Category: Essays

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Diplomas are Meaningless (Part 2)


“Fix it,” I told the job applicant, then started my timer.

I was interviewing applicants for a computer technician position. Before I asked them about their background and the usual interview questions, I put them in front of a computer unit that I had purposely sabotaged — nothing too difficult to fix — a loose memory chip here, a disconnected cable there. In order to get to the next stage of the interview, they first had to successfully power up the unit.

I expected the guy in front of me to be the fastest out of the entire batch of applicants I had for the day. After all, he had a very thick resume filled with certifications of attending this or that seminar, on top of his college transcript and diploma. I thought this guy must be good.

It turns out he was one of the worst.

He spent close to an hour inspecting the unit, fiddling with this and that, but he never got it to turn on. Finally I had to tell him to give up as I couldn’t spend all day just waiting for him. The guy who got the job didn’t have a thick resume, just a normal kid with a pimply face. He fixed the unit in less than 10 minutes and is now my senior technician. He continues to learn and grow and can now fix things that I don’t even know how to fix.

Many years back, I applied for a teaching job in a prominent college in Manila. I thought to teach some graphics editing with Adobe Photoshop, which I had been using for many years — as a hobby, but also professionally to produce fliers, logos and so on to personal clients. But the interviewer took one look at my degree and said, “Oh you’re a computer science graduate. You can teach web programming.”

And I said, “No, the web was very new when I was already a senior in school. I never got to study it. I don’t even know HTML.” (HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language — the basic building block of all web pages). The interviewer just smiled and then asked me to do a demo teaching session.

A few weeks later, I got the job and to my surprise, learned that they had assigned me a subject where I had to teach HTML. I literally had to grab a fellow new teacher and said, “Hey, you gotta teach me this stuff.” She graciously sat down with me and started typing and talking and showing me enough of the basics and pointed me to a couple of tutorial sites. I quickly scanned through what she shared and organized the key elements in my head.

A few minutes later, I walked into class and said, “Hey guys, let’s learn some HTML.” Little did they suspect that their teacher only learned the material a few minutes ahead of them.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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Diplomas are Meaningless (Part 1)

Many parents dream of having their children finish college. They endure hours of preparation and waiting for that brief few seconds when their child goes onstage and receives their diploma, and takes a bow.

That precious diploma — in many families it is a relic of pride, often laminated or framed and hung on a wall. It supposedly certifies a person’s competence and qualification for a job in their field.

When I came back to Davao almost 10 years ago to get involved in our family business, one of the first things I did was to go over our employee application process. My dad had long ago designed a test for applicants to take which involved basic arithmetic — adding long rows of numbers, subtraction, multiplying by 3 digits, division, etc. I remember he made me take that same test when I was just a kid dragged to the office and being bored to tears.

I thought that test was no longer applicable. Who adds rows of numbers by hand anyway? And why would there be a need for that when calculators and computers can do the job faster and with better accuracy?

So I wrote a new set of tests. In my mind, it was simple and would simply serve as a simple baseline check of the skills of the applicants. Any college graduate ought to be able to pass the test, I thought. Heck, even an elementary graduate ought to pass the test.

The first part consisted of having around 5 words per number and all the person had to do was arrange those words in alphabetical order.

This had a practical application. We run a retail drugstore and one of the tasks of the employee was to arrange some products in alphabetical order.

The second part consisted of basic arithmetic. John buys 3 tablets of brand X at 3.25 per tablet. How much does he have to pay? He gives you 20 pesos. How much is his change? Nothing harder than that — just real-life figures with real-life examples.

We used to require that our applicants be college graduates, so over the years, we’ve had hundreds of people with diplomas taking that test and the results are dismal — more than half of those failed.

What does it mean when hundreds of college graduates can’t pass a simple test consisting of items that I would have encountered when I was in sixth grade? What does that piece of paper mean then?

These days, we no longer require that our applicants be college graduates. They come, they get trained, and what makes them succeed will be their attitude, their willingness to learn, and their ability to assess situations and solve problems that come their way.

If they perform and if they are up to the task, I don’t even need to know what that piece of paper says and I don’t need to see their transcript nor their grades.

In the business world, only results matter.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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Barking Dogs

The beauty of the internet and social media is its ability to bridge the gap between physical and social distance and allow you to connect with your friends and even random people anywhere. It is possible to have real-time conversations and swap jokes with friends on the other side of the planet. You can quickly see what they had for lunch or dinner, or where their family went to spend summer vacation, or read their thoughts about this or that issue.

It’s also great for self-expression. Introverts like me can now get things off their chest by just writing “out there” without feeling the need to confront anyone in particular.

But like all things in life, that beauty also has an ugly side. The impersonal nature of the written word makes it easier for people to spread hate, anger and fear, whether intentionally or not.

I used to get into a lot of online arguments before, particularly when I was trolling religion and politics. I would get into very active arguments with this or that person. I would post sarcastic replies to random people who would also shoot back, and there would be a back and forth firing of replies until one of us got tired of it, or until another topic appeared and stole our attention.

Winston Churchill said “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks” and Mark Manson said, in less elegant fashion, “Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many f*cks in situations where f*cks do not deserve to be given. ”

Perhaps I’m just getting older. The younger me had more energy, was more curious and experimental, and probably also more conscious of what people thought and said about me. I thought I ought to sound off on each and every issue, and each remark I made ought to be “liked” and one in which many people agreed.

