“Global competitiveness depends on students’ abilities to innovate and invent, not on their test scores,” agrees Yong Zhao, professor and director of the U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence at Michigan State University. America has long embraced its students’ passion, ingenuity, dreams, and ideas—none of which can be measured by test scores, says Zhao. Asia, on the other hand, has traditionally valued test scores above all else. Even where scores are high and innovative educational approaches are valued, as in Singapore, it’s still felt that testing plays too much of a role.

“Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy,” Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Minister of Education of Singapore, said in a Newsweek interview. “There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition….America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America.”

Another blow for too much objectivity in the classroom. Maybe our beloved scihi teachers can advocate this to the proper authorities? We are a leading school after all, so it is just right that we lead the pack in terms of progress. Speaking of which, here is Toyota’s recipe for success. It is a manifesto on innovation – not for the faint of heart, but definitely a good read.

I feel that a lot of what makes up the student-teacher divide is the concept of authority. Authority carries with it such a depth of meaning that it is easy to jump to false implications. Such as “I Know A Lot” = Authority = Respect Me = I Am Powerful. I have experienced again and again the way “higher-ups” feel they have to exert themselves, as if their “authority” was the basis of having a student-teacher relationship (not that kind of relationship, silly).

Yes, the dictionary says that authority is the power or right to give orders and enforce obedience. But in the complete sense of the word, obedience is a personal decision on the part of the follower. Therefore, as long as the student never completely obeys the teacher, the teacher does not have authority.

Authority is not had, it is given. When someone informs you, and you believe him, you are allowing him to form you (because the information you acquired is bound to influence your decisions) and thus, you are giving him authority. (PS: This is not my original idea, I just read this from somewhere but unfortunately forgot who wrote it. Any of you readers know?)

Authority is not what defines the student and teacher relationship. It is the result of that relationship, wherein the student trusts the teacher enough to inform and form him. Authority is not the thing which allows the teacher to teach the student. Rather, it is the reward of successful mentoring.

And like authority, trust is earned, not taken as a given. How to get students to trust their teachers? Get the teachers to listen.

What’s your take on this? I’m listening.

I’d like to propose that the reason why we’re not happy with our present systems is the cognitive dissonance that exists in the school.

Cognition 1: The school’s official vision:

The Cebu City National Science High School provides the pool of students who are proficient in Science, Mathematics, and English imbued with moral values, and who will pursue Science and Technology oriented careers in preparation for their leadership roles in the Philippine society.

To back that up, we follow all sorts of rigorous curricula and policies. Students are required to master a dizzying range of competencies across many disciplines. Well and good, is it not?

Cognition 2: The “realities of life”

Practicality dictates that 60% of each graduating class take up nursing or whatever course is necessary to get a high-paying job after college. These last few years, how many of our graduates have gone on to science and technology oriented careers? How many are now in ‘leadership roles’ in our society? Not much I guess, because our country does not have the right infrastructure to take care of graduates who want to go into S&T. It does not pay off to be a scientist, or to be in the academe so why bother?

Cognition 1 obviously does not agree with Cognition 2, and vice versa. The scary thing is that even our teachers and administrators have fallen for this dissonance, which means that they no longer encourage students to pursue S&T careers. Instead, we are taught that “What good is it to have great ideas if you can’t feed your family?”.

The scarier thing is when the dissonance manifests ourselves in daily learning. What’s the use of learning [insert subject here] if I’m going to take Nursing anyway? The need-to-learn-the-fundamentals pitch won’t work. Why? Because if we won’t be building higher education on our fundamentals in the near future, we’ll just forget them.

Anyway, the only way to fix the dissonance is to face the issues directly. Do we stick with the vision and instill in the students a sense of passion and martyrdom to pursue the less-rewarding path? Or we can continue to ignore our vision (if so, we don’t need a demanding curriculum) and instead focus on graduating students for the job market. One way is definitely easier than another.

I believe our educators should really consider this. And if there is something here that you don’t agree with, don’t just close the browser. Tell me about it.

