seem, in some cases, to have learnt very little. The style of education they have received seems to have been very much a process of accumulating a bank of facts in their heads rather than encouraging them to think critically. Our students know a lot of ‘facts’ but they find it very difficult to take these facts they have learnt and apply them to real life situations in a critical way. They find it very hard to make their knowledge useful. Questions which involve having to work out what they need to do as well as actually doing it are often a step too far. In any given situation there might be several different ways to say the same thing, to calculate the correct solution or to build a given project, our students find the choice and discernment process necessary to work out which method is the best in any given situation very challenging.

Perhaps the struggle to think through and make reflected-on choices is a common struggle. The ability to think critically is, I think, an essential life skill. In real life there is rarely only one possible truth. Being among those who find this deeper thinking hard has shown me that there is a clear link between being able to solve a maths or technology problem and being able to reflect more deeply on life. The ability to look at a situation from different points of view in one sphere naturally leads to being able to think more generally.

To philosophise is not to engage in abstract discussion of metaphysics it is to constantly allow life to question us, to be open to new possibility and new potential. To be fully alive we must be free enough to be able to embrace what is new. One of the saddest things which can happen to a person is that they find themselves, for whatever reason, unable to cope with the constant newness necessary to be fully alive. New relationships are rejected, new experiences are avoided and new ideas are ignored. Too often, like a little children scared on her first day at school, a person can be too scared to embrace newness.

To be locked rigidly into one way of being or understanding is to stifle ourselves. So perhaps the most important job of any educator is to set those in their care free mentally and emotionally to be able to really reflect on life and to challenge themselves. A good teacher is able to help their students to contemplate the questions which they fear will reveal truths they won’t like.  Being open to new and original ways of understanding both ourselves and our world is perhaps the definition of being a fully educated person.

Good education is transformative. Realising and embracing the reality that there is more than one way to multiply a number, make a cabinet, construct a sentence, wire a circuit or fix an engine is a first step on a journey towards real freedom and real happiness.

Welcoming a Visitor

After more than six months away from the UK and all our friends and family last week we had the pleasure of playing host to our friend Janet. Hence the recent blog silence!

It was great to see here and to show her first hand many of the sights, experiences and realities which just can't be expressed by writing or photos. It was also really nice to look again with new eyes at all that has become so familiar.

Many thanks Janet for coming, It was a great ten days......here are some photos.   

Easter Celebrations at DBTC

Here is a photographic taster of the Easter Celebrations here.

Why did God die?

²⁰ “When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. ²¹ He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites—all their sins—and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. ²² The scapegoat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness

 (Leviticus 16:20-22)

This short text from the book of Leviticus sums up, with a certain pathetic irony, something very telling about human nature. For some reason we believe that we can remove our problems by transferring them to someone or something else and then once the problems are sufficiently distanced from ourselves we can condemn them, expel them and maybe even kill them without having to do anything to transform ourselves.

Such is the road to salvation which so many of us attempt to walk far too often. The problem is not me! The problem is that person over there! If only we could sort him out then all would be well! If only she would change then my problems would be solved!

Very quickly this method of thinking leads us to a mindset or defining ourselves in terms of oppositions, we cannot really say what we are for, only what we are against. Slowly this mindset spirals us inwards, those around us become our competitors not our siblings. Humanity too quickly becomes a community of aggressive competition.

Perhaps Jesus died because he made such a radical stance against this philosophy. In Jesus we have a God and a Man whose identity is found in universality. He challenged those around him not to export their problem and to see others as their family not as their competitors.

Let's be brutally honest, this idea of universality is too much for most of us, too much of our self identity is tied up with our sense of perceived superiority, so we attempt to ignore or clarify Jesus' words, we attempt to take Jesus to have meant that we only have to love some people, or else we make this definition of love something very ephemeral and spiritual disconnected from how we live. We dis-incarnate Jesus moving him into the sky and far away from our own daily life.

But Jesus will not play along with our (or indeed anyone else’s) self justifying fantasies of superiority. Whenever we reject another there Jesus is stood with that others being rejected as well. Whoever we presume to place outside our community in that very act we are also putting Jesus outside. Whenever we try to attain salvation through assigning scapegoats we should know that Jesus is that scapegoat.

Jesus is saying "OK if you insist on having scapegoats then I will be it, if you insist on rejecting others then I will be the one who is rejected, if you insist on defining yourself in opposition to something then it will be in opposition to me."

