A peek at the trailer for the upcoming production of the Diocese of Paranaque Parochial Schools Association production featuring the diocese's school personnel. No lesson plans, just a whole lot of talent!
Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teachers. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Saturday, April 30, 2011
learner.org
The Scholastic Instructor Winter 2011 issue lists http://learner.org/ as number 21 in the list of "25 Best Websites for Teachers". Personally, I'd put it up there at number 1! I've just spent an hour-and-a-half at the site, and the topics, interactives, and full courses just blew me away! If I only had $196 on demand, I would register for a course credited in Columbia University.
The most fun I had was at the Physics Interactive Lab http://learner.org/courses/physics/interactive/lab_interactives/subatomic.html, reminding me that Physics was indeed my favorite of the Sciences! Videos and other professional development resources are just a click away!
http://www.learner.org/workshops/workshop_list.html
Here's hoping that teachers out there will get a "click" out of learner.org.
http://www.learner.org/workshops/site_leader.html
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Ordinary Miracles For Extraordinary People
This is for our morning reflection at the start of the day's Catholic School Leadership Program course. I wish I had time to do more effects, but then again, the final edit is reflective of our simple joys as educators. Ordinary Miracles for Extraordinary People.
Monday, March 28, 2011
RULE BOOK IN MY RIGHT POCKET, STARDUST IN MY LEFT
This is the ID I didn't get to wear all year. It was hanging by the preschool house door all these months, and I took it for granted because I thought that everyone knew me anyway, and I had an official ID, so why bother?
I should have bothered. I should have bothered to go to that preschool house each day, to check up on what the kids are eating, to play with them, help them mold clay into funny little animal shapes, to talk to the teachers, not just about school, but about telenovelas and other "fripperies", as Neil Gaiman would call trivial things that matter in the long run. Should haves and What ifs. If only life had reruns, replays, delete and back buttons, it would have been so much easier.
Reflecting on my role as principal this past year, I would say that each day was different, and I dealt with it differently. Each student was different, and I treated him differently. Sure, there are templates and rubrics for everything that's ever done in school, but in many cases, these are thrown out the window once something without precedence comes up (like a brass knuckle or a failing grade in Values Education). This is where collaborative management comes in. I am just blessed with a stellar team of educators who brainstorm with me on just about everything--from facebook posting policies to new curricular offerings. I am very certain that I cannot lead a school all by myself. My ideas as principal are almost always collaborative in nature, and for my team of teachers to believe in me, I have to walk the talk and be where they are--in the midst of classroom chaos, varsity triumphs and defeats, and whatnot. I made sure that I showed up not just for the opening remarks; I went backstage and gave my two cents worth to the student manning the lights and audio booth for the school play. Some may call that micromanaging, a euphemism for meddling in local affairs; I'd like to think of it as mingling with the troops. I've never been comfortable calling the shots from behind a massive office desk at command center.
Then again, I look back at this year, and I wish I had a better master plan. A Super Template. A Mega-Rubric. I wish I had a master plan for students falling through the cracks of academic failure. I wish I had a better master plan for the school's finances. I wish I had a better master plan for the school's outreach program. Actually, wishes aren't regrets. They are next steps waiting to commence. So in about three months, I'll be wearing that ID once and for all. There'll be a RULE BOOK in my right pocket, and a handful of STARDUST in my left. It'll be tough and demanding, but my God, it'll be magical too.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
ELIZABETH KOSTOVA'S THE HISTORIAN: SORT OF A HOMAGE TO TEACHERS
Blogger's Note:
I posted this in my personal blog on January 3, 2010. I tend to make connections between the books I read and the real life I lead. This is an example.
I closed the book The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova over a year ago with a mixture of exhilaration (what a great book!) and disappointment (what an awful ending!). I won't review the book here, so please check out my FULL BOOK REVIEW BLOG of The Historian over at www.xanga.com/millette_espiritu. More than just another book about vampires--actually The Vampire of lore, Dracula/Vlad Tepes, the novel is a testament to the nobility of the teaching profession.
