Two books on local government in the Philippines

These two books are available for full view at Google Books. Click on the title.

Decentralization and biodiversity conservation, Part 35
By Ernst Lutz, Julian Oliver Caldecott, World Bank

The global phenomenon of school decentralization is a highly political process. It involves substantial shifts in power, affecting the influence and livelihood of groups such as teachers and their unions. School systems are also vehicles for enhancing political influence and carrying out the programs and objectives of those in power. This report identifies the political dimensions of school decentralization and discusses the methods and problems of building a broad public consensus to support it. Country case studies and examples of best practices are provided.

Subnational capital markets in developing countries: from theory to practice
By Mila Freire, John E. Petersen, World Bank

Within the framework of increasing decentralization, the need for local governments to access financial markets is growing. As urbanization expands, local authorities need to provide more services with fewer resources from the central government. Subnational borrowing, leveraging reliable cash flows and prudent fiscal management, can be alternatives to fund such investments, especially when the useful life of the service is long and an adequate legal framework is in place to ensure fiscal and financial stability. This book, prepared by staff members of the World Bank and selected guest contributors, consists of two parts. The first part comprises a framework to study subnational governments as borrowers and the array of credit markets in which they may operate. The second part consists of case studies that document the recent experience of 18 countries in developing markets for subnational borrowers and offer lessons about fostering responsible credit market access within a framework of fiscal and financial discipline. The book pools information on the issuing of municipal debt and its characteristics, analyses the role of macroeconomic conditions and market development in the success or failure of those borrowings, and suggests recommendations to guide ongoing efforts. The goal is to assist local governments in working as strategic partners in the development and strengthening of the capital markets in emerging economies.

A poet, a woman, a poem

I'm rediscovering my love for literature, perhaps a gut reaction for the hell of weeks ahead being in law school and teaching world history, Asian studies and Probability and Statistics to my students at my employer.

Here's William Butler Yeat's "Aedh wishes for the Clothes of Heaven":

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Interesting how this poem was dedicated by Yeats to Maud Gonne -- his love for her almost drove him mad.

Rest Not, Rizal, Not Yet by Francisco O. Javines

(as published in the Philippine Journal of Education, December 1963)

Rest not, Rizal, not yet,
Rest not in peace. Your work is not yet done:
The very ailments that your pen described
and dared exposed so all the world could judge
the work of alien tyrants,
are now the very ills that plague our land:
The cancer that is caused by graft and greed
still is the festering sore
in high and low society, and now creeps
like a pestilence over the land.
The ignorance of leaders in your day
still is the ignorance that blinds
the dark and narrow minds
of self-appointed leaders in our midst.
The haughty arrogance of conquerors then
now is the studied arrogance of sycophants,
the gross discourtesy of loafing clerks.
Still money flows to grease and straighten out
the sinuous, circuitous, repetitive course
of administrative actuations.
Rest not, Rizal, be with us yet!
New social cancers blight the land:
the broke home, the child that knows not love or case;
the beggar stretched across a muddy pavement;
the gambler, the dope addict, and the goon;
the greedy legislator, ten percenter,
influence peddler, phony expert, super crook;
the inconsiderate rich who recklessly flaunt
their diamonds, their parties, and their cars;
the impatient poor who shun decent work
and dream of making millions overnight;
the bribed policeman turned extortionist;
the slanted press; the paid indecencies:
the list is a litany of legions.
Rest not, Rizal, be with us yet:
Rebuild in us the beauty and the dream;
Restore in us the vision and the hope;
Remake in us the mansions of the mind;
Reopen for us windows in the soul
through which the winds of vigor-giving change
will blow to sweep away our lassitude,
our lethargy of limb, our languor of the mind;
our longing for the frostrings and the frills.
Thus will return with stronger roots in us
your simple virtues, Pride of our Race,
your strength of soul, your industry, your thrift,
your great nobility, your quiet dignity;
your fortitude that faced the bullets in the dawn,
and sowed a revolution for our rights!

(You might also be interested of the poem They Only Hiked to Heaven by the same author.)

