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.

A Filippino Theology? - Part 2

The Catholic Church of the Philippines is deeply influenced by the Church in Europe. How could it be otherwise, for so much of Christian history the Church has been an almost complete European entity, non-European congregations being seen as merely satellites of the European Church. Still today most of the power to influence the work and the thinking of the Church is held in Europe.

Happily things are at least beginning to change. The Filippino Church is beginning to go back to the sources of Christianity for itself and attempt to read them afresh and to see what they might mean in a new context.

Clearly, I am not an expert in Filippino theology, so I won’t presume to make a detailed analyse of it, but I would like to highlight two elements.

The country recently celebrated 26 years since the fall of Marcos as president. The largely peaceful struggle against Marcos was a coalition of many different groups, an important part of which were Christians motivated by their faith to challenge an unjust regime. Out of this movement came what has become known as the Theology of Struggle. This theology places at the centre of Christianity the struggle against oppression in all its forms. Crucially it is a doctrine which speaks from the point of view of those at the bottom seeking to empower them. Such ideas are a world away from a European Church whose perspective is a legacy of waning political and ecclesiastical power. The theology of struggle calls for communal solidarity, and for leaders who will embrace humble simplicity while rejecting violence at any level.

In the Years since the fall of Marcos, and with the emergence of a Filippino elite increasing keen to embrace right-wing economics the Theology of Struggle has slipped into the background being sometimes labelled as communist or sympathetic to terrorists. Equally in international Church circles it is little taken note of, perhaps because the wider Church enjoys the trappings of privilege a little too much?

The second element I would like to highlight is production of a new translation of the bible, the Christian Community Bible, whose title page explicitly proclaims that it is written for

"The Christian Communities of the Philippines and the Third World; and for those who seek God."

Versions of this Filippino bible exist in both English and Tagalog. The production of this bible is an open acknowledgement of what linguists have always known, that to translate is always to interpret. This translation claims for its own the perspective of the poor.

The Christian Community Bible is the official bible translation of the Catholic Church in the Philippines, and yet sadly at least where we are it is hardly ever used in liturgy, imported American texts are easier to find and cheaper to buy.

In terms of creating a properly inculturated Filippino Church there is a long way to go, much only exist in the realms of theology and academic thought. The real challenge is to create authentically Filippino liturgy, hierarchical structures and grassroots practise. Perhaps the gradual collapse of the European church will be a good thing in this sense, our gradually decreasing relevance could be a real blessing for the Christianity of the poor.

Crazy Names

The Philippines is a country where it is possible to be called pretty much anything. There seems to be little conventionality about naming people and little consistency of spelling. All of which means that the Philippines has some of the best named people in the world. In Britain we really aren't trying compared to the Filippinos

The following are all genuine first names

Among the Salesians there are

Fr. Bong, Fr. Dong, Fr. Randy (Yes, Really!) and Fr. Boni,

Some of the names are religious in origin:

John Paul I, Jenesis, Baltazar, Jomar (Joseph + Mary) or Jejomar (Jesus, Joseph and Mary).

others are variation on famous people, historical characters or just creations made by joining two exisiting names together:  

Jimboy, Freday, Rejanmel, Glenric, Admund, Renson, Terrece, Dondon, Larry, Jeff-Mari, Romel, Romeo, Butch, Kevinlie, Rell, Welfer, Dax, Elbert, Edison, Alvin, Wahren, Bryl, Chan, Retche, Jeric, Melfee, Jarlene or Macartney.

Among these great names a few stand out from the crowd, so if any of you are expecting a baby and have yet to think of a name perhaps one of the following might do:

Lucky-Rey, Jolly-Boy, Jiffy or Jello.

Salvation by Separation or Celebration?

The Philippines is a land of celebration and a land of Community. The experience of being part of popular celebrations such as Sinulog in January has set me thinking. Here are some ideas which may or may not make sense. I apologise that this is a little long!

The Human identity is, and always has been, a marriage between two opposing facets of our humanness. We all need spontaneity, impulse and energy; we need life to have excitement and newness. Yet we are also drawn towards order, organisation and logic. As humans we have an impulse to try to make order out of chaos.

What goes for the individual also goes for the collective. Our identities are found in relationships with others. Communities also have a deep need for both Spontaneity and energy, and at the same time for order and reason.

In the western world (which I realise is a generalisation) we have tended to believe that it is necessary for order and reason to be in place before spontaneity and creativity can flourish. We assert order and reason in the public sphere in the belief that this will create a space for spontaneity and creativity in the private sphere. Society exists as an organising structure which avoids chaos and thereby allows the space for the individual to be creative.

Some people grasp this freedom created by a sense of social order and are able to live lives full of energy and creativity. Yet it seems to me that very often this arrangement is not serving us well.

