Last section of Grade six. I am amazed by these pupils for what took the teacher days to make took them just under twenty minutes to finish. It's frustrating to think that after all the the test makers' efforts, some pupils do not even make an effort to read the test items; they just circle letters randomly, and they do not even try to answer essay questions.
The third
week of January is the scheduled examination week for the third quarter grading period. So,
teachers are supposed to be making their tests now. We should now be writing
our table of specifications, making questions based on the table and having it
checked by the master teacher of the subject. But...hehehe...teachers' weekends are sacrosant.
There are some things that tests and examinations cannot measure. I teach music and paper tests for music cannot measure the pupils' musicality.
Things to remember in making a test: Prepare test questions
based on the lessons taught or tackled within the grading period, organize the
test from easy to difficult, vary the test type from multiple choice, matching
type to essay; distractors should be related to the correct answers so that the
pupils would find it quite challenging to get the correct answer and not just
use simple common sense to figure out the correct answer, and make sure the
instructions are simple and easy to understand. Basically, these are the things
to remember in test construction
Validity
and reliability are things best left to the teachers of Measurement and
Evaluations.
Tests are
difficult to construct now because purely objective tests are discouraged.
Gone are the days of purely objective test.
Test
items like this are discouraged:
1. What
do you use to cut wires?
a. Wire
Cutter b.
Hammer c.
Screw Driver
Today’s
test items are situational.
Example:
1. Mang
Pedro and his family was watching TV when the electricity went out. He looked
for cause of the black out, and he found out that main switch’s fuses was
busted. He bought replacement fuse. What tool should Mang Pedro use to remove
and replace the fuse?
a. Pliers b.
Hammer c.
Screw Driver
Imagine
how difficult this is especially for subjects that use English for instruction.
(Lucky for me, all the subjects I teach use Filipino.) Just
making up of the situations takes a lot of time plus making sure that the items
are grammatically correct, etc., then the encoding. The result: a three
page-legal sized-front and back test instrument (or whatever these examinations
are called by educators).
I have
nothing against “situational” tests except foe the extra effort it entails for
the teachers. Anyway, the advantages for the pupils are many. Primary is that
it promotes reading comprehension. Logical thinking is enhanced. It promotes
skills in recognizing cause and effect, making predictions, processes, etc.
It’s just
that this kind of test is so difficult to construct especially for a lazy
teacher like me.
It’s the end of the day, the end of the week and I am so enervated that I feel I can’t get up from my chair. I am sitting, feeling my head
throbbing from the hours of incessant talking. So, instead of grabbing my motorcycle key and broom-brooming the heck out of the school, I had to sit down and rest for a few minutes. Resting while typing and talking and inundating all my blah,blah,blah to this blog while five pupils are cleaning up the room.
Teaching does not tire me; in fact, I enjoy
being in front of the class teaching, singing and cracking jokes and laughing
with my pupils. What really zaps my energy is the constant struggle to keep my
temper at bay.
What pisses me off is the seemingly lack of appreciation from my pupils for the effort
I give to be as respectful to them as possible, giving my best to be cool and to level with them so as to lower the tension and lessen the communication barrier during the class, but there are pupils who sometimes misinterpret this
as acquiescence and they take advantage. They literally test the limits of my patience. So, I have to continually remind them, sometimes firmly, about the teacher-pupil
relationship especially inside the classroom.
God knows I try my best to hold
back. I even go as far as to humor my pupils just to diffuse my anger and make myself
laugh at the intolerable rudeness and disrespect of some of my pupils
especially those from among the lower sections, but there are times that these
holding back gives in and it's inevitable for emotion to flare up. This is inevitable. But I and all teachers
must learn how to control this inevitable eruption especially the tendency and the temptation to
physically harm a pupil i.e. to whack them on the head or throw things at them, or, in my case, the temptation to throw them out of the door.
