(An ABS-CBN News report. Annotated by Arbet Bernardo, annotations in italics.)

President Arroyo was heckled by government employees several times while delivering a speech during the celebration of International Women’s Day at the Ninoy Aquino Stadium in Pasay, Manila Thursday morning.

The President told the crowd at the stadium that the government’s microfinance project seeks to grant loans to the poor so they can start small businesses. She added that the government signed a memorandum of agreement with the Canadian government, which allocates P300 million for women transformation.

She then asked the audience, composed mostly of government employees, who among them had benefited from microfinance.

“Wala (None)!” shouted the audience. Oh dear.

The President then asked Myrna Yao, chairwoman of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, to explain why the women did not receive financial aid when they should have been the first ones to benefit from it. Yao said the women who had benefited from the project were not invited. Ms. Yao must be having cold sweats by this time.

Mrs. Arroyo asked Yao why the beneficiaries were not invited. She then turned to the audience and asked: “Who among you are conduits to microfinance?”

The crowd again shouted in the negative and started heckling the President. Heads will roll soon….

Yao then explained that most of the beneficiaries attended last year’s Women’s Day rally and that this year’s attendees were all new.Now she must be shaking.

Mrs. Arroyo then asked the audience in Tagalog: “Maybe this is the first time you attended Women’s Day?” She added that nongovernment organizations and government employees should coordinate with the Deparment of Social Welfare and Development, which is managing the microfinance project.

The President also asked the government employees if they received an additional P1,000 monthly allowance, which was implemented last year. The attendees again shouted “None!” and started laughing. Some attendees later realized that they were actually receiving the allowance on top of their regular pay, DZMM reported.Buti pa sila, yung mga street sweepers ni Gloria, wala.

After her speech, Mrs. Arroyo attended a closed-door meeting with Yao and DSWD officials. Uh-oh. Not good.

Why do we keep on punishing the innocent?

When the supposed leakage in the June 2006 nursing board exams leaked to the press, the immediate reaction was for a retake of the exams. The investigations had not even began by then, and yet some people (who are not even in the nursing profession) were calling for a retake.

Well, now these people have succeeded. Nurses who passed the June 2006 exams have to retake if they want to get VisaScreens.

Buried deep by the CGFNS decision and the futile US junket of Congressman Monico Puentevella et al is the root of this scandal. Was there really a proof of leakage? Who made the leak? Who benefited from the leak? Are these people charged in court?

Two members of the Board of Nursing are charged by Ombudsman (after almost six months) only now. That slow office is set to start investigating private individuals involved in the leakage.

The justice system on this country is really slow. The innocents are already punished (and being punished), but the guilty are still being investigated.

For those who advocated retakes: the Supreme Court does not allow retakes in bar exams when leakages occur. What the Court do is to invalidate the section where there was leakage and punish the guilty. Take the 2004 bar exams for example.

The concept of honor and command responsibility is really alien to this administration. In other parts of the world, head would have rolled and resignations would have been tendered. Here, we punish the innocent.

Enrolling your children in a private school does not guarantee a quality education. Many fall prey to the fallacy that private schooling equates to quality education, and not a few learn this lesson the hard way.

With the school year ending in a few weeks, as most students rush to comply with last-minute requirements for clearance, many parents will probably get a shock with their children’s school performance. And when they do, it will probably be too late, all because there are instructors who don’t care at all.

A good teacher will inform a child’s parents immediately if the student is having problems in school, whether academically or otherwise. That way, parents can act on the matter, and the teacher can proceed with corrective action upon consultation with the parents. This is the ideal situation.

Now, things can go wrong on three fronts: an indifferent teacher, an indifferent set of parents, or worse, both are indifferent.

A trip to Navotas (a municipality in Metro Manila) this weekend had led me to write this post.

There is this kid who is enrolled in a private school. The grandparents of this kid (the kid’s mother is an OFW, and his father is the usual husband of an OFW) learned that their grandchild will probably repeat next year; Php 36,000 down the drain. So that the kid will not repeat, teachers had told the guardians to “do” several projects.

The computer instructor had asked for a complex computer program. So complex, in fact, that the student will surely repeat, as the project is clearly above the student’s capability and knowledge. Heck, this type of project is usually given to programming students – in college!

There are several problems to this story.

It is OK to teach students some computer skills. But to teach students programming skills that clearly is way above the student’s capability is wrong. Programming entails advanced analytical skills; in reputable schools, they train programming students to be analytical by loading student course work with several units in Calculus and other hard sciences (chemistry and physics). Clearly, the teacher in the story is not an educator; he is probably a programming major without any training in education.

I understand that finding fully-trained computer-subject educators (with a degree in education) is a problem for secondary schools who offer computer subjects, so some schools are forced to hire the next-best alternative. But without a background in education, a greenhorn teacher (even if fully qualified in IT) is forced to apply what he know (despite the curriculum), sometimes even more than what students can handle. But education schools are fast catching up on this, and it will take a while before the problem is ameliorated.

Testing is a part of the teaching process. This allows a teacher to gauge what the students know, what they have learned, and how they can apply what they have learned. Projects are simply tests to measure how the students apply the knowledge that they have gained.

When a teacher assigns a project, it is assumed that the teacher has taught everything that the student needs to know in order to do the project. You do not test a student on what he doesn’t know (unless it is a diagnostic test); you do not ask a student to do a project that you know he cannot do.

Also, the concept of project-for-passing-grade is just plain wrong. Why study for months when you can pass by just submitting a project?

The fact that the teacher allowed the problems to last at this point in time shows that the teacher is remiss in his duties.

However, the teacher is not solely to blame in this story. Parents and guardians have to make sure that their children are doing good at school. Besides, they get to see the report cards four times a year. By the grades alone, they should know if students are having problems or not, and act accordingly.

If this is the state of education in private schools, are public schools in a much better state? What do you think?

The debate about the economy, to me, is just political noise and not much else. Why should senatorial candidates debate about a topic that is clearly the domain of the executive? Sure, legislators enact economic laws, but they do so because the executive asks them to do so.

In the presidential system of government, it is the executive that sets the economic agenda, and calls on the legislative to enact laws that will support this agenda. Legislators may file bills of economic nature from time to time, but those bills do not fit the agenda, they are not prioritized.

So where does the Senate fit into the so-called debate on the economy? Why debate on statistics? Can they correlate those figures with the bills passed by the Congress?

(Besides, government numbers are always disputed; see this column by Manuel Buencamino. All I can say is this: changing the rules in mid-game is called cheating.)

And as MLQ3 has said, making the economy as the topic of the debate is a double-edged sword. It can always boomerang against the one who threw it.

John Marzan has a continuing post on the issues that should be tackled by the opposition.

Electoral reform and political reform, for starters. We keep on lamenting the kind of politics that we have, yet we fail to take our legislators to task when it comes to these matters. See this PCIJ post for what could have been.

Maybe the economy-as-debate-topic is just a smokescreen to hide other issues that should be tackled.