Overload

Hurot dakan baja yaot? As February is being ushered in, a lot of people are airing their pleas in social media sites to make this month a “better” one. They have enumerated the crisis in Iran, the eruption of Taal volcano, the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and the Corona virus lately. For them 2020 seems to be a bad year since the first month brought some sort of chaos to the world.

Yet, those people who are not “connected” seem to be living the way they have been doing. They are in a state of equilibrium. Some are even content… Is the collective fear being caused by over information?

The term “information overload” was coined by Bertram Gross, the Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, in his 1964 work – The Managing of Organizations. However, it was popularized by Alvin Toffler, the American writer and futurist, in his book “Future Shock” in 1970.

Gross defined information overload as follows:

“Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision quality will occur.”

Since the coming of Industrial Revolution 4.0, people seem to rely on too much information they could get at the tip of their fingertips. They seem to make the internet as the overall source of information that some could not even work without it. Students and even some educators are stooped on their phones and laptops to be updated with the latest innovation and even gossip. Pre-school kids are allowed by their parents to be exposed on online games not realizing the mental stress they will have when the limit to absorb movements and visuals will be reached.

And there lies the danger: the capacity to decide, infer and make practical solutions will not be developed due to information overload.

Jill Monde of philnews.ph wrote: It is just the first month of a new year and it seems like things and circumstances are getting really alarming and disturbing already: Many dies, worldwide dilemma, outbreaks, natural phenomena, death of a legend, and among others. All of these made headlines and got many people worried and bothered. She then enumerated the following events:

1.    1. Australian Wildfires; 2. Iran-US Conflict; .3. Ukrainian Plane Crash: 4. Taal Eruption; 5. Novel Coronavirus Outbreak; 6. NBA Legend Kobe Bryant and Gigi’s Helicopter Crash

This information could create quite a stir in the mental foundation of those who are constantly monitoring such events in the macro scale. They will then concede to the insinuated message of the information that indeed, the month of January is catastrophic. 

They fail to consider that they are healthy, they have a job and humanity is doing good deeds to counter such negativity. The information muddled their positive disposition since they fail to go deeper to the inner person and reflect. They automatically react on the stimulus.

Andrea Brandt, PhD (2018) mentions that when you’re reactive, your feelings depend on external events outside your influence or control. Whether you have a good or bad day depends entirely on what happens to you and around you. The weather, what your boss says about your presentation, what mood your partner is in when you get home, how your favorite team played: All these outside things control your emotions; you don’t.

Reflective people are pro-active. They choose what to focus on and let go of worrying about things over which they have no influence. They take individual steps to make external factors be solved within their spheres of control.

Excessive use of smartphone paired with negative attitude and feeling of anxiety