For example, I am asked to read handouts about art from the 15th century to the present. It is in outline form, presenting the major movements in art, their “founders”, the major artists and their dates of birth, et cetera:

I. Expressionism (late 19th to 20th century)
- paintings use a lot of color and is grotesque
- emphasizes the feelings of the painter
- Painter is the founding father (19XX – 19XX)
- born in Berlin
- famous work of art: two women screaming (19XX)
- died of hunger

II. Impressionism (early 19th century)
- interested in objective representation
- dealt mostly in landscapes
- Another Painter started the movement (18XX-19XX)
- born and died in Paris
- most famous painting: another weird painting

The discussion invariably focuses around the outline, with different groups of students providing “extra information” and catchy visual aids. One week later, the system requires our teacher to “test” our knowledge of the topic. Following are the questions:

1. Who is the founding father of expressionism?
2. In what year was the person in number 1 born?
3. What kind of art usually features landscapes?
4. What is the famous work of art by Another Painter?

Reflecting on this, how important is it really to test what the student knows about these facts? Even outside of the classroom, it is very easy to obtain information. One can easily pull an encyclopedia from the shelf and look up who started Expressionism. In this Internet age, one need only point their browser to Wikipedia and a host of other repositories of information, and the facts are easy picking. What we need our teachers to do is to guide us through the thought process that is hard to have without a guide. Now, imagine this alternative discussion:

Art is a reflection of what a society considers beautiful. Why did Expressionism come into being when it did? What does it say about the human situation in that time? How does this “focus on emotion” manifest itself in other aspects of human society?

And of course, the coup de grace,

Relate this to the present. How do our present art movements reflect our society?

This kind of analysis makes students think more critically, and develops their capability to make meaningful insights. This is the kind of skill our knowledge-driven society demands of our students.

It is just too bad that our teachers will not be able to develop their lessons plans this way. Why? Because the system constrains them with objective assessments and grades and all that (imagine our teachers having to check the essays of 175 students). But that’s just me talking.

Teachers, what do you have to say about this?

It’s sappy and mushy and corny, I know. But observing myself take zoology tests or science and society tests or calculus tests, even finance and accounting tests in Ateneo, there’s a lot of scihi in my taking them.

I’ve never visited the school since I graduated, I might do so this Christmas break. But I hear a lot of feedback, straight from my brother, from my mom, from teachers, from other students, from alumni. Most of them stress how things have changed.

Well I don’t really think so. Maybe not yet.
I hear there are a lot of disappointing things but I do hear things to be proud of too. Especially when we widen our comfort zones and look everywhere else.

What I really want to say is this: work and make love with the people and the things you don’t like. Seriously. Because what really saddens me is hopelessness, and that only during college do we get to really appreciate what we’re going through in high school.

A lot of people fail because they fail to appreciate both what’s pride-worthy and what’s disappointing. Worse, we pick the wrong careers, the wrong schools, and fail everyone else.

Maybe scihi isn’t much. But that’s not the point and believe me it never is.
The thing is we chose [deliberately or thanks to older people] scihi and it seriously is one of those oops-no-turning-back kind of choices. We could only do so much.

I think the people who win are those who do what they can.
Even with this much.
Now I can and want to win
so I’ll take scihi with me.

Sometimes, it’s that simple.

Karl Vendell Satinitigan
Batch 2004

I agree that sometimes, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. My beef with people who defend the status quo (either by actively or passively resisting efforts towards change) is this: if we can have something better why not go for it? I mean, the French people didn’t tell themselves, “let’s stay oppressed because it’s going to teach us to stomach hunger and cope with poverty and make us ‘better’ persons in the end” – they revolted and brought about a better social order. Which is not to say that we are peasants, or that we should revolt.

My point is, we are where we are because our forbears didn’t settle for less. At one point or another in history, they decided that they didn’t have to endure what they were enduring, and they changed it. Mankind’s ascendancy is the fruit of his efforts to get to the next step. If now, we just sit on our haunches and tolerate our inadequate paradigms because ‘it makes us stronger’, it will take us forever to, borrowing from gaming, level up.

Now that would just be too bad, because taking things into perspective, the main point of going to school is to educate ourselves. Based on my experience, scihi could could do a lot more to provide the students a better education. Saying that the problems we are facing now is okay because it teaches us life lessons anyway is beside the point. True, I did learn a lot about how to deal with stress and everything, but again, that’s not what I go to school for. And besides, I’m sure there are many other opportunities for us to learn how to deal with life, like augmenting the labor force or dedicating ourselves to a time-consuming endeavor while trying to get good grades, but I digress. If we want scihi to be a good school, we should be talking about how we can make the system work better towards providing holistic development for the students.