If we can only find our identity in opposition, rejection and expulsion then we should at least know that the one we are rejecting, expelling and killing is God himself.

And if you are reading this and thinking it applies to someone else rather than you........................

Good Friday

And so to part 2.

Yesterday at 3.00pm we returned to the, now very bare, church for the Good Friday service.

Afterwards Steph and I walked to a nearby parish to take part in their Good Friday procession. At 5.00pm the dead body of Jesus is symbolically processed through the streets as if to the tomb. Literally thousands of people followed this funeral procession singing and praying the rosary.

Holy Thursday

At 5.00pm yesterday evening we began, along with Christians across the world, to celebrate the three most important services of the year. Holy (or Maundy) Thursday is part 1, it remembers the washing of the disciples feet by Jesus, the Last supper and the praying of Jesus before his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane. After the eucharist the churches are stripped bare and the bread and wine (now the body and blood of Christ) are removed from the church to a place set apart.

My experience of Holy Thursday in the UK has been of an emphasis on the removal of Jesus’ presence from the church. Jesus who is about to die is taken away and the worshippers are left inside the now very bare church contemplating this desolation. The practise of remaining symbolically with Jesus as he prays waiting for his arrest generally takes place with people sitting in the same seat as they sat in to celebrate the last supper.

In the church we attended however the emphasis of the tradition seemed to be different, as Jesus left the church the whole congregation followed in procession.  For the rest of the evening until midnight worshippers prayed not in the church but before the temporary outdoor altar where the Bread and Wine were placed. This place of reservation was very colourful, covered with flowers and candles.

During the evening there is a tradition here of trying to visit and pray with, at least seven different parishes before midnight. Hence we piled, along with 27 others, into a small van and began a pilgrimage around Cebu visiting different parishes spending a little time to pray in each one.

Across the different parishes we visited there was, as might be expected, a certain variation in practise. In some the altar of repose was still within the church building and barely a few metres from the main altar. However in others a significant effort had been made to construct a new place of prayer in a separate place. What was striking above all else was the number of people participating, all the places we visited were busy with people. These celebrations are a truly communal event  

The Importance of Growing Vegetables

March, April and May are the months of summer for the Philippines. The schools have finished for the summer, the weather is a few degrees even hotter than usual and the community we live with is generally a little less busy.

                The Technical training department where we work is, however, for the moment still working. The students only spend one year studying so there is no time for a long summer holiday. Lessons will continue until Saturday 14^th April then there will be Final exams, remedial lessons for some and only after that a week of holiday before the new semester starts.

                Despite the continuing work there is a feeling of summer. One of the aspects of the department which is very striking is the environment in which it sits. Part of the routine of the daily chores, and the community service given out for punishment, is to care for the gardens. The technical education building is surrounded by greenery both decorative and edible. Growing fruit and vegetables is very much part of the routine. We teach in very pleasant surroundings.

                All of the practical needs of the department are fulfilled by the students; cleaning, painting, gardening and even walking the department’s dog. Any repairs which need to be made are done by the students. As a result there is a real care for the physical surroundings, very little is broken and nothing is vandalised. However on a deeper level there is a sense that the building and surroundings look lived in. Things look like they have been made by students; there is a rustic-ness which I think is both homely and an important part of the department’s ethos. The students have to do practical work but crucially they also feel a real sense of collective ownership, there is the space for the individual to be creative and to be themselves. Perhaps without this sense of ownership and potential creativity the chores would feel more like a form of servitude than a form of service.

                If there was one aspect of the routine here which I could transplant into the British education system it would be this routine of community service balanced by a sense of collective ownership. Such a culture could do a lot to offset the obsession with individual attainment which currently reigns in most British schools. What we too often lack is this space to serve others in a way which allows us to give something of ourselves.

Annoyances - Part 4: Lacking Change

Shops never have any change. It doesn't matter how big the shop it they invariable have no change. A large proportion of the economy is transacted in very small amounts, for small business and small shops it is essential to have the smaller notes and coins. Thus everyone has to use the big shops to spend their larger notes and to get hold of smaller notes and coins. No one will ever give the right money in a supermarket because they have to use the transaction to get hold of change, so invariable the supermarket will run out of change really quickly. The bottom line is that there clearly aren't enough coins in circulation, a bigger proportion of the money needs to be in the form of coins. Frequently in shops we will have to wait while the shop assistant pleads with us to have the right change or while he or she goes to neighbouring shops looking for change.