This happens to the best of us. That’s why whenever there’s
news of a teacher physically harming a pupil, I empathize with the teacher. Of
course it does not mean that the teacher is justified in hurting his/her
pupil/s. I empathize because I know the pressure, and the energy and the
effort it take to hold back cumulative stress. These pressure and stress are factors why teachers lose it and hurt their pupils. Parents should understand this. I don't believe that teachers are mean, sadistic human beings. Teachers lose composure because of the work load, the records and the forms, the unscheduled visitations from supervisors and superintendent and other minor department gods, school and inter school activities, the complaining and the attention seeking-gossip mongering parents, the collections, disrespectful and rude pupils that make the teachers feel degraded thus losing their sense of self esteem, the negative atmosphere in the work area etc. add these all up and you have dynamites waiting to explode. I am not complaining, but all I am saying is there are factors that affect teachers behavior, their minds and their effectiveness, and that teachers have different tolerance for stress, humiliation and physical labor.
But hurting pupils is inexcusable. Teachers who lose it and are guilty of physically hurting their pupils should be made accountable and should be meted out the penalty deserving their actions, but these teachers deserve to be understood too. Teachers who are sex offenders and abusers are exceptions; they should be summarily shot IN THE GROIN if proven guilty!
Anyway...
Thank God for the weekend. I
strongly feel (most teachers would agree
with me) that the weekend should be an inviolable rest day for the teachers because
five days of teaching is murder, sucks the life out of us teachers, literally slowly (or if you have heart problem, instantly) killing us, while the two days reprieve give us the opportunity to
energize, to build up the reserve power to continue on teaching.
Anyway, I’m just tired and I am
not harping on anybody or complaining about anything in general or in particular. I am just tired and I want
to rest. I just want to rest.
I am
thinking of resigning from teaching in the church so that I could enjoy my weekend, but that's another thing..
I just want to rest on the weekend; I believe that's not so difficult to understand :-) Outta here...
As a motivation for my industrial
arts pupils, I did a simple arithmetic on the amount of water lost due to a
leaking faucet and I translated this loss into money. I hope they get an idea
of the amount. I think this is a good way of motivating them to learn some
simple maintenance job in their homes.
Hmmm…this is weird really. While
doing the math, my mind (the other one that is because the other part of my
mind is engaged in teaching, does not mean I have schizophrenia or something)
wandered off to looking at the pupils, looking into their eyes and thinking of what they were doing and at the same time thinking of how their minds process the
motivation that teachers (and parents) throw at them.
I am not talking about motivation
that teachers use to prepare their pupils’ interest to the lesson at hand; I’m
talking about the motivation thrown at the children about what they do, why
they study; the things that fuel or nudge them to strive.
Got me wondering…
The norm for graduation or
special events is to invite successful (most of them financially successful)
people to talk to inspire, to challenge and to share their experiences on their
way up to achievement, to share the challenges and how these challenges were
overcome and, of course, the meat of the speeches the secret/s to their
success.
Of course, the audiences are all
ears, taking note and processing the speeches with the thinking that maybe they
could duplicate in whole or in part some of the successes achieved by the
speaker/s.
Hmmmm…but this got me thinking…
Let us take for instance Manny
Pacquiao.
The press has been building a myth around the
man as an icon of success. He is being hailed as a paragon of a successful
sports figure, businessman, politician (though personally I think this is not
his court), and even that of a faithful family man. This is beside the fact
that he has sired a child at least with one woman. I mean his action like
manipulating the mother of his illegitimate son into agreeing into a
disadvantageous settlement showed Pacquiao’s insensitivity and irresponsibility
by denying this son the right the child should have enjoyed as a son, even an
illegitimate one, both financially and emotionally. Never the women who I think
took advantage of Pacquiao, it’s the child.
Anyway, just
shows that Pacquiao is not the Bible toting and Bible quoting person that he is
supposed to be. He is a human being after all.