Without a real sense of communal spontaneity we have become a society which does not have source of life around which to gather, we are an atomised people who, like toddlers, engage in parallel play rather than shared celebrations. Without real community many people are unable to properly define who they are. We often live lives of fear and unattained potential. So many people seem to continually lament what they lack rather than celebrate what they already have, or to talk about what they once were rather than what they aspire to be.

The communities we do have are associations of mutual interest concerned only with the parochial concerns of their own constituencies. We lack communities which are able to look beyond the petty concerns of their own members. We lack communities which really celebrate with energy and spontaneity. We also lack the ability to dialogue in a way that is creative; too often we descend into contests as to which of two entrenched opinions will win out.

In the west we allow reason to constrict our potential. Unable to embrace our potential we too often become like crabs hiding away in our own little shells.

Participating in popular celebrations has thrown a light, for me, onto what is missing from western society. I have been able, from outside, to see more clearly something I had previous not been able to see.

As human beings we can only be fully alive and fully fulfilled in the midst of a loving, supportive, and (crucially) outward looking community. We are happiest and most fulfilled when we cooperation not when we compete.

Communities of this kind have a need for organisation and order, but if order and reason are able to rule everything then all we are left with is a dead law. Real community life is nourished by spontaneity, energy and the courage to take the risks inherent in loving others. We need to be open to being surprised and excited by each other.

It is in community that we become fully our individual selves, and in becoming embracing fully ourselves as individuals we are driven towards community.

Often in the western world we celebrate the freedom of the individual. Yet the very fact that we, in the west, live such disparate and atomised live is testament to our failure to grasp real individuality, or to understand our true natural as communal beings.

Salvation by separation is, perhaps, one of the dominant false idols of our age?

Annoyances - Part 3: Hanging About

Many Filippinos tell us that as a nation they are always late. This isn’t really true, compared to many countries Filippinos are quite punctual. However there is a very strange culture of unnecessary hanging about. If an event is due to start at say 7.00pm then everyone will normally have arrived by about 7.15pm ish, then they will all stand around without anything starting until about 8.30pm.  Sometimes the hanging about with drag on for longer without anyone feeling the need to actually do anything. It is very strange and very frustrating.

Some More Photos

The Challenges of Teaching - Part 1

Steph and I have been here in the Philippines for about five months. Most of our time is spent teaching, planning or marking. It sounds very dull, but so far I am, most of the time, not finding it so. I am finding the challenge of teaching quite exciting.

Our students spend most of their time studying technical subjects the three courses offered here are: Mechanical Technology; Industrial Electricity; and Wood and Furniture Technology. All three of these courses require the students to know and be able to use quite a bit of maths.

The students we teach are not academic high fliers, all of them come from poor backgrounds and most of them have suffered due to the substandard public education provision. In the government schools classes are very large and teachers often not as qualified as they need to be. 95% of Filippino children attend publically funded schools (In England it is 93% although much higher outside the Southeast), but it is the privately educated 5% who inevitably end up with all the political power (sound familiar?), hence because the system has worked for them there is little thirst for a change among the ruling classes.

In order to make up for this lack of prior education the students we teach have to work very hard, with so much to learn and only two hours of maths teaching a week there is no easy option.

One of the big challenges of teaching is to convince the students that they need to practise in order to learn. this is true of all schools everywhere in the world. Part of being young is not being mature enough to see why it is important to work hard and to learn. Perhaps the most important job of any teacher is to help their students to see why they are learning?

Much of the education our students have received before coming to TVED has been essentially learning by rote. A teacher will write up texts on the board which are simply copied down. All that is required to receive a passing grade is to regurgitate this set text in an exam or homework. I am not criticising the teachers who teach this way, how else do you educate enormous classes of 50 plus students?

The problem with this method of teaching is that it doesn’t encourage the students to think. They are used to simply copying and find it hard when they have to work out how to solve problems for themselves. Give them a straight equation

34 × 54 =

and most of them can solve it, but give them something which require them to work out what they have to do and they are lost. Take for example this monthly exam, 65 students sat it and only 10 managed to get to the final answer.

Given homework to do some will do it properly but a large proportion will just find another student from whom to copy. Thus because they don’t practise thinking they don’t learn, and because they don’t learn they are left unable to move forward onto the next more complex stage.

Of course such is the way with students the world over, and I don't delude myself into thinking the same problems don't exist everywhere. I was no doubt the same. Nor is the learning by rote unique to here, I can remember when studying for GCSEs and A-levels that for four years I was being taught to the exam, getting the grades was more important than learning the subject! Knowing what the teacher or examiner thinks a novel means is more important than what you think.

The question and the Challenge is how to inspire them to learn for themselves rather than fall into the all too easy trap of 'teaching by force'. That's what I am trying to work on

Annoyances – Part 2: Spitting

I never need to spit, ever. So I don’t understand why so many of the people here do. During our two hour lessons students will frequently ask to be allowed to go out so that they can spit. During the rosary in the evening there will be a steady trickle of students walking over to nearby bushes in order to spit. It is quite normal to see people spitting in the street. I don't get why?