A few months after, I found myself being interviewed by my then soon-to-be mentors. I was intimidated. With God’s grace, I got in. So June came and all those first day jitters came rushing through me. It was an entirely new environment that I was in. Here, the teachers were no longer addressed ‘Tita’ or ‘Tito’ as they were in my previous school. I now had to say ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir’. I got rid of my knee-length socks and tried to acquaint my feet with ankle-length socks. I did not go home for lunch either. This was also my first encounter with a very formal flag ceremony in a school campus. My general impression that day was that the student body must really be active in the school’s affairs since they were the ones who led the welcome ceremony for the freshmen. They took care of the order during the tour around the campus. The students were everywhere, busy preparing for the day’s activities. I was struck by the sense of family I saw among the students during the Eucharistic celebration. Everyone reached their hands out during the ‘Our Father’ and I thought to myself how wonderful it was to now be part of that family. Freshman year was all right. We were in that stage of adjustment to SciHi culture – the colorful grand rallies for Student Government Elections, the numerous projects especially come Open House and the cramming… for some, this actually worked. Then came sophomore year, and based on experience, this was the most ‘laid-back’ time of all. We were no longer the newbies and were fairly adjusted to high school life – or at least we thought we were.

It was in junior year that I got to see SciHi at its best and ‘not-so-best’. With all the extra-curricular activities I took part in, I realized how well-respected SciHi is by other schools, both public and private. I realized how fortunate we are to have the best teachers, breathable classrooms where students each have a seat, and even if we had to share some books at times, the student-book ratio never reached 10:1. I say this because I have seen other public high school students who have just the opposite of what we have in SciHi. It indeed is a sad reality to think that in these public high schools, there too, are highly-competitive students deprived of quality education they deserve. We also faced challenges of our own in the Student Government. A lot of issues were at hand. And I realized that if we wanted change and there were only a number of students and teachers involved, we could not have that change. We needed the full support of the school. I was disheartened by the fact that after all the hard work the Student Government had put to push projects with the help of the student body, they would be turned down for some reason. Junior year was tough – having to juggle academics with extra-curricular activities. I was so into these extra-curricular activities that my academics suffered. I know this was wrong but I don’t regret it for it was in these activities that I was exposed to the real world. I got a better glimpse and feel of life that I did not when confined to the walls of the classroom.

Senior year came. I thought things would be easier. On the contrary, things just got tougher. Pressure was on from both academic and extra-curricular responsibilities. There were times when I really wanted to give up on the things I had hoped for the school, the organization and even myself. Idealistic as it may sound, this was what I honestly felt. I was driven by the thought that if I gave up now, it was as if I had wasted all the efforts of the students that came before.

SciHi life, as I’d like to put it, is ‘lisud na lingaw’. More than the chemical equations, scientific names and mathematical formulas we had to learn and even memorize, SciHi taught me LIFE. I am and will be forever grateful to my alma mater.

STILL hoping for the best,
Patricia Davide
SciHi ‘06

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This my friends, is from an anonymous commenter on the site. How true is this really? Do you agree with his statements? Why or why not?

Next year we may likely forever lose the freedom of going outside during lunchtime to merrily skip and frolick like children among the streets beyond. Sad as it is, I do not think we can prevent this sad circumstance from permanently imposing itself. (Delay, maybe, but prevent, no)

So I ask of you, if we cannot thwart this maniacal assertion of communistic power*, we might as well go ahead and make it better for all of us.

Pls.give suggestions what you want changed/added/maintained inside the school premises if the “No-go-outy Law” is implemented.

- Catherine Valendez 

But what percolated (got through) to me most was her statement(please do correct me if i don’t get this right, thanks!): “There are many happenings in our country, place and school. MANY ARE TRYING TO DESTROY US. But what is important is WE KNOW WE ARE RIGHT.”

I come to think about it… Who are destroying the school?

*Note: According to a some sources, and I know some can attest to the fact that Mam Chin has had access aleady to this blog….