These days though, I don’t really care much. Not that I don’t care about what’s happening around me, but I have decided to focus on what I care about most  — education. As Manson (again) says, “We all have limited number of f*cks to give; Pay attention to where and who you give them to.” I am beginning to feel that limit as I begin to slide off my mid-forties and start the slow march towards the fifties.

The more time and energy I give to other causes and issues and whatnot, the less I have for my passion. So let the dogs bark. I’ll just ignore them and keep going straight where I want to go.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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To Homework or Not To Homework


That is the question. Or is it?

Two bills have been filed in congress seeking to ban homework as a requirement for schools. One seeks to ban homework in general and the other only seeks to ban it during the weekends. It has been interesting following the debate on this issue.

The proponents of the bills, as well as those who are pushing for these, say that it promotes more quality time for the children and parents and enhances well-being by eliminating a stress factor. Besides, they say, a lot of parents or tutors end up doing the homework anyway.

Those against the measure say that by doing this, we are producing wimps. Pile on the homework. Life is more difficult so we should prepare them for it instead of running away from it.

If you have been reading my previous articles, you could say that I favor throwing out the homework. But focusing on homework alone, however, is missing the point. I say throw out the homework, and the entire curriculum as well.

You see, the problem is not whether or not to give homework, because if a child is inclined to learn a certain topic, you can pile all the homework you want and he will do it. But if a child is not interested, no amount of homework will make him learn. Oh, he will perhaps learn just enough to pass the quiz, then the exam, and then forget all about it.

So it is important to study motivation and purpose — not the adults’, not the parents’ nor the teachers’ nor the principal’s motivation and purpose, but the child’s. 

There is a popular saying that goes, “the two most important days of your life are the day you were born, and the day you find out why.” 

What education ought to be doing is helping children discover their why’s, but what is happening with education now is that it is obsessed with telling children what they should be concerned with, what they should deem as important, what they should do with their time, what they should be studying, and even what they should be wearing and how their hairstyles ought to be.

This is not what education is all about. It is not about molding or shaping the children — because that implies that we are bending them for the purpose of the molder or shaper.

Each child has a unique gift, talent and purpose. The educator’s job is to get out of the way and let them discover the joy of finding it, then support and nurture that joy.

In the words of John Taylor Gatto, “Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

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What I Learned From Video Games

I saw an internet meme that said, “You see children cooking. I see reading, measuring, math, following directions, collaboration, listening skills, problem solving.” Indeed, a lot of people still believe that learning only occurs when “subjects” are taken separately, dissected and taken to unrealistic depths — with a need for highly trained, specialized and expensive teachers.

Learning happens everywhere, everyday with mundane tasks such as cooking — and this learning is wholistic, practical and grounded on reality. It is learning that caters to a child’s interest, and thus has more retentive qualities than rote learning in the classroom.

An activity that parents today worry about a lot is their kids playing video games. They think it is useless and addictive. I find it ironic that these same parents have their own addictions — alcohol, socializing, shopping, expensive watches, gambling, arguing with random people on facebook, and so on.

Let me tell you something, I have been a computer gamer since I first put my hands on my friend’s Apple 2 computer way back in 1985. I was 11 years old. The games back then were displayed in 1 color (usually green) and a far cry from today’s photorealistic graphics.

The very first game that captivated me was Secret Agent. It was an adventure game that started with you on a plane that was bound to crash, and you had type commands like “open door” or “get gun” or “shoot door” in order to get to the next stage.

The game required a lot of reading as you had to read scene descriptions and deduct clues from it. It also taught a bit of logic. You learned very quickly that “get parachute” followed by “jump out of the plane” doesn’t work because you have to “wear parachute” first before jumping out otherwise it will just go flying out of your hand when you jump.

Where in the World Was Carmen Sandiego? was another very popular game. You followed bandits by tracking clues which would tell you which country they went to. For example, you could talk to a witness and he would say something like, “She said she always wanted to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” and so that told you where the bandit went to next. And because you had to fly to the capital cities of each country, you would naturally memorize these capital-country pairs quite easily, and know if they were in Europe or Asia or South America. How’s that for learning geography?

Even arcade-style games like Karateka or Lode Runner or arcade-strategy game Captain Goodnight required rapid hand-eye coordination and strategic-thinking combined, especially at higher levels. And of course, I learned persistence when I kept dying at certain levels, but wanting to try again this time with a different tactic, or with faster fingers.

(Fun fact: I played the original Castle Wolfenstein, the grandfather of Wolfenstein 3D which came out in the 90’s — the original first person shooter. It was in 2D and only had stick figures. When the guards first appeared, my friend and I were startled because the speaker suddenly blared a very loud “Achtung! Achtung!”)

Even today, I still enjoy playing computer games and still learn from them. I don’t think it is unhealthy at all and people should loosen up about it. Yes, there are dangers in extremes, but that’s true for almost anything.

You see kids playing video games, I see hand-eye coordination, strategic thinking, persistence, out-of-the-box solutions, even applied math, physics, history and geography, and with the internet you can also throw in socialization and collaboration.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.