interviewing skills

It pays to know interviewing techniques, how to ask relevant questions and give winning answers.  We are often made to handle situations that require this skill of being able to ask the right questions and answer them as well when they are thrown your way.  It is much like preparing for the interpellation period in a debate or the cross-examination in court.  The skill starts with the ability to LISTEN with your mind.

As the interviewer, you need to listen to the responses that the interviewee is giving, and as the one being interviewed, you need to listen very well to the questions being asked in order to give the best answer.

Follow the thinking of your interviewer. Anticipate questions and responses and be ready to respond accordingly.  It is good to have a set of questions prepared beforehand but use these only as a crutch or to fill in the gaps.  Otherwise, be spontaneous, adjust the situation to the person you are interviewing.  Be flexible and be genuinely interested in the person you are interviewing.

Offbeatmom beat this

Although I started this blog many months ahead of my other blogs, but one of it, OFFBEATMOM, beat this first blog of mine in terms of number of visitors.  Just look at the counter I have on each blog and you would know what I mean.

I miss reading

Because of the many tasks I have to do for our TV show and also as a family woman, I have missed to do one of the things I love and that is reading.  I just envy those people who really find time to read and bury their faces in the pages of a book.  It's a shame because I recently bought two books from the local National Bookstore but until now they have remained untouched.  Sigh....

they want their kids to look their age

The latest singing sensation in the world is a 15-year-old Filipina, a petite girl named Charice who performed in Ellen Degeneres' show where the child impressed the host as well as the audience who gave the girl from the Philippines a standing ovation.  It was not only the powerful voice of Charice which captivated the hearts of foreign audiences.  It is her image as well, an image of a genuine child.

People are tired of child celebrities who are dolled up and dressed up like old entertainers.  They are tired of child celebrities acting and behaving like sexy adults.  The girl from the Philippines will certainly serve as a good role model to all the youth in the world.  Everybody hopes that Charice will not succumb to the lures of the material world, that she will remain as she is.

poor quality of education in RP cited

In yesterday's issue of the Inquirer, a lengthy news feature on the deterioration of the quality of education in the Philippines caught the attention of many.  Am I surprised? Uh--uh.  With 27 years teaching experience I know and I've known that sad fact that the quality of education in this country is really going down the drain.  Ask the students.  Let them speak if they can.  I mean, how many of our thousands of college graduates can truly communicate in good English?  Two out of two thousand?  That's what most call centers are saying, that is why they have no other recourse but to hire those with very poor communication skills in the hope that these guys can be trained.  But they are wrong again because everything should start from the bottom.  If we want to have quality graduates in this country, then we have to strengthen the system from the bottom, pre-school, going up.  Have a very good foundation in the the grade school, then a very strong follow-up in the high school, and a robust training in college.  I mean, it should be collaborative.

2008 is a good year....

Sez who?  Sez many who see the last number 8 as a perfect number.  The two circles on top and bottom to form the number are symbolic of wealth and proportion.  Since 8 is also an even number, this also increases its positive connotation.

With this interpretation, then we should all make use of it and make this year a real blessing not only to us but to everybody.

Happy New Year!

writing the first draft

When you have already finalized your outline, you should now be prepared to move on to the next phase which is writing your first draft.  With an outline based on the notes you have gathered, this phase of term paper writing should be like a breeze. All you need to do is follow your outline but be sure to acknowledge all borrowed ideas.

A term paper is not a string of borrowed ideas from different authors.  Of course you need these ideas from authority as springboard for discussion but should not be the main course of the paper.  It is up to you throw in some expert opinion but be sure to come in after each borrowed item by agreeing or maybe disagreeing or maybe expanding the discussion in your terms.

after notetaking, what?

When you have gathered enough ideas or notes to make you write a substantial term paper, next comes writing an outline or trying to arrange the notes you have collected.  This is an easy part since all you need to do is evaluate the value of each card containing an idea and see where each one fits.  This is fun to do since it's much like playing cards, shuffling ideas here and there until you can come up with a working order of your paper. Think of parts, topics, sub-topics and try to arrange the note cards accordingly.  Discard some that are repetitive or unnecessary.  Use only those that you will need.  Arrange and rearrange, discard, evaluate.