Annoyances – Part 1: Incredibly loud PA systems.

Whenever announcements are made or music is played it is always done really loudly. So loud that often the words or music are distorted by the volume. During our time here we have been to several parties and the volume of music being played is a negative they have all had in common. It becomes impossible to talk or hear anyone else speak. These very loud PA systems can spring into action at any given moment, we have occasionally been woken up very early by screaming Karaoke from the local neighbourhood.   The  Filipinos just don't seem to be able to use volume controls responsibly!

The Importance of Getting Excited!!!!!!!!!!!

The Philippines is a land of many festivals. Barely a week goes by here without there being some reason to celebrate, be it a birthday, a cultural festival or a religious feast day. Very often when we are out in the cities the route of our journey will be disrupted by a procession of some kind. Our work with the Technical students is frequently, to our continual annoyance, interrupted at short notice to make way for yet another holiday or important event which need celebrating.

What I find really interesting is the complete lack of celebration fatigue. Whereas in the UK there are many people who don't like parties, and many people who will start to moan if celebrations go on too long, here that doesn't seem to be the case. No one worries about the loss of productivity caused by another day off declared at short notice. When the next event is announced there is always genuine excitement.

Another example is that of Fr.Rex, one of the Salesian Priests here, he recently spent sometime in Germany. Both before he left and since coming back he has spoken with such excitement about his time away experiencing a completely different culture.

I think that in the culture here there is a more developed understanding of our need to have celebration and our need to be excited. Life should include things to look forward to, it should include things to get excited about. Too often in the UK we treat excitement as if it is something we should grow out of in adulthood.......we say to anyone showing signs of getting a bit excited, "Calm down, there is no need to get excited"

But perhaps we should get more excited? Perhaps having things to get excited about is part of what makes life rich and full? Maybe if we never, or seldom, get excited about anything we are not making the most of life?

So next time you experience something exciting "Don't calm down, get excited!!!"

Mark 2:1-12

At this link are my thoughts on todays Gospel Reading which is Mark 2:1-12

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BzVxKp_r3opxNjcwMjc3YzItZjdiMi00MTIzLWE4NjgtZGM0NGFjNTlhNWEy

A Filippino Theology? - Part 1

Most Filipinos are Catholic. Most of them practise their faith seriously. They pray regularly, they attend mass commitedly, they make regular confessions. The rites and traditions of the Catholic Church permeate the centre of Filipino culture far more deeply than in any other place I have visited.

What I have found striking about their faith, other than its fervour, is how much the European construction of Christianity dominates the Filipino church. The church buildings here look like European church buildings, they are decorated with European styles of art, they are patronised by European Saints, liturgies are conducted just as they are in European Catholic churches. 90% of the saints whose feast days are celebrated are European. The Filipino Church is very much a carbon copy of the European Catholic Church reproduced thousands of miles away.

The European nature of the faith practised here goes beyond decorations and rubrics. In Europe the ongoing dialogue between culture, philosophy and theology has moved the Church (Catholic, Anglican and Protestant) towards a very individual orientated perspective. During the last 500 years our emphasis has gradually moved from being that of the community to that of the individual. Hence we tend to think of communal worship in terms of its usefulness to the individual. Catholics will speak of an individual obligation to attend mass rather than a communal obligation to celebrate mass together; the sacrament of reconciliation is understood in terms of an individual repentance made in private not in terms of the community collectively dealing with its corporate sins. The same threads of individualism run through the practise of most European denominations, we practise a belief in individual salvation which owes as much to our cultural worldview as it does to the New Testament.

All of this European grown philosophy of religion has been parachuted into a very different Filipino culture whose underlying values are very different. There is a deep discord between these two philosophies of life which isn’t immediately evident.

Filipinos (here I am obviously speaking in generalisations) don’t like to be alone. Autonomy is not valued as it is in Europe, people much prefer to live and work in groups. At meal times very often several people will gather round one large plate, or banana leaf, placed on the floor and eat together rather than each having their own plate as we do in Europe. At more intimate social events their culture is to drink from a shared cup passed around the room rather than each hold their own cup.

Of course the reality is more complex. Many richer Filipinos have adopted European (or American) cultural practises. Individualism is a growing cultural trait particularly in the sphere of economics. However, more generally speaking, this sense of the communal does persist particularly among the poor.

Set against this background it seems to me that the way in which Christianity is practised with its individually orientated rituals is a problem. How bizarre that a people already, in their wider lives, eating from one plate and drinking from one cup when at the Eucharist queue up in ordered lines to receive individual wafers? How bizarre that a people accustomed to eating in a circle couched together on the floor should at mass sit in ordered rows set back from their meal table? How bizarre that a culture which embraces collective working should be encouraged to seek reconciliation individually and privately?