They Only Hiked to Heaven by Francisco O. Javines

(as published in the Manila Times and in the Philippine Journal of Education, August 1963)

Grieve not, my friends. The boys will be home:
They only hiked to heaven. And now they laugh
at the foolish tears we shed.
They are not dead - boys never die; they live
in you and me: in every little burden
from a neighbor's shoulders lifted;
in every smile we cause to glow
upon a face where sorrow drifted;
They live in every man or woman, boy or girl
whose life is filled with days of simple deeds:
perhaps a fence that's mended,
a frail old woman helped across a street;
or just a good book read, or a humble prayer said.
Weep not, O mothers. Grieve not, O fathers.
Your boys will still be boys in God's eternal bosom.
Their shouts, their pranks, their laughter and their tears
now echo in the vaster corridors of heaven.
Their names unsullied and their noble deeds
now are enshrined in the hears of men of men
of every clime and creed!
Grieve not, beloved land bereft of boyish blooms
suddenly plucked by the swift hand
of the Giver of life. He caught them like arrows
arrested in flight, gleaming in the sunlight,
to swerve to His higher purpose, His nobler aim.
And as April suns that sink in Manila Bay in one great blaze
return and ever return in every sunny day,
So too will they return in every son of this dear land:
in every good deed done, in every tear we turn to laughter.
Grieve not, my friends. Death is not death for him
whose daily humble deed shone bright and yet unseen
by eyes myopic with material greed.
Death is not death for those whose lives forever shine
as well-trod woodland paths
that beckon in the moonlight,
and beg the restless mind and heart, the exploring feet
to seek the distant nooks and glens, and there
to hold communion with the Maker, and to learn
the lore of fowl and flower, the prayer and the patience
of the trees; and then at last, when work is done,
to seek the silence of the tents of heaven.
They are not dead. They only wander now
amidst the tents of seraphim
in the eternal jamboree grounds
lit by the campfire of the stars.

To my neighbors

Please close your windows when you are making love. I am trying to live a good life here.

Also, love-making is taboo on Tuesdays, don't you know?

Love,

islesv

Three things I learned from law school

1. I am not the most intelligent person in the world, or in our class, for that matter. And worse, I'm not even the second best. I had some inkling about this when Jessie Ceniza tied with me for top place of our class back in our college days and Sherlenie Tecson of Cebu Normal University caused me to wonder why I was not able to see the brilliant proofs during our topology classes at UP Cebu, but hey, Jessie and Sherlenie were just one of my classmates in those classes. It's simply different when you have a classmate ahead of you and when almost every one in the class is ahead of you. So now the Jessies and Sherlenies are the Merachelles, Junjies, Kara Maes, Hyacinths, Ronalds, Yassers, and Camelles. (Did I miss any one? I sure hope I did - there are just too many of you. Come now, get off my head :))

2. No matter how you hard I study, there will always be better students than me. They don't study as much as me, they don't lose sleep over assignments, (and worse, they don't have to go to work and deal with students who have problems understanding their lessons), but they still get better scores than me in the test. In other words, they are just more intelligent than me. (Hey, isn't that number 1 above?)

3. (in the 3rd person now) No matter how you think your answer was much better than that of the other guy (or gal, or gay), the teacher has a different idea. And the teacher grades your answers, not you. Do you understand that now, islesv? (Sure I do: I force my students to understand the same exact thing every day of my working life.)

Lazy islesv

Some universities and colleges do not usually start their classes on time. They say classes start on November 10, 2009, but you'll only see the professor one or two meetings later.

Not at the University of Cebu College of Law.

I just missed four hours of lecture today.

I knew that classes start today (tonight, to be more exact), but my laziness got the better of me and I went home to sleep. Not that I am particularly tired, but it's difficult to adjust your body to a regimen of 8-hour work + 3- or 4-hour study after almost a month of relaxation. (After my first semester at law school, the days during the third week of October to the first week of November were comparatively lax days.)

And now, I'm two hours behind in my Local Government class, and two hours behind in Obligations and Contracts.

Someday my annoying habit is going to cause my death

One of my favorite habit (and annoying to many people) is insisting on implementing the rules. The previous Sunday, while I paid my fare on board the jeepney from my hometown Sogod, Cebu to Cebu City:

islesv: Here's my fare. (Handed in 40 pesos.)
driver: This is not enough. The new fare is 50 pesos.
islesv: Since when was that?
driver: Since the other Saturday.
islesv: Eh? I went home last Monday and only 40 pesos was collected from me.
driver: But we [drivers and operators] have already agreed that 50 pesos is the new fare. Besides, the fare matrix explicitly states that.
islesv: So you have a new fare matrix?
driver: No, but the old fare matrix charges 60 pesos for Sogod to Cebu City.
islesv: But don't you have to get a new fare matrix to demand a fare hike?
driver: As I've said, the old fare matrix charges 60 pesos for Sogod to Cebu City.
islesv: OK.
driver: (thought I will hand in an additional 10 pesos)
islesv: Can I see your old fare matrix?
driver: (pressed hard on the accelerator. We were going at nearly 100 kph.)