Anyway, almost
most of the leaders and motivational speakers I have heard (not necessarily listened to) have used Pacquiao as a model.
Nothing's wrong with this, per se, but I still believe that there are more better
person to idolize than him. But is it possible to duplicate MP's sucess?
How about Bill
gates? How about the late Steve Jobs? How about the cousin that became a
millionaire? How about Lady Gaga, How about Alvin and the Chipmunks? How about…
I don’t know
about this…but I think when a person starts to have idols, or models to look up
to, they, somehow, lose something in them. Of course, it can be argued that by
loosing something in themselves, they, in the process have gained something in
themselves. This is like nature abhorring vacuum or the principle that no two
things (or entity) could occupy space at the same time.
Anyway, aside
from the parents and the teachers who are inevitably the firsts people that
directly influence the primary development of an individual’s identity, these
idols or icons (pop or cultural or intellectual or religious or cartoons
characters or what have you) have great influences on the further development of
an individual’s identity including his/her understanding of the world or
reality (going way over my head here).
Of course, in
the development of an individual’s self or identity, it is impossible to happen
without the influence or interference of factors, this is inevitable. It is
impossible for an individual to come into his self awareness without the
influence of everything around him/her.
What is, I
think, happening is that when looking up to someone as a model, the self has to
give something of its own. In the development of the self, there is the
tendency to think that the mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa, but there is
the thinking that this is not necessarily so. The mind is not exactly blank but
it has built in or aprio ri transcendental something that makes the mind an
active organ and not just a sponge or passive organ where information or
experiences are inputted.
Anyway, where am
I?
Having someone
to look up to both positive or negative, means that a part of an individual’s
identity is lost or if one is an admirer of the tabula rasa theory, some how
the individual’s self awareness is redirected outside. This is not necessarily
bad nor is it necessarily good. Like I said before, this is just inevitable.
Anyway, as the
individual age this influences or models or icons start to assert its supremacy
over the individual. There are then tensions that happen in the person’s self
awareness. There are parts of an individual that rejects this invasion of the
self, by these influences, while there are parts that fights for its
assimilation.
To the artists,
as is true with development, the first stage is imitation. Anyway, (my-co teacher
interrupted and I lost my already disorganized train of thought) there will come a time when the self, somehow, need
to assert it’s own self, it rebels and wants to eject this influences to
establish its own identity. I don’t know but maybe this is similar to what is
called the identity crisis, maybe it is. Who cares…
Got me thinking,
somehow, to the listeners of these motivational speakers, or when looking up to
someone as an ideal or a paragon, most of them want to duplicate the success but
most of the time they lose themselves.
Blah,blah,blah,
gosh, my one hour break is over and being called by my pupils…how time flies!
If you got this far and maybe wandering what in the frak (got this word from Battlestar Galactica Reimagined) am I talking about, I congratulate you...really I'm just passing my break time :-)
But if you're looking for Freudian slips...do have fun :-)
My co teacher, who's taking an
MA in ED Management, was reading a book; she was obviously preparing a
presentation for her MA class. I took a look at the book and it was an old book
about educational supervision and management, sort of a principal’s manual.
Anyway, there were interesting
things that I learned from my reading some of which I already knew some of
which I did not know. Anyway, I’m just sharing some excerpts from School
Administration and Supervision by Gregorio p. 363 ff. This book was
copyrighted in 1961 so there may be some changes that have been effected since
then. Anyway, here are the excerpts. For brevity, I did not copy all the details except for items which think are not that known to some public school teachers.
Here we go:
As Civil Service employees, the
public school teachers, supervisors, and administrators are enjoying special
privileges. All privileges of the teaching personnel are prescribed by law.
Some of these privileges are the following: (I did not cite all the relevant
laws for this is just an overview of what I have read. For complete information
I suggest you read Gregorio’s book.)
1.Teachers
as persons in authority.
This means that teachers cannot be attacked
physically when performing their duties. This lawprotects the
teachers from being physically harmed by parents and other individuals who may
have grudges against them.
