Educational System of MHCS (Chinese) Compared to Chapter 19 of Noli Me Tangere

As you may be aware, the 3rd year students of MHCS (Makati Hope Christian School, if you are unaware) tackle Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere for their Filipino class. Of course, being part of that 3rd year batch, I am studying this work as well, not in Filipino though, I can't understand it in Filipino. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that if I'm comparing something in Noli Me Tangere to something in life, I can understand the story; therefore, I must be reading it in English. Yeah, duh, English…

And if you're wondering, you can buy the English version of Noli Me Tangere, with a translation of El Filibusterismo at the back, in National Bookstore for more than P400. That’s quite a good deal, considering the alternatives. Those alternatives being: A. Buy the comic (in Filipino, I haven't seen an English version) B. Deal with the Filipino version you get from school, and slave over it with a Filipino-English dictionary (No thank you) or C. Ask about it from a classmate/batchmate (No thank you once again, as much as possible I’d like to handle stuff by myself). Anyway, away from the somewhat brief advertisement and back to the post…

So… Since I've been keeping myself aware of it by reading the English version of the thing and pretty much ignoring the Filipino version (Poor book…) but listening to the reports of my classmates on the chapters do help. Anyway, it’s so much more understandable and helpful for tests when I read the book, but one chapter really hit me. It was chapter 19. Now, boys and girls, turn to page 86 if you have the same book as I do. (Teehee, 86… Lols insanely)

The basic summary of the chapter is that there is this schoolteacher, who's name I didn’t catch, telling his story to Crisostomo Ibarra. His story is, well, that kinda that he noticed stuff about the way he was teaching. He noticed that the kids he was teaching weren't encouraged to study, due to the way they would be punished if they made a mistake, and that their location was bad. They couldn’t read aloud because they studied in a church of some kind (I think a parish one or something) and if they did the priest would scold them.

The teacher tried to teach the kids Spanish, but after a bit of time the priest, Damaso, called him over to his office and insulted him. So he couldn’t teach Spanish, if he did he would lose his career, as Damaso was one of the most powerful men in San Diego (The “town” the story mainly occurs in). It resulted in the teacher losing heart in his work, but he wanted to fight back still.

Anyway… I'm continuing where I left of and don’t feel like finishing the summary. My comparison is based on what the teacher wanted to change by teaching Spanish, actual Spanish, and not pure memory Spanish without really understanding what it means.

That is basically how it is in our Chinese class. We have to memorize this sentence and that sentence, without really understand what it says. I appreciate the fact that our Chinese teacher is trying to teach us the meaning of what we studying, but I think that it is somewhat unsatisfactory. I'm not saying this to smite out teacher. No way, she's a wonderful teacher. She's very kind and nice, and funny to boot. That’s very rare for a Chinese teacher in our school. The only other teacher I remember myself favoring this much was our teacher in Grade Two and that was because he used to tell us stories of the Monkey King – or something along the lines of that – if we were good little kiddies. *eye roll* But, yeah he was very nice.

I remember hearing from someone, whose name I can no longer recall, that the Chinese in our school is a joke. I mean, compare it to the Chinese of other schools like St. Jude. Compared to St. Jude, what we’re studying is pretty much nothing. I mean, they studied History, Science and other subjects in Chinese. So they were trained to speak, write, and think in Chinese. When all we can do is pretty much write what we copy in Chinese. For proof, look at our transferees from St. Jude, they're all pretty much honor students in MHCS in Chinese.

We need someone to do what this brave schoolteacher did. We need to get back to the ground basics. There is no real point in studying Chinese by memory, everything flies out the window the day after the test, and possibly wasn’t even there in the first place.
Children study so they can prepare for “real life”, working and such. Chinese is supposed to be an advantage, but studying Chinese like this could be something we could use in our resumes, but when it comes to the actual usage, be better put on a paper bag before we g

Leave Me Alone – a rant

I’m a loner. So even if I was born to an enormous family, who seems to love our tiny apartment, I don’t like socializing with people much or too intimately. I hate holding hands. I hate hugs. I hate kisses. What I do want is for people to stay at least an arm’s length away from me. One of the things I want right now is to be left alone. I don’t mean that in a way that I'm ready to pack up my things, go to the mountains and become a hermit, although to me that doesn’t sound as bad as it may to others.

