All is calm as I write this column; the sunshine breaking through overcast skies. Wind and rain in the wake of Typhoon “Carina,” are but a bad memory recorded in viral clips on Facebook and TikTok. Going through my files, I cannot find the typhoon chronology published...
A friend recently sent me a 63-item “cheat sheet” posted on “DepEd Teachers’ Channel” on Meta that covers material for Araling Panlipunan, the strange creature known in English as “Social Studies.” From this list, I learned that the first Filipino bread was pan de...
Of all the Cabinet positions within the grant of the president and the approval of the Commission on Appointments, that of the Department of Education (DepEd) may be the most challenging. It is a post I would not wish on anyone, not even my enemies. Why? Because...
One of the challenges of teaching a freshman course on Philippine history through primary sources is that the last formal Philippine history students took was in Grade 4 or 5. With a gap of seven or eight years, they come to class ill-prepared for a deeper, more...
Do pharmacists take a course on reading prescriptions? Physicians are said to have the worst handwriting. In Japan, old doctors prescribe in German schrift, the type of writing Jose Rizal sometimes used that is illegible to me. Looking back, I learned to decipher and...
Classroom history taught me that pre-Spanish syllabary was called “alibata.” By the time I started teaching, I was told the correct term was “baybayin.” Whoever coined alibata used the first three letters in Arabic: alif, baa, and taa. While there have been attempts...
Every time I am in Cebu, I visit the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño to visit two of the three oldest Christian relics in the Philippines. While the star of the show is the Santo Niño, enshrined in a side chapel to the left of the main altar, I make time to visit the...
The continuing deterioration in Philippine Education is crystal clear from the Philippines’ dismal scores in the Programme for International Student Assessment. We ranked 78/78 in 2018. We improved a bit in 2022, ranking 77/81 besting Uzbekistan, Kosovo, the Dominican...
Not all cultural property is to be found within the walls of the three buildings of the National Museum of the Philippines in Manila. One of the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts, the Angono petroglyphs, is nestled inside the Eastridge Golf and Country Club,...
There is a famous photograph of the so-called “Triumvirate of the Reform Movement” taken in Madrid studio, in the 1890s, that depicts Jose Rizal and Marcelo H. del Pilar standing beside Mariano Ponce, seated, trying to look pensive. All three were contributors to the...