As the cards containing the ideas are laid out on the table in the order that you want them to appear, start drafting your working outline.

Taking down notes

Notetaking is a very crucial task in writing an honest term paper.  However, many students have not developed the proper way of taking down notes.  When the teacher asks them to submit their notes, they usually submit notes that are copied word for word from a source or two.

The first step in notetaking is reading.  Read a source one at a time and look for ideas that you could use in your paper. Each idea is to be written on one side of a note card.  Take note, do not use the back part of your index card and do not lump more than one idea on an index card.  This is done so that arranging them to make an outline would be easier for you.

See to it that you also write down the source of each idea---author, title of book, page, publishing company, place of publication, year of publication.  The source info is to be written on top of the index card.  Limit the number of ideas you borrow from each source and see to it that you get ideas from as many sources as you can.  If your teacher requires you to read 10 sources, then do so.

looking for sources

Once you have chosen your topic, it is time for you to start hunting for sources.  The more sources, the better.  Avoid limiting yourself to one, two , or three sources because this will most likely lead you to plagiarism.   Have at least 10 sources.  List them all down, the author's name, title of the book, place of publication, date of publication, and publishing company.If you find more than 10 sources, you will need to skim and scan each book or source and see which ones you will really need.  After you have chosen your sources, you can now start notetaking.  This aspect of term paper writing requires more time since notetaking involves reading.  

Next topic is Notetaking.

Find a topic that is of interest to you

The first step in writing a paper is worrying about the "topic" or the subject of your research.  What will you write about?

It will seem at first that there is nothing left for you to get started. It will seem like all the topics had been taken and there is nothing left for you to write about.  You professor will most likely encourage you to think of a "problem" that is still unsolved either in your community or on a global scale.  Now when you think of "problems" I am sure that you can come up with many broad ones such as poverty, terrorism, government, politics, religion, etc.  Now try to narrow down those topics or problems into smaller problems and see what you can come up with.  Write down as many as you can under each broad issue and see the best angle or aspect that you might want to tackle.  Let's say you are interested in the worldwide problem of poverty.  What aspect of it would you want to write about?  Try to get hold of papers related to it and find out from which angle you will be approaching the topic this time.  You can have a seemingly popular topic and still use the same but this time from a different angle.

Always make sure that the topic is of interest to you.  It is hard to write an honest paper if there is no interest on the writer.  There should be that "curiousity" to know the answers to the questions that you will be asking related to the topic in order to reach your goal of writing an honest term paper without feeling like you're being punished to do it. Make the research a learning experience that could lead to the possible solution of an age-old problem in your community.

of rats and men

2008 being the Year of the brown Rat brings to mind a lot of things like it being our year because brown is the color of us Pinoys.

Well, is this going to be OUR YEAR after all since brown is associated with the Filipino race?  But a brown rat?  This made me think.  Are rats also in any way connected with Pinoys?

Yes, I think we too are ratty in many ways.  I remember one teacher of mine in the high school who would cry in front of the class when we were not very attentive to her.  She would always use this favorite expression of hers "I am as poor as a rat".

There is no doubt about it.  Poverty is always associated with rats.  Rats, especially brown rats, live in proverty because nobody wants them.  Nobody wants  to have them as pets like the white mice that get fed and sheltered.  Brown or black rats are the most hated pests in the house.  We do everything to kill them.  We trap or poison them or hire a pest exterminator to get rid of them.

just wondering

I am wondering why my latest post here does not appear.  I am doing this blog to check.

script writing

Scriptwriting could both be fun and challenging especially if you need to do it every week.  Boy, that can really squeeze out all the creative juices in your brain!  You can't simply use the same script you used in your previous shows because then your show would look like an old shoe nobody wants.  The challenge of giving a new and different intro each time is real and one can't just ignore the challenge because even the most seasoned and successful TV shows in the world work.