.
2.Maternity Leave.{I think there are already provisions for paternity leave]
3.Study
Leave.
Public school
teachers are encouraged to raise their educational qualifications. Study leave
is intended to assist teachers in securing personal and professional
improvement and to retain in service those teachers who are efficient.
4.Outside
teaching.
The Department
allows public school teachers to teach in private evening classes in not more
than 12 hours a week in addition to their regular loads in their own schools.
5.Vacation
and sick leave.
6.Compulsory
insurance.[GSIS is the main insuring agency of the government.]
7.Vacation
Pay.
Teachers are
entitled to pay during the Christmas and long vacation.
8.Service
Credit.
A teacher on the
teacher’s leave basis is given service credit when he is asked to work during
the vacation period. This service credit maybe used to offset past and future
absences due to illness and other reasonable causes.
9.Salary
Loans.
10.Free
Medical Consultations.
11.Cost
of living and hardship allowance.
Public school
teachers are entitled to cost of living allowance. The teachers’ salaries shall
keep pace with the rise in cost of living by the payment of cost-of-living
allowance.
Likewise, special
hardship allowances are to be enjoyed by public school teachers in some areas
of the country.
In areas to
where teachers are exposed to hardships such as difficulty in commuting to the
place of work or other hazards as determined by the Secretary of Education.
12.Compensation
for injuries.
13.Joining
Teachers’ Organization.
Public school
teachers shall have the right and without previous authorization to freely to
establish or to join organizations of their choosing whether local or national
to further defend their interest, subject to existing laws, Civil Service
Rules, and policies of the State. The right established shall be exercised
without any interference or coercion.
14.Enjoy
Academic Freedom.
Teachers are free
to use any method of teaching they think best for their pupils. Likewise, they
are free to experiment and express the result of their experiment.
15.Working
Hours for Teachers
Teachers engaged
in actual classroom teaching are required to render not more than six hours of
actual classroom teaching a day to give hime/her time for the preparation and correction
exercises and other work incidental to his normal teaching duties.
They maybe
required to render more than six hours but not exceeding eight hours of actual
classroom teaching a day upon payment of additional compensation at the same
rate as his regular remuneration plus at least twenty five percent of his basic
salary.
16.Retirement
Benefit.
17.Tenure
of office.
Regular or permanent public school teachers and officials are
granted stability of employment and security of tenure.
I reported to work late, still reeling from vacation. The
first person I saw at the office was Ate Annie, the school’s all around girl (I
mean she does it all).
When I was parking my motorcycle, the first class to greet
me was grade VI-section 6. (Or was it section 3?)
The first thing grade chairman told me was that she has
something that needs my attention, the school publication. Of course, she
greeted me Happy New Year first.
Upon opening my room and seeing
the dirty plates and glasses and all the junk scattered that were still hold
over from last year’s, signs of a teacher leaving his classroom in hurry for
the Christmas vacation, the first I thing I did was to open my (not really mine
but since it was on my table, allow me to call it “mine”) computer and check my
FB status. Well, superstitions be believed, this meant that I would be an FB
addict for a year.
I was told that the Master
Teacher in charge of checking the records was asking for my rating sheet. My
gulay, why did I not do it last year?!
There were few pupils and some teachers
were still absent. They were, maybe, be still on holiday mode.
I will be checking my lesson
plans now, that is, if I can find it.
When I attended my wife's family reunion in Gumaca, Quezon, we hired a videoke machine. I was shocked when I saw that the video being shown was a PowerPoint presentation of the supposed achievements of a Quezon Province congressman. What was worse was that I am informed that all barangays were given these machines. Reminded me of the Nazi Goebel...(Photo not mine)
We got home from Baguio from our
New Year’s break at 3 o’clock this morning. We rested for a while and then we slept.
