I’ve been giving exams for more than 20 years, and as any teacher learns fairly quickly in his or her career, constructing them can be an art in itself. The challenge consists in framing questions that are tough to answer but easy to grade, questions that will produce answers that provide not only objective information but nuanced arguments and attitudes, that tell you right off if the student has done his or her homework and knows what he or she is talking about.
This semester – for my class in the American short story and another on Philippine Culture and Society – I required three quizzes (a combination of objective questions and a short essay), a midterm and final (both essay-type, open-book exams), and a 10-page term paper.
The objective quizzes keep the students on their toes and are an easy check on their reading; I have to confess that, perhaps unnaturally, I loved such quizzes myself as a kid, treating them as a trivia game. But these days I believe firmly in the necessity of full sentences and paragraphs as a gauge of the student’s command of the subject and powers of articulation. I don’t expect perfectly punctuated compound-complex sentences, but I do demand clear, sharp, and interesting ideas with some corroborating detail – evidence of a mind at work, beyond the "spitback" or regurgitation of lecture notes.
Now and then I get inspired (or desperate) enough to try new things with my exams, and this semester I thought of alternative ways of getting the same old information out of my students. PHLP 100 introduced 33 young non-Filipinos to Philippine history and culture, and this was how I tried to see how well they understood and internalized what we had been discussing in class.
1. (One of my two midterm exam questions.) Pretend that you’re a member – an officer, an enlisted man, a nurse, or a cook – of the Wisconsin Volunteers regiment of the American occupation army in the Philippines. It is March 1902. You have been fighting Filipino forces in the countryside (you can choose where), and are back in Manila for two weeks of rest and recreation, before being sent out again on a yet-unspecified mission.
Write a letter home to your father or mother, telling them about where and how you are, giving them your most vivid impressions of the Philippine Islands and its people, and of your experience as a combatant.
The letter should be personal, convincing, and with some sharp, memorable details (you can make up a few for as long as they are defensibly realistic). I’m looking for a letter that will capture the mindset of an American soldier, and the temper of the times. (Note: the Wisconsin Volunteers never fought in the Philippines, in historical fact, but served in Cuba.)
2. (What I called the "creative option" for their term paper: "A Day in the Life.") Choose a specific date from 1521 to the present, a character, and a place in the Philippines, and walk me through a day in the life of this character, from the moment he or she wakes up to his or her bedtime. I’d like to get beneath the flesh of this character, to see the world through his or her eyes. What’s his or her biggest problem or concern for that particular day? What will he or she eat, wear, visit, make, do? What can make this character laugh, cry, curse, or sing? Who are his or her parents, siblings, friends, and enemies? What will this character want or dream of for the morrow?
3. (Their sink-or-swim final exam, which I intended to reveal how they appreciated large political, economic, and social issues from an American standpoint.) Assume that you work as a senior official for the US government, and that you’ve just been assigned as Assistant Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific, with the Philippines as one of your key areas of responsibility. To improve US-Philippine relations, the President has authorized you to spend $50 million in foreign aid for one high-impact project in the Philippines. This assumes that you’ve done your homework, and understand both the historical and contemporary Philippine situation thoroughly.
What project will you recommend for that money, why, and what problems do you expect to encounter in its implementation? What activity or reform will benefit the Philippines the most, for which a $50 million fund could make a real difference? What historical imbalances or inequities will your chosen project address? Why this particular project and not others? Cite possible alternatives and their merits or demerits.
Write your answer in the form of a formal memorandum to the President, in the White House, beginning with "Dear Mr. President" (or "Dear Mrs. President", if you prefer), and sign it in the end with "Very truly yours," followed by your name and signature.
I thought I’d go over those prescriptions and see how we in the Philippines match up. How are our own kids and our system doing?
1. "Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way." My recent teaching stint in the American Midwest offered painful proof of how far young Americans have to go in this direction. I found that the best friend of ignorance in this case wasn’t the lack of money or the means to go, but complacency, a lulling sense of contentment with what one knew and was comfortable with.
Here our discomforts and discontents give us a leg up. We Filipinos are naturally interested in the outside world – we have to be, to survive. We bring our little barangays and mindsets along wherever we might end up, but there’s no such thing as a place too far for the Filipino. In a sense, we’re global citizens as much as or more than anyone else, but whether we act as global citizens – responsible not only to and for our families and country, but to and for the world – may be another matter. In any case, let’s keep a map of the world in every Filipino classroom, or better yet, a twirling globe.
2. "Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy – the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated – ‘put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos.’… It’s interdisciplinary combinations – design and technology, mathematics and art – ‘that produce YouTube and Google,’ says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat."
I think we Pinoys have first-rate minds and wonderful creative talents, but I suspect that the physical and institutional infrastructure just isn’t there to spark these "interdisciplinary combinations" that make for trailblazing departures from the usual way things are made or done. There’s little incentive for serious research; we think in terms of tomorrow and next week, not next decade; we punish or ignore the nonconformist; and we’re mostly quite happy to be employed by someone else and to claim a paycheck twice a month, instead of gambling on a dream or a notion. We’re creative, sure, but not too imaginative. (Does that make sense?)
3. "Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what’s coming at them and distinguish between what’s reliable and what isn’t."
For most of us, the world of new media – the Internet, satellite TV, the iPod, Counterstrike, blogs, digicams, DVDs – is still a playground, built mainly for fun, and full of nice people who’ll push your swing. We’ve yet to appreciate it as a battleground or high-speed chute for ideas, commercial pitches, outright lies, and – somewhere among them – tons of useful information.
Here I think we’re pretty even. While young Americans of course have much easier and wider access to high technology than their Filipino counterparts, all these kids use the Internet and other digital media for mainly the same reasons – entertainment, homework, and social networking. They spot the same opportunities, fall into the same traps, pine for the same objects and objectives. Indeed, the Internet (and MTV before it) has helped to create a global youth culture, something much more homogenous and more widespread than their parents could have imagined or would have been willing to take part in.
And again, we’ve adapted the Internet and cellular telephony to our very specific needs. I can’t forget that roomful of nursing students on their lunch break in Davao, hunched over monitors in an Internet café across their school, each one looking for a potential mate abroad on a matchmaking website. That’s a sight you’ll never see in the States.
4. "Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today’s workplace. ‘Most innovations today involve large teams of people,’ says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. ‘We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.’"
Here Filipinos excel. We aim to please, and please the world we do, with exemplary – indeed biblical – patience and industry.
Over an end-of-the-semester lunch with my fellow instructors, I shared my summary impressions of American collegiate education today – some very positive, some not quite so. The resources of a modern American university or college are awesome, and the energy and candor of its students refreshing. But they, too, face daunting challenges. Sometimes I got the sense that schooling in America is designed to achieve a level of comfort – a kind of "I’m okay, you’re okay" ethos – when education could be more useful by promoting the opposite, a deep-seated if occasionally ugly disquiet.
But I have to say that I had a great time in De Pere, one of the most peaceful and pleasant places in America you can ever hope to be in: I came, I taught, I learned.