I tell you, scriptwriting is not a joke.
 

my first alumni homecoming

Not really big about alumni homecoming, I attended my first ever anyway mid of this month because I was tasked to do the emceeing. Otherwise I would have skipped that too like I'd been skipping them for the past.....hmmmm.....many years. It was a high school alumni homecoming and I've finally seen once again my former batchmates no longer firm and trim but more like "mature" men and women who now know the secrets of life and living. Photos of us back in high school were flashed on screen and there we were, taut, young, all thin, and oh so innocent. We looked so unknowing and so sweet. Suddenly there's this feeling of sadness that overwhelms one when you think about how good those days were and how you wish you could have stopped time so you could have remained so young and beautiful.

Now, 35 years after that happy stage of our lives we can only pretend to smile and be happy to be able to make it to that reunion. Many are no longer able to join because they had left the world and are now situated somewhere.

Will I attend another homecoming next year or the years to come? It depends.:)

on writing the term paper

The schoolyear is almost ending and majority of our fourth year high school students in the country are now facing what they dread-----writing the term paper.

I too wrote my first and last term paper in college, not in high school. Unfortunately, I did not learn it the right way. I mean, we weren't taught the nitty-gritty steps of truly making one so I admit that there was a lot of plagiarism that went into the completion of the paper. It is embarrassing to admit but about 95% of it was plagiarized because our teacher did not exactly show us the proper way of making an honest paper.

I learned how to make one when I started teaching the subject. Of course, I had to study and master the subject to be able to teach and make my own students understand the whole procedure. I devised a way of making my students write their own term paper in the easiest and most honest fashion. I had developed a procedure that will ensure that no plagiarizing happened. I did this for a number of years and later on I noticed that teachers from other schools have adopted the same method. Of course, I am happy about it.

What are the easy steps in making your own honest paper? That will be the subject of discussion on my next blog.

provincialism

People vary in the ways they deal with things. For instance, people in smaller and slower paced cities have the tendency to take appointments for granted. The value of time never exists here. They just cancel out appointments for not much of a valid reason. This is the best example of unprofessionalism or provincialism. Even finishing a college degree does not help. The habit acquired since birth will always surface and so they break commitments and not push through with appointments.

Huh? Can you just tell someone after you've made an agreement that you are cancelling out because of this and that reason which you failed to see beforehand? No matter how you look at it your provincial mentality is the root of it all because if not because of that you would have had the decency or common sense to see to it that everything is clear before entering into any agreement with someone or anyone.

It's annoying, you know.

COSCA & YEHS Outsourcing

Don't miss to watch our show tomorrow, Sunday, Dec.9 in my country, because it will be featuring one of the premier Catholic schools in the province.

Next week's feature will be a call center situated in a neighboring city. YEHS outsourcing will be bringing to your homes a peek into the call center industry. That's for next Sunday. You don't wanna miss that one too.

off to another town to judge

My son will be going to another city to judge and of course, we intend to do some footages there and have them shown on our show. It's a literary-musical sort of affair and I am sure it's going to take like forever.LOL. Anyway, if you want to view snap shots of the affair, just tune in to our show every Sunday, 8:00 p.m., Channel 6, Filproducts Cable TV.

On the 8th of this month he will have to go back to the place to judge another idol search competition, and on the 22nd it will be another city for a big event in which he will be judging again.

It seems like December is a season of competitions.

got shadowed

During last week's interview with the Project Manager of Firm Builders, my son who is co-hosting "at random" told me earlier to do the interview with the guest. However, when it was time for the interview he changed his mind and said that he'll do it with me. So of course I was happy about it because he is really the one in charge of interviews. I did a brief intro of the guest, an Assumptionista, and I thought I'd throw the first question as well. But just when I was about to open my mouth to ask the first question my son Mark rattled off and did it and I was like gaping 'til the whole interview came to a conclusion which was the only thing I did during the entire segment.

I got shadowed. Oh well, it is said that our children are improvements of ourselves. I cannot disagree with this.