After a few hours, we were rudely awakened by a neighbor singing, at the top of
his voice, Blue Bayou, a classic by Linda Rondstadt, complete with the mispronunciations
and the Visayan accent.
I have nothing against Visayan
accent, heck I am a half Visayan myself, but, really, one cannot help but be amused
(well in this case, irritated) by this. I used to sing Karaoke too, but, that
was when I was still living in sin, unsaved, condemned and fallen from grace.
But when the realization came that the Karaoke was in C Major while my singing
voice was in B minor, I quit. I stopped and instead went on to play guitar in
the church.
I have nothing against Karaoke. I
mean, karaoke singing is fun especially the ones that tells the singer’s score
after the piece. And for some, an artificial girl’s voice telling them that
they got 99 for their singing is already an affirmation of their singing
talent. That is until I tried the machine and I got a score of 50, I doubt the
scoring method these machines use.
But, but, but… Again I have
nothing against Karaokes or videokes. I have nothing against singing too. I believe
singing is a basic human right. But singing and Karaoke are two different
things. All human beings have the right to sing. I mean all. This right is
inviolable and is on top of our basic human rights.
But just like any rights, it is
regulated by common sense and common decency. One does not sing while his mouth
is full; one does not sing dirges in birthdays; or one does not sing happy
birthday in funerals (except when it is the deceased birthday). These rules, or
conventions, are built in our heads. It’s a priori, deontological and these are
examples of Kant’s categorical imperative.
Anyway, when it comes to karaoke
and videoke machines, I think it is time our legislators create guidelines and
laws. Normal singing voice is ok. No problem even if the singer’s voice is
flat, sharp, atonal, alto, soprano, tenor, round, sandpaper-like, etc. It’s
okey. No problemo. But when these voices are amplified and accompanied by
machines with their artificial-mechanical-robotlike midi accompaniment, well,
things change. The harmless singing becomes…not harmless.
Really, kidding aside, videoke,
like firecrackers, should be regulated because sometimes, one cannot tell the
difference between bad singing and nuclear explosion and the damage to the ear drums that they cause is almost identical. Really, sometimes videoke singing does more damage than physical, they have deleterious psychological impact too.
This is the last day of the old year and the day before the New Year and this is the best time to think about Labelstime. So, my post will be mostly about time.
Chronos was a Titan god, the beings that were in existence before the Greek gods. He was the god of all time and the universe. Chronos became ruler of the cosmos after he killed his father Ouranos. Zeus, his son, in turn overthrew him thus ending the reign of the Titans.
Time is linear.
This is how we normally think of time, a one way movement from one
moment to the next moment. There is the past, present and the future. The past
is what happened after, the present is what is happening now, and the future is
still anticipated. We have knowledge of the past, we have knowledge of the
present, but we could not know the future until it becomes the present.
This idea of time
is self evident in natural processes from aging to cooking to making coffee. We
age from birth to date; we cook by following a process from step 1 to step x
until the food is cooked, but we cannot reverse the process. The same with
almost everything we do i.e. there are processes that cannot be reversed.
To illustrate:
Linear A.
past present future
The past is were everything happened or everything we experienced happened in an earlier time. We have knowledge of our experiences from the past through our memory. The present is what is happening now. The future is what we anticipate. Though we can not know the future, but because of the of causality, we have idea of what the future may be. (Many do not hold on to the necessity of causality, the skeptic David Hume is one of them. His assertion is that it is not logically justified that the future can be predicted by events in the past. He was criticizing induction, the primary process we use for learning.)
Anyway, if we look at time this way, since the past has reality or has become realized, and though they seemed illusory because we have knowledge of them through our memory, this diagram of linear time shows possibility of time travel but only in one direction: to the past.
Actually we do this mentally all the time through recollection but we cannot mentally travel to the future because the events are not yet realized. Hence, when we mentally think about the future, we really think of possibilities or of possible worlds. (This is the subjectivity of time, we have different experiences of time.)
Where am I?
