October 28, 2003

Personal effects such as swimsuits, towels, hats, toiletries,
medicine, golf clubs if you wish to play golf and tennis/squash
rackets/balls for tennis/squash enthusiasts

The following will be joining the R&R

Cross-reference: 2003.10.24#3

Instead of breathlessly enumerating all the different things we saw
today, let me tell you a story from our rest and recreation.

After our light morning snack, Gus told us about an “infinity pool”,
or a pool with invisible borders that seemed to make it part of the
sea view. Gus, Charlie (was it Charlie?), Dr. Tejido and I decided to
go to the club house to check out the pool before lunch. They offered
to send the vehicle. We thought the walk might help us develop a
healthy appetite in time for lunch, so we confidently headed in the
direction of the main entrance.

The uphill climb worried Dr. Tejido, though, and he returned to the
beach club after a short while. Gus, Charlie and I continued -
intrepid explorers setting out to check if the facilities were
suitable for the other faculty!

We made our way along Punta Fuego Avenue while chatting about the
beautiful houses we passed and speculating about the social sins
committed in order to accumulate such wealth. We even debated the
wisdom of having the R and R at such a ritzy place, as a lot of
teachers might decide to quit and join the industry seeing the fruits
of other people’s labors. They were somewhat puzzled that I hadn’t
gone into the industry, but I explained to them that I really enjoy
teaching and we commiserated our mutual pecuniary possibilities.

The walk was longer than we expected, although signs here and there
encouraged us to continue. We joked about having to reassess the
feasibility of our venture, but we continued walking – probably
because the conversation was fun and probably also because we’d gotten
that far already.

When we were halfway to the main entrance gate, Gus remembered that he
had maps of Punta Fuego. He brought out a copy and handed it to me. I
quickly scanned it and realized we were going in the wrong direction.
In fact, the club and the entrance gate were at opposite ends of the
complex. At first, the other two were incredulous, but I pointed it
out on the map and we resigned ourselves to the idea of walking back.
Oh, boy, how we ribbed Gus about getting lost! =)

We still managed to check out the main club before lunch, thanks to a
lift from another in our party. All said, the conversation was well
worth the walk.

Again, let me tell you stories from this one.

If you went to the National Conference on IT Education (NCITE 2003), I
hope you didn’t miss Cherry Sta. Romana’s plenary talk on Data
Structures: From Structured to Object-oriented. She is clearly,
inspiringly passionate about computer science education. A dean of the
Cebu Institute of Technology, she told stories of how the industry and
the academe are working very closely together in Cebu. The companies
there rather vocally complain about the lack of qualified graduates;
apparently, only 5% of the CS and IT graduates are employable. To
address this, they formed an organization that conducts training and
development.

Object-oriented programming is one of the areas this foundation
focuses on. Many computer science teachers are new to object-oriented
design and programming because they’ve only been exposed to the
structured programming paradigm. Even when they teach object-oriented
languages like C++ or Java, their design is still fundamentally
structured – functional decomposition, algorithm-centered design, and
haphazard data sharing. As a result, neither teachers nor students
develop an appreciation of object-oriented design principles. Straight
OOP is intimidating because it presents many new concepts at once.
Cherry presented an alternative approach – an intermediate step
focusing on programmer-defined data types in any languge, even
languages that do not explicitly support object-oriented programming.
This allows people to gradually transition toward thinking of programs
of data + methods while working in a language they know well. With
that background, they will be able to appreciate the features of OOP
languages like C++ and Java because these languages enforce the rules
they had consciously followed.

Not only was her topic useful, her delivery was also captivating. She
was fast and confident, she used slides effectively, and she kept the
audience interested. I have so much to learn from her!

In other news:

Without doubt, Mario is a natural performer. He might have a lisp that
can be distracting in one-on-one conversations and he might have a
hard time preparing slides, but once he’s in front of an audience,
he’s all set. =)