You jog but you don't walk?

A conversation with a tricycle driver, which forced me to reconsider my morning routine of taking a tricycle ride from my residence to the highway, where I could take a jeepney to go to my working place:

Driver: Are you not that guy who jogs at dawn?
Me: Yes, why?
Driver: I wonder why you can jog this length three times, but you don't want to walk it.
Me: (said nothing)
Driver: You're too proud to walk, are you not?
Me: (said nothing; OK, I got your point)

(Additional benefit: seven pesos saved every day. That's for the morning coffee.)

Whatever happens is a resource

A writer -- and, I believe, generally all persons -- must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. --Jorge Luis Borges

Gibo is incompetent

Gibo + Ondoy = Incompetence.

When Mar Roxas decided not to run for President in 2010, I thought Gibo Teodoro, Jr. would be the next best bet.

But the slow and incompetent response of the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), of which Gibo is the chairman, during the typhoon Ondoy calamity convinced me otherwise. If how he performed that day is a prelude to his performance come 2010, we're in for some six years more of hell (as of nine under Gloria is not enough).

At the very least, NDCC thought it wise to remove Gibo's ads about "disaster preparedness" from the networks that very day and every day afterwards. But still, I feel cheated, and I'm sure, a thousand other Filipinos too. In the TV ads, it seems we were ready for any disaster. But it was clear it was all propaganda, just like the economic figures now and then cited by our government.

I would have put that issue to rest, but a replacement ad is now being aired.



Galing at talino? If he doesn't sound boastful in asserting that, I don't know what would. So what if he graduated magna cum laude from law? Or that he was a bar topnotcher? We've had enough of this uber-intelligent people running our government. Remember Gloria has an economics degree kuno - it didn't help.

Are the people in-charge of his ads commissioning any survey at all? Perhaps it would be wise to check what the average Filipino needs now - not someone who has the brains, but someone they can believe in.

Gibo may not have noted from his Sociology 101 (or Philippine Institutions, whatever they call it at the University of the Philippines, where he graduated) that majority of Filipinos are poor, and don't finish college (or even have the means to enroll in college, for that matter). They may admire his accomplishments, but they cannot identify with him. I can't even identify with him, and I'm one of those "pinagpala" who were able to go to college. In politics, identification is king. Just look at what Manny Villar is trying to do. (Unfortunately, his trapo image works against him.)



In classic Chinese political theory, there's a concept known as the mandate of heaven. When the heavens do not approve of the ruler any more, the gods send disasters, including the death of several key leaders (in Gloria's time, how many can you name? FPJ, Roco, Manalo, etc.). Unfortunately for Gibo, he is part of Gloria's dynasty. (The term dynasty can also refer to the succession of "appointed" or "annointed" successors, not just the immediate family members of the ruling family - confer Byzantine history.)

And the heavens had spoken. Gloria and her dynasty must go. That includes Gibo.

Okay, I might be rationalizing my dislike for Gibo since the Ondoy disaster. But unfortunately,

"The image of a meeting being held with the top brass while my son was waiting for help sitting in the rain on the rooftop on the middle of flood water does not speak well. Management style or not, this is a bad response." -Atty. Trixie Angeles

A truly humbling video

The Sun is a Miasma of Plasma

National Geographic Bee

Still looking for more geography challenges online, I took the National Geographic Bee (for November 7, 2009) from the National Geographic Society. My score: (out of 10,000; I had one item out of 10 wrong)


(P.S. I'm sure to come back each day...)

You're a history teacher and that's your geography score?

I had fun taking the geography quiz at FreePoverty.com - I got a grade of 132. I'm not sure what's the highest (probably 300), but I did managed to get to the third or fourth question of the hard (difficult) level.

I noticed that my weakness is in identifying the different places in the United States. I could only properly identify Tallahasee and Orlando in Florida, and that's because my girlfriend used to work and study at Orlando, and I picked up my knowledge about Orlando about that time. Also, there were few questions about African places, and I'm not sure I could properly identify different places there (I'm only confident about South Africa and Somalia).

But the clincher question was about Mauritania. I did not even knew that that country is located in Africa until I failed the quiz :)

Notes on a math curriculum

As the subject coordinator for mathematics at PAREF Springdale School, I presided over the meeting yesterday which looked at our performance matrix for the entire curriculum.