My favorite character is Professor Bartholomew Rossi, a brilliant historian and quite an intellectual academic superstar in his day. Paul (as narrator in this chapter, while his daughter is his rapt audience) is his dissertation advisee, and clearly, the young graduate student has nothing but admiration for the esteemed Rossi. He was part-English, part-Italian, but the Anglo part, at least in Paul's worshipping eyes, stood out:"His face was of crisp English mold, sharp-featured and intensely blue-eyed...to look into Rossi's face was to see a world as definite and orderly as the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace." It was Rossi's keen mind that made him the American Paul's Idol: "His mind is another thing altogether...his encyclopedic production had long since won him accolades..." But above all else, Rossi was "the kindest, warmest friend I'd ever had." I found the latter to be true in the succeeding chapters. Let me jump the gun here by saying that when Rossi mysteriously disappeared just minutes after his last visit, it was Paul who risked his life to find his mentor.
I can sympathize with Paul. I was the ultimate "sip-sip" in high school, perhaps without meaning to be one. As a student, I remember hanging onto the coattails of my teachers. To my mind, long before I drifted towards the academe myself, teachers were God's gift to humanity. To this day, I believe it to be true. After a quick rewind to my days as a fledgling learner, I've come up with my top 5 all-time favorite teachers:
1. Ms. Dulce Atienza (Grade 5 and 6 Math, Manresa School)-Ms. Atienza is a motherly, articulate teacher who made Math meaningful for me. It has since lost its meaning in high school, when the teachers resorted to terrorism to drill cosines and square roots into my system.I love Ms. Atienza for being kind but firm, and, as my section adviser in 5th grade, for being my second mother.
2. Mrs. Pearl Santos (Freshman English, Manresa School)-My Idol with a capital "I." I lived for her 12-page exams on diagraming sentences, and her stories about her days as a hard-hitting journalist. She was a perfectionist, all business at all times, and she played no favorites when my other teachers then had not-so-subtle "babies." I began to love the English language because of her.
3. Ms. Angie Ureta (Junior and Senior English & History, Manresa School)-She was 19 when she zoomed into our batch's humdrum existence in 1985, and we were enthralled by her youthful candor and world-wise sensibility. I thought back then that she picked on me out of unreasonable cruelty, but I began to realize that she was bulldozing me into finding my niche--writing. What I am now, a writer, I owe to her.
4. Prof. Emmanuel Torres (Shakespeare on Film, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-Firstly, I loved his class because we met every week in the Ateneo Art Gallery. Secondly, he was a non-threatening, soft-spoken, brilliant man who brought us to the Globe Theatre with just a few panoramic sentences, as well as his hard-to-find films. But I will never forget, most of all, his comments on my essays, most of which he would read aloud in class, to my utter embarrassment. For my paper on Mel Gibson's portrayal of Hamlet, he wrote: "With this paper, and others like it, you have demonstrated a potential for being a professional critic." OMG.
5.Prof. Danton Remoto (Survey of Philippine Literature, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-I will never again read NVM Gonzalez' The Bamboo Dancers without thinking of Prof. Remoto's acerbic comments on protagonist Ernie Rama's sexuality. Our class of 6 students was clearly in awe of this man's literary genius, and I for one, was motivated to churn out academic papers that would hopefully meet his standard, which I'm afraid I never did. But that's OK. Today, I see him fight for gay and lesbian rights on TV with much tact and poise, and I'm proud to tell one and all that Danton Remoto was my teacher.
To my delightful surprise, a former student, Maika Bernardo, wrote about me in Inquirer.net:
"Miss Millette encouraged me to write more and head the school paper staff. Her words of praise helped aspiring writers to come out of their shell. With her encouragement, I earned a leadership award on graduation day."
To view the full article, see:
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20091004-228351
I believe that teachers impart learning more effectively if they are MENTORS, not instructors. I've tried mentoring, and I can safely claim that I've done more for my students this way, rather than give them lectures thay can always download from some website. This is confirmed in The Historian, particularly in Paul and Rossi's warm, genuine friendship forged by a common love and respect for history, and for each other as human beings. And this is affirmed by the many teachers I've thanked along my life's journey, and the many students like Maika who have thanked me simply by being good, God-fearing, productive citizens of the world.
I posted this in my personal blog on January 3, 2010. I tend to make connections between the books I read and the real life I lead. This is an example.
I closed the book The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova over a year ago with a mixture of exhilaration (what a great book!) and disappointment (what an awful ending!). I won't review the book here, so please check out my FULL BOOK REVIEW BLOG of The Historian over at www.xanga.com/millette_espiritu. More than just another book about vampires--actually The Vampire of lore, Dracula/Vlad Tepes, the novel is a testament to the nobility of the teaching profession.