My point is that I'm an introvert in a world brimming full of hyperactive, tailing extroverts.

Yes, this is a rant about how I can't seem to get peace, most especially when there are more than three people in my house at a time.

I was born into a world where I can take control of what I want. I'm not kept on a foot long leash, I have freedom, and I have the right to that freedom. I have always had the choice of what I wanted to do, of course within the bounds of “Is this all right for me?” “Or will this hurt me or not?” My mother had always, let me emphasize that always loved the company of people when I was younger. She kept on saying that I was something like a Sunflower, constantly smiling and happy (and hyperactive, BTW – I noticed that this is my most used abbreviation…).

But, I have grown up. I don’t move much, I consider myself quite apathetic Frankie will vouch for that. So I don’t care much for the world and whatever goes on with it, perhaps that isn't quite the right word. It isn't that I don’t care, I do, I want to be kept aware of the on goings of others – although that could be considered snooping and curiosity rather than true concern. It’s just that I've made it a point to myself that I don’t want to be really, personally, involved in it.

I'm also apathetic in the form that even though I can sense that something’s troubling someone or something, but couldn’t care less if they were in pain or not. True, it does induce some sympathy from me, but hardly enough for me to really be concerned of their well-being.

Call me a psychopath, and I wouldn’t care. I'd just laugh about it in your face.

I don’t like, hardly enjoy it, when people are all hug-hug, kiss-kiss, lambing-lambing with me. So what if we’re close? I don’t care. Stay away from me before I become nasty. Do you notice my look of annoyance or my sudden jerking away? Take a clue when you see it before I snap. And I don’t doubt that my snapping, as are as it is, will be nasty.

This post has basically been triggered by my cousins. (I'm typing this in between studying for Chinese… I don’t want to have to order them away forcibly, I want to save myself a scolding as well. I know they're kids, about ten and six, I think.

I've been very patient with them. A lot of this patience has been faked actually. I overheard my aunts saying that I've matured and so on whatever crap. Please. I'm trying, but don’t go off and make such absurd assumptions. I'd much rather kick them out than let them play Sims on my laptop, when I could be doing something that I profit from. After all, I don’t really care about them much.

My door has two “notices” on them. I'm not sure exactly what you call them, but those are the boards you can buy at hardware stores and stick on wherever you want. Anyway, the two signs say, “Restricted Area” and “Private”. I bought them ages ago and they're beginning to dust.

My mom asked me why I wanted to buy them, I never gave her a straight answer because I didn’t want to hurt her and throw her into her tampo-tampo mode. But after ages of wanting to say it out loud, I’ll finally proclaim it here. “I put them there because I mean it. I don’t put posters on a door just for the heck of it – that is if I did. I try to do things that will achieve something, anything, regardless of how shallow. If I put an Initial D poster there, it means that I'm proclaiming that, I love Initial D. If I put ‘Restricted Area’ and ‘Private’, that means what it means. You don’t need a dictionary or an encyclopedia of Why Girls Act This Way, and What It Really Means. Sometimes I think people just are blind – either that or stupid. Private means private, stay away – duh! Restricted Area means you cannot enter without written permission of the occupant – that of course was an exaggeration. My oral permission is more than enough. But that’s basically what I want. I want people to respect what I want. And what I want is to be left alone.”

Dani, if you read this, I really mean it when I act like I don’t like it when you go off and play with me hair. I AM NOT A FRIGGIN DOLL! I don’t let my mom fix or do whatever what she wishes with my hair, and neither will I allow you to.

“I hate holding hands, I hate hugs, I hate kisses, I hate it when you have to go on and show your affection to a person through physical ways like this. Can't we be satisfied with the relationship in itself? I don’t need to feel it physically to appreciate a feeling of love. If I feel it emotionally, that’s enough. If I love you, I'd make you feel it without have to touch you. If I don’t do that, then I probably don’t care much about you.”

Pro-Abortion, and the Beginning of the Debate Between Kayu and the Thirteenth Angel

In today’s society, everything, well, almost everything, is different from what it used to be, our culture is different from what it was years ago. We all like in this fast-paced world, and as the McDonalds commercial goes, “Everything is fast” or something else quite similar. And in this society, our woman have a voice that is listened to, heck the US Secretary of State is a woman. Women have equal rights with men. Rights like, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and Freedom of Decision.