Our target was to finish a single level, and we focused on the primary school (grades 1 to 3).

My training back at the University of San Carlos was for high school mathematics, and I realized that I need some input on the development of mathematical thinking in the earlier grades. I only remember some basic information (from my readings and from actual experience being a grade 1/2/3 student almost two decades ago): multiplication tables are introduced at Grade 2, clocks and calendars are necessary in grade 1, etc.

It seems to me too that the DepEd curriculum for the earlier grades nowadays is a lot crowdier than what it was two decades ago. Then there is the nebulous "Geometry" portion for the fourth quarter (grading period) of each grade.

Also, a lot of parents, teachers and school administrators seem to think that it is necessary to have their children learn the multiplication table in grade 1. The question is not whether they can; I believe they can, given enough time to drill it in and a good teacher to guide the students. But whether it is the best time to put it in the curriculum is another question.

Keeping my fingers crossed...

I went to the University of Cebu College of Law office this afternoon to check on the status of my enrollment. I had already plotted last Monday my schedule for the second semester for this school year 2009-2010, but the office have not yet approved my enrollment because some of the grades were not yet available.

Only the grades in four (out of seven) courses that I've taken last semester were already available by today. My grades for the four are the following:

• Persons and Family Relations (Civil Law I; under Atty. Steve Y. Dicdican) - 1.0 (x 4 units)
• Environmental Law (under Atty. Rose-Liza Eisma-Osorio) - 1.9 (x 2 units)
• Legal Ethics/Legal Profession/Legal Philosophy (under Asst. Dean Atty. Paulino A. Yabao) - 2.2 (x 3 units)
• Constitutional Law I (under Atty. Jess Anthony N. Garcia) - 1.6 (x 3 units)
  

I'm keeping my fingers crossed - hopefully I can maintain the scholarship.

Last semester I paid only the ID fee, insurance and UCLASS (student organization) fee - the college did not ask me to pay for tuition and miscellaneous fees because I graduated magna cum laude from my undergraduate course (Bachelor of Secondary Education) from the University of San Carlos. I even had free books.

I was thinking that I might have to shell out almost 19,000 pesos this semester (where will I get the money?) for the tuition if I don't get the 1.7 cut-off grade. (I might be able to chip off almost 2,000 from the 19,000 by paying once and on time to avail of the 10% discount, but still 17,000 is a big amount of money. I'd rather buy a second-hand motorcycle or use that money for downpayment for a new one.)

The only three grades not yet in the system by the time I visited the office were for the following:

• Alternative Dispute Resolution (2 units)
• Statutory Construction (2 units)
• Criminal Law I (3 units)

ADR and StatCon were both under Atty. Roque E. Paloma, Jr. while Crim was under Atty. Celso V. Espinosa.

My biggest worry among these three courses is Criminal Law I. I might not even pass the course, or get less than 2.5 (the rule is simple: average of at least 1.7, and no grade below 2.5). Assuming Atty. Espinosa will look upon my final exams with kindness (honest Sir, I really don't get the Indeterminate Sentence Law), I might get at least a 2.5.

And even then, I still have to pray that my grades in both ADR and StatCon would be OK. OK would mean that one would be at least a 1.3 while the other would be a 1.2. If all these three conditions are met, I will get my 1.7 average.

(P.S. Really, I don't get the ISLaw yet. For my consolation, even the members of the Supreme Court sometimes debate over the proper application of its provisions, e.g. People vs. Temporada)

Of requirements not received, and NG (or INC) (and Yahoo considering islesv.net spam)

I just realized that what I may have accepted with full courage before, with the firm belief that bad things happen to random people in a random manner, had actually traumatized some deep section of my psychology.

Last year, while I was taking up my masters at the University of the Philippines in the Visayas - Cebu Campus (UP Cebu), a guard lost my requirements for the course Instructional Planning II, resulting in my getting an INC (incomplete) grade for that subject. (For the record, when I received that INC, I was in fact happy -- I really thought that I deserved a failing mark for that course because I learnt so little.)

This time, I almost got an NG (no grade) for my Legal Ethics course at the University of Cebu (where I am taking up Bachelor of Laws) because my professor did not receive my and my partner's case digests which I sent via email almost a month ago (October 8, to be exact). No thanks to Yahoo, which may have flagged my islesv.net address as spam. (Even my girlfriend had to whitelist that address - stupid Yahoo.)

The funny thing is I feel a certain dread.