By Edwin de Leon During my parochial high school years, practically everyone was on the same socio-economic level. This helped us to be less sensitive with our lot. The staff was distant and generally aloof; rapport in an all-boys school with mostly women teachers is not the ethos promoted in Catholic schools. The priests of the day were nothing… Read More »
Part I In one of my commentaries, I signed my name as a “Recovering Catholic.” One of the online comments read: ” welcome back, people do realize the advantages of being on the inside,” to which I replied: “you obviously are not familiar with the phrase. A “Recovering Catholic” is similar to a recovering alcoholic. It is based on the… Read More »
Are you feeling overwhelmed these days? Or am I just getting more angsty, being cooped inmore as a result of COVID-19 restrictions? Maybe I am watching too much news, and a lot of itis not uplifting, more depressing to be precise. I looked deeper into some statistics to gauge thedistress in the general population. In a nutshell, my… Read More »
In Sept of last year, I wrote a two-part article for BALITA about the gathering of “dark clouds” in the Philippine educational landscape. I couldn’t have been more prescient when in Dec 2019 the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment ) results of 2018 computer-based, 2-hour test were revealed. The assessment was administered to 600,000 15-year-olds in 79 participating countries. We… Read More »
By: Edwin de Leon There are probably more books and titles dedicated to life’s most perplexing wringer. What is the meaning of life? If we take this question on a purely biological basis, the short answer is “none”. Just as the universe has no meaning, so is the life ( or lives ) in it. We give meaning to our lives… Read More »
“The great enemy of clear language is Insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” (George Orwell, 1903-50, English Novelist) Marissa Odi Gonzales’ Immigration Services Team at 1008 Pape Avenue, Suite 2W in Toronto binds… Read More »
A WHOLE LOT OF FRISKING GOING ON
Back in the day, when we were geographically and informationally isolated, attending a private catholic or parochial school was de regueur. In my generation, it was a formalization of faith in a culture where religion was so prevalent that one could become a Catholic by assimilation. In the years prior and into the ’60s, life revolved around the… Read More »
Twelve innocent people, murdered in another mass shooting in the US. ( This commentary was originally written for the Phil Daily Inquirer in the latter part of Feb of this year. Since then there were three major mass shooting ( defined as at least four people shot ), two in Texas and one in Ohio. Officially, there have… Read More »
Teacher’s pay has gone up considerably since, but still below the rise in the cost of living. Still, there are grave gaps in training that may not be preparing would-be teachers to match a new generation of more knowledgeable students. Ms. Cruz asks rhetorically: “Are teachers themselves, competent readers?” To answer this, let me quote one of the… Read More »