My first point would be that women have the right to choose what they want to do with their lives, of course they'd be responsible too, but they now have the freedom to do what they wish, and the state should not interfere with this. If a woman finds that she is pregnant, either from an accident or a crime, she should be able to decide what she wants to do with the fetus within her. Her husband, or whoever partner she had, can talk to her about it, but it’s primarily her choice, her decision.

Second, a person, or whoever opposes this freedom of choice, should consider the child and its future. If the child is born, will he be in a good family? Will he be born in a good environment? Does his parents, or mother (if it’s single parenthood) have enough money to support him? It’s good if all the answers would be yes, but if the answers are yes, then the mother probably would want to have the child.

The problem is, not all children will be born into nice families who can nurture then properly. What if the parent has no money, or what if the couple already has an overload of children, what if both? If someone offers to assist them, then that’s nice, and it would actually turn up well, but who will actually go and offer the same kind of support to everyone? Not everyone will receive this, and that’s the problem. The government could say that they would, but in the Philippines, this is very impossible, not with all these crimes popping up everywhere. It would be better to let the child go before anything like this can happen.

And also you have to consider the teenagers who were not properly taught about sex and got pregnant. It deprives someone greatly of their time when taking care of their child, if you also, or even force, a teen to give birth to their child, then what will happen to the teen’s studies? They would probably not even finish their studies, just going on to work to support their child.

Teenagers are also not fully developed. If the mother gives birth, she risks her life as well as her child’s during the birth-giving process.

One thought to the churchgoers who oppose abortion, if a child dies, he/she goes to heaven, night? So if you let a child be born in an unstable environment, for example like the squatter’s area, then you are putting child in danger of loosing their soul. The squatter’s area or wherever is not a place you would want to raise a child in.

Now, look at one more benefit if you allow abortion. Jobs. There are people who abort children for these women who don’t know how to do it themselves. They also sell aborfinitives to help the mother eject the child.

And finally, it is mentioned in the article, that abortion is being met with more and more indifference every year. So it wouldn’t even be too hard to have it allowed. And women, who are opposed to it, change their minds and want it when they are in a situation that calls for it, like being a victim of rape, for example.

But basically, women and the society in general can reap many benefits by allowing abortion, like saving the child from risks or dangers he/she would have to endure if he/she is born. And it’s simply not anyone’s business but the couple’s if they want an abortion or not.

Yes, I know it’s a really messed up essay, but I was too lazy to try and fix it.

Manny Pacqiao: The Modern Philippine’s National Hero

Everyone has heard of our favorite and most famous boxer, Mr. Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao, what a stupid a.k.a. name though. Isn't being named after an ancient Namco game humiliating? Or does he not realize it? It would be much cooler if he were named something that belongs, or at least fits in with the 21st century.

But I’m not here to criticize his stupid nickname, but here to provide yet another essay, questioning his status here in the Philippines. He is so revered here in the Philippines that when he had a fight against a guy (whose name I can no longer remember) earlier this year, I think, people were flocking to televisions and eagerly (insanely) cheering on their idol in Las Vegas.

Sure, it’s really great that he’d bringing glory and honor to the Philippines, he is, as my title claims, like the new National Hero. It seems that he is greater than those heroes of more than a century ago, who have done much, much, much greater things to the Philippines, like setting it free from the Spaniards, Americans, and Japanese. Although, freeing ourselves from then Spaniards and the Japanese, we got help from the Americans, but that’s not the important part. Our heroes, like Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, or other guys from our monetary system, they are the significant heroes in the Philippines, even if they are long dead.

They initiated, or continued, our fight against our colonists. It is because of them that we are the first country liberated from colonization, in Asia, I mean.

If we talk about the heroes of today, at least we should honor the OFWs a bit more. They’re the ones who are pumping a significant percentage of our dollars into the Philippines. But, no, all the wrong people are the ones receiving honor and grace from our very dear president. Although I doubt that the government has enough money to honor the OFWs the same was she does to Mr. Pacman (and the dude from the Black Eyed Peas, who is totally undeserving as well).

We get honor and glory, in the form of boxing victories of all things. I’m so totally against boxing, so that pretty much adds to my negativity about Mr. Muncher. I remember reading about a proposal of the DepEd to include boxing into school’s curriculum. WTF! That would be a summarized version of what went in my head though. The totally elongated version of it would follow.