So if we invent time machine it could only travel to the past because the future is still blank. But we cannot travel before the invention of the time machine. (Why invent a time machine at all?)
Linear B:
past present future
This is like consuming time. It's like a rail road where the future is realized and we are just experiencing the present. Time travel is possible for the future. But time travelling is limited to the time the time machine is invented. (So, your time machine is stuck?)
Linear B.
past present future
If we are an observer outside of time, reality would look like a tableau. Everything is all laid out, so technically, there is no past, present or future. These tenses of time are mere experiences of time.
Book illustration.
Linear A.
Its like reading a book where the pages are being written as you read but the read pages are preserved.
Linear B.
It's like reading a book where all the pages are written except the read pages are lost.
Linear C.
Its ike a reading a complete book. Pretty much everything is determined.
Time is Circular
Time is circular.
Circular time means the past can be become the future and the future can become the past. The main idea behind circular time is recurrences. This idea of time is dominant in many religions in the Orient. The belief that everything comes around is evident in the belief of karma and reincarnation. many philosophers have taken this idea of circular time especially those who are influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.
Time is spiral
sorry for the drawing...
This is a sort of a combination of linear and circular time. Yes, we experience time in a linear way, that is we have past, present and future, but this idea also includes the concept of recurrences. Yes we experiences recurrences but we there is a distance or separateness from the previous recurrences.
The Classics
Let us look at some of the great thinkers idea about time.
Aristotle: "Time is the measure of change...but time is not change itself"
Descartes idea of time is best illustrated by this 80's Twilight Zone Episode written by Theodore Sturgeon.
Isaac Newton argued very specifically that time and space are an infinitely large container for all events, and that the container exists with or without the events. He added that space and time are not material substances, but are like substances in not being dependent on anything except God.
Time contains event, but time is not dependent on anything but God.
So time is like a canvass where events are painted, But even without the painting, the
canvass still exist. This is quite comprehensible.
Gottfried Leibniz argued that time is not an entity existing independently of actual events. He insisted that Newton had underemphasized the fact that time necessarily involves an ordering of any pair of non-simultaneous events.
According to Leibniz time necessarily involves ordering of events...time needs this ordering and without it, time cannot exist.
Remove the painting and you remove the canvass.
Of course, there are those who deny the existence of time and there are those who are not bothered by time.
Immanuel Kant has a very different idea about time. Kant proposes that space and time do not really exist outside of us but are "forms of intuition," i.e. conditions of perception, imposed by our own minds. To understand this a little bit more, Kant reacted to the theory of knowledge prevalent that the mind is a passive organ that absorbs experiences and through this process we acquire and organize knowledge. the famous motto is Locke's tabula rasa to which Kant opposed. This is his Copernican revolution, sort of.
Kant reacted by proposing that the mind is not a passive organ but an active one. It does not merely absorb impressions but it has the ability to organize these impressions. To do this, Kant proposes a priori knowledge that is transcendental. (Getting lost here... "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them.";;Kant)
Anyway, to make it short, time and space are a priori forms in the mind that made it possible for our mind to actively organize and grasp ideas or impressions. Ouwardly we experience Newtonian time but also there is an element of Leibniz, the organizing aspect or function of time.
Anyway... this is way too abstract.
Hmmmm...
Time and God.
Is God timeless?
This proposes that God is outside the flow of time. To Him, everything is in the present. This means that everything is determined. This view sacrifices freedom.
Is God eternal?
God is subject to the flow of time but he is not affected, as nature is, by time. This sacrifices many of God's omni- attributes. God is limited because God is not in control of time; he is subject to time. God's knowledge is also limited because he can not look beyond the present. This view puts emphasis on freedom.
Anyway...hmmm...