My favorite character is Professor Bartholomew Rossi, a brilliant historian and quite an intellectual academic superstar in his day. Paul (as narrator in this chapter, while his daughter is his rapt audience) is his dissertation advisee, and clearly, the young graduate student has nothing but admiration for the esteemed Rossi. He was part-English, part-Italian, but the Anglo part, at least in Paul's worshipping eyes, stood out:"His face was of crisp English mold, sharp-featured and intensely blue-eyed...to look into Rossi's face was to see a world as definite and orderly as the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace." It was Rossi's keen mind that made him the American Paul's Idol: "His mind is another thing altogether...his encyclopedic production had long since won him accolades..." But above all else, Rossi was "the kindest, warmest friend I'd ever had." I found the latter to be true in the succeeding chapters. Let me jump the gun here by saying that when Rossi mysteriously disappeared just minutes after his last visit, it was Paul who risked his life to find his mentor.
I can sympathize with Paul. I was the ultimate "sip-sip" in high school, perhaps without meaning to be one. As a student, I remember hanging onto the coattails of my teachers. To my mind, long before I drifted towards the academe myself, teachers were God's gift to humanity. To this day, I believe it to be true. After a quick rewind to my days as a fledgling learner, I've come up with my top 5 all-time favorite teachers:
1. Ms. Dulce Atienza (Grade 5 and 6 Math, Manresa School)-Ms. Atienza is a motherly, articulate teacher who made Math meaningful for me. It has since lost its meaning in high school, when the teachers resorted to terrorism to drill cosines and square roots into my system.I love Ms. Atienza for being kind but firm, and, as my section adviser in 5th grade, for being my second mother.
2. Mrs. Pearl Santos (Freshman English, Manresa School)-My Idol with a capital "I." I lived for her 12-page exams on diagraming sentences, and her stories about her days as a hard-hitting journalist. She was a perfectionist, all business at all times, and she played no favorites when my other teachers then had not-so-subtle "babies." I began to love the English language because of her.
3. Ms. Angie Ureta (Junior and Senior English & History, Manresa School)-She was 19 when she zoomed into our batch's humdrum existence in 1985, and we were enthralled by her youthful candor and world-wise sensibility. I thought back then that she picked on me out of unreasonable cruelty, but I began to realize that she was bulldozing me into finding my niche--writing. What I am now, a writer, I owe to her.
4. Prof. Emmanuel Torres (Shakespeare on Film, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-Firstly, I loved his class because we met every week in the Ateneo Art Gallery. Secondly, he was a non-threatening, soft-spoken, brilliant man who brought us to the Globe Theatre with just a few panoramic sentences, as well as his hard-to-find films. But I will never forget, most of all, his comments on my essays, most of which he would read aloud in class, to my utter embarrassment. For my paper on Mel Gibson's portrayal of Hamlet, he wrote: "With this paper, and others like it, you have demonstrated a potential for being a professional critic." OMG.
5.Prof. Danton Remoto (Survey of Philippine Literature, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-I will never again read NVM Gonzalez' The Bamboo Dancers without thinking of Prof. Remoto's acerbic comments on protagonist Ernie Rama's sexuality. Our class of 6 students was clearly in awe of this man's literary genius, and I for one, was motivated to churn out academic papers that would hopefully meet his standard, which I'm afraid I never did. But that's OK. Today, I see him fight for gay and lesbian rights on TV with much tact and poise, and I'm proud to tell one and all that Danton Remoto was my teacher.
To my delightful surprise, a former student, Maika Bernardo, wrote about me in Inquirer.net:
"Miss Millette encouraged me to write more and head the school paper staff. Her words of praise helped aspiring writers to come out of their shell. With her encouragement, I earned a leadership award on graduation day."
To view the full article, see:
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20091004-228351
I believe that teachers impart learning more effectively if they are MENTORS, not instructors. I've tried mentoring, and I can safely claim that I've done more for my students this way, rather than give them lectures thay can always download from some website. This is confirmed in The Historian, particularly in Paul and Rossi's warm, genuine friendship forged by a common love and respect for history, and for each other as human beings. And this is affirmed by the many teachers I've thanked along my life's journey, and the many students like Maika who have thanked me simply by being good, God-fearing, productive citizens of the world.
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