Boxing in our school curriculum. I would love to ask the guy who proposed this if he actually thought about what he was proposing. Is he insane? Or is he such a Pacquiao fan that he was totally deluded by Pacman’s shiny little stars floating around him when he fights a match? Probably both. This is certainly not a good was to honor the boxer. He’s a boxer for crying out loud, the image he is feeding to the people of other countries is that, “Sure, we’re a third world country, but at least we can fight well.”

It’s crazy. We have misdirected all this time and energy for no significant, or even valuable purpose. Heck, it’s a totally brutal sport.

Pacquiao is wealthy. He is famous. He gets accusations that he impregnated a woman, or something like that. <>

Mischief Magic

I'm actually in school now and am fully apreciating the fact that Blogger actually prevents you from leaving a page directly, our school has some program that redirects us from a certain page to some other page (like Google, Yahoo, or our school's own retarted website. It probably has a bad word or something else in the page that the program looks for and sends us to another page, either way, Blogger isn't going to let me go until I agree to. So ^^ I'm typing up a post during computer class. Even though I don't understand what our teacher is typing on screen. Oh well... Actually, Frankie's page had me redirected when I tried it, but that isn't surprising really...

I do have a bit of a rant, then I'll go on with raving on and on the rest of the time. I hate my school computer's keyboard. I'm a relatively fast typer, and don't actually have to look at the keyboard when I type so when I do, I (duh) don't bother looking at the keyboard and sometimes the monitor as well. But that's obviously not a rant. My point is that (Man... is debating getting to me...) my keyboard is somewhat broken. When I press the Enter button, take note this isn't all the time, it get's stuck. So I end up having to free the button and erase all the Entered spaces... This is simply a nuisance that wastes my time, so heck...

BTW, I'll be posting the code of our program so I don't have to write it down...

"Form1_MouseDown"

Select Case e.Button
Case MouseButtons.Left
MessageBox.Show(Me, "Left button click", "ALERT")
Case MouseButtons.Right
MessageBox.Show(Me, "Right button click", "ALERT")
Case Else
MessageBox.Show(Me, "Middle button click", "ALERT")
End Select

Now, back to my post. ^^

I have been in such an absurdly cheery mode lately. A bit on the "emo" side though because of my "no creative writing" phase. Hey, I don't mean that I don't want to write, but I haven't been getting to writing anything of my own, be it from stories, essays, or blog posts. My previous post being totally euphoria-driven (I guess, I kinda forgot the word I was going to say) and Initial D-hypered. But now... It is still somewhat eurphoria-driven (although it has somewhat wanned) and is still so hyper. About two animes this time.

Should I get on with this post, or should I wait till tomorrow still? Hmm...

I'm not using the "tag" tab over there...

Anyway, I'm going to plug Frankie's new Jigoku Shojo site! Wohoo! Hah, Ron Bruise of Gaia Online reminiscent much? Go to www.freewebs.com/hotlinetohell It looks plain, but it the text doesn't disappear when you click the send button, there's no actual fear or intimidation that leaks... XP Too bad, Frankie, please try to get it to work...

Jigoku Shojo is such a facinating anime. It keeps me up till midnight every night...

*I'll get back to this later...

More codes for the time being:

"TextBox1_KeyPress"


Dim key As Integer
key = Asc(e.KeyChar)
Select Case key
Case Asc("0") To Asc("9")
e.Handled = False
Case Asc(ControlChars.Cr)
e.Handled = True
Case Asc(".")
If InStr(TextBox1.Text, ".") = 0 Then
e.Handled = False
End If
Case Else
e.Handled = True
End Select

Now, where was I... I have no idea... *pokes/prods/shakes thought bubble forming above head*

Ah yes, the most overwhelming wonderful news to scatter around like confetti in a hyper-active child's party... Dum-dum-dumdum! I have gotten an FC! Is met by silence and WTFing. Yes, I can understand that only an Initial D fan would truely appreciate such beautifully bent and painted metal.

http://s80.photobucket.com/albums/j167/Kamyuz/?action=view&amp;amp;current=Image314.jpg&refPage=&imgAnch=imgAnch1" target="_blank">

*added Haha, Frankie.