Happy New Year and do take the time to reflect about time...but most of all, whatever our idea and philosophy of time is...I mean...hmmmm... I think a simple Happy New Year is enough :-)
The New Year is significant to
most of us because it signifies an end and a new beginning. So for most of us,
the ending of an old year means looking back and reflecting or hind-sighting on
what happened within the passing year. We take time to take a look at the good
things, achievements, and even the failures that transpired in the last year.
We make assessment and we make resolutions for we believe that we cannot change what happened in the past be it good or
bad, but we could make changes for the coming 365 ¼ days; every new year is a
new beginning.
Of course this is a stupid idea, but who cares...
an hourglass...primitive clock
But what is time?
Time is how we measure the passing of events and how we organize these sequence of events. Time is measured in
hour, minutes and seconds, and with today’s technology, time can even measured
to smaller units like the millisecond. It is also measured in days, weeks, months, years, decade, millenniums, and etc. We may have different time zones, different clock settings but basically we all have grasp of this definition of time.
With the invention of the clock, our
conception of time has become related to speed. We think of time as directly
related to movement like production, schedules, plans, trips etc. Time is a
unit just like any other unit by which we measure things like the gram, meter,
inches and feet if you’re an American, or as a basis from which we compute
things like profit, speed, velocity, etc. This is our shared understanding of
time, the physical time. So, this is time for most of us:
1.Born
on _____________.
2.Study
for _______________.
3.Go
to work at __:__ then leave work at __:__.
4.Go
to church on ________.
5.Celebrate
birthdays on _______________.
6.Get
married on _________________.
7.Retire
on ____________________.
8.Die
on ______________________.
Of course we do not know the exact time for all the items in the list, but they are pretty much determined.
A big schedule!
People waiting for their train schedule in China. Looks like they are wprshipping the god of time.
I think with the invention of the
clock, our whole understanding of existence and being changed dramatically: we
have become the slave of time. I was reflecting upon the never ending debate
about determinism versus freedom, but I think one of the factors that favors determinism
(in all its shade) is when we have all become slaves of physical time, hence,
even the freedom we think we have is even more belittled by the imposition of
schedules upon us by physical time. Though we think we have freedom, but in
reality we have lost all that freedom that we think we have when our lives, even
to the minutest details, are subject to schedules.
Of course physical time is
concerned with measurement and measurement is limitation. Anyway, time has become a factor in measurement and this is the
common conception productivity: production x labor x time x interest x etc. : time is money.
Since the industrial revolution...our conception of time.
This, I think, is one of the reasons why the study
of the humanities, the arts, the process of reflection, philosophizing, all
other creative and conceptual activities are treated with contempt by people
who understood time in terms of physical and financial productivity. This fact is lamented by educators because most of the curriculum created today focuses
on production and productivity thus relegating the arts and the study of the
humanities into the backseat. It can be said that the soul of human study is slowly
being killed by the study for the quest for the continuing improvement of productivity. Introspection, reflection. philosophizing, conceptual creativity...creativity, they are second to useless in this age utilitarianism.
Anyway…where am I?
So, Time is something (for lack
of better and understandable term) that is outside us. Its invention, mean the measurement of physical time, is a way for us of
understanding and relating to the physical world around us, from going to
school to observing atoms.
Time is a factor.
I imagine time as a conveyor belt that moves
us from one place in time to another place in time.
So for me (or for us) time
is linear, ever moving forward but our consciousness of it is measured by the
present.
Time is a conveyor belt that brings us to the end of our journey: death. Of course we believe that death is a way of bringing us outside the conveyor belt into timelessness or into an infinite conveyor belt but is not subjected to the physical deterioration of the movement from one point to another. You know, I think, sometimes annihilation is much, much better.
And what is that present?
Day? Hour? Minutes? Seconds?
Paul Tillich said it very well:
The moment we say, “This is the present,” the moment has already been
swallowed by the past. The present disappears the very instant we grasp it. The
present cannot be caught; it is always gone. So it seems we have nothing
real—neither the past nor the future, nor even the present. Therefore there is
a dreaming character about our existence…
