We began our day by attending the Flag Day Ceremony at the College. Typically, this ceremony occurs on Monday mornings, but because of the national holiday, yesterday, the ceremony was held today. In honor of our visitation to the school, the teachers and students planned a little bit extra for their program: the singing of the American National Anthem by one of the students, Crystal Santillana. Her remarkable performance of our national anthem brought Jeanette and me to tears. It was a wonderful way to begin our day.
Following her performance, we were introduced to Crystal's mother, and she was very pleased to hear the praise that we heaped upon her daughter. As you can see, the praise was more than well-deserved. I was so struck by the performance that I uploaded it to YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJ-5Q7V6FY
I encourage you to share it with your family and friends. I'm sure you can just imagine the power and energy we felt from hearing our national anthem half a world away. With all of the problems and issues upon which we tend to focus regarding our country, there remains a powerful aura of respect worlds away. It was really something to be part of it.
After the ceremony, Jeanette and I spent the remainder of the morning with the Principal of the school, Manuel Delumpa. He graciously sacrificed his time for us for most of the morning. We toured the school, observed some classrooms in progress, and were eventually treated to a wonderful lunch. Manual is clearly an excellent administrator. It was quite refreshing to see him walking around the school and interacting with students and teachers, While he commands an aura of respect, he is also very approachable and extremely pleasant. In terms of his interactions with Jeanette and me, he was affable, charming, funny, and sharp as a tack. During our tour, I was able to snap some photos of students and teachers in their classrooms and in the cafeteria:
Following our tour of the school, Jeanette and I held a session with a group of students--an Intercultural exchange where we were able to take questions from the students about the similarities and differences between U.S. And Filipino schools. The questions from the students were really quite insightful; they spoke to a maturity level among the kids, and also indicated to us how seriously they consider the quality of their education. I have to say that the English-speaking skills of the students is quite remarkable. Most of the kids can speak two languages, and many of them three or more.
We finished our day with a round-table discussion with various subject-team leaders from the school. The collegial nature of the discussion was so refreshing. We again talked about best teaching practices, curriculum issues, fighting through educational bureaucracy, etc. In short, it is clear that despite the differences in culture, the Filipino teachers share many of the same concerns about teaching and learning that we have. We are fortunately going to have more opportunities for these kinds of discussions in the coming days, and I am certainly looking forward to it.
Tomorrow, Jeanette and I are going to team teach with two instructors from the school. We spent some time in the afternoon collaborating with Genevieve and JanRae (forgive me, JanRae! I'll correct the spelling of your name later today, :-). We are going to going over an excerpt from Beowulf-when Beowulf fights Grendel. I am going to be reading the excerpt to the students and then talking to them about heroism, purpose, and other aspects of the story. How awesome is that? I will be team-teaching with Genevieve, and Jeanette will be team-teaching with JanRae. Following our lessons, we are going to get together and discuss best teaching practices and the like.
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Location:La Consolacion College, Bacolod
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