Recent Blogs Posts

There is something more profound and lofty in the thought of having friends around. I don't just mean the mere set of friends you brag about because they are inside your Facebook friends' list or they are your followers on Twitter. I meant those kinds that would sit patiently for you whenever you need to be heard about, even when you only have ice cream to eat.

As I was on my way home a realization carefully sank in. I am actually the luckiest person in the world for having such ...

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on January 1, 2010

IT HAD BEEN A year already when I first climbed Mount Babag by way of Ernie's Trail, a steep and challenging route named after my climbing buddy – Ernie Salomon. That was on August 17, 2008. Since then I have climbed her twenty-three times alone or with a group. I aim to complete a full year cycle by climbing her again on August 23, 2009. This would be my twenty-fourth incursion there.

I brought two hawk feathers ...

As a student some years back, I had never really liked tests, whether they are assigned or those kinds that leave you cursing your teachers (the pop quizzes) nor those periodical tests. At a younger age, I would stay up all night, thinking about the many pages and fretting about how to let them stay in my ever-unusually absent mind. I hated the way my Social Studies quizzes were constructed. They always made me memorize so many dates and events. Back then, I never really liked Social Studies, unlike ...

Let's set the record straight. I HAD NEVER REALLY ASPIRED TO BE A TEACHER. I remembered full well that when our Language teacher in Grade 3 would ask us what we would want to be when we grow up (you know those seemingly endless essays that took forever to write and are repetitive because each grade, until probably when you reach high school, your teachers would ask you to write about them), I had always written: a COMPUTER ENGINEER or a REPORTER but never a TEACHER.

Yet somehow, it ...

To a class of academic students who knew nothing about drafting because for some reason, it was not included in their lesson, teaching the concept of perspective is never a walk in the clouds. This was what came to my mind as I searched through previous concrete encounters on the word "perspective". How else does one teach such a very abstract concept?

I then remembered an example my great philosophy teacher used in summer class when I took my masters. He made use of the ...

Like a movie flick, two entities meet. The lover and her beloved. Their love story was that of any typical relationships: the lover meets her beloved and just as any well-orchestrated plot, their relationship was never the same again after that.

But wait, I'm just not going to let you in my carefully shrouded, privately veiled love life (as though there ever is one). I'm just going to usher you into my addiction of the internet and my deeply laid plans to finally rehabilitate myself. ...

I did this when I was a bit younger. I even argued a lot with my grandfather about it. I can't believe I would come to do this myself when I reach this age. This realization came in just days ago while I was settling a trouble one of my students did.

It used to be that my grandfather would argue with me how different the children in our generation and in theirs were. "In our generation, children would never do this".... is often the opening lines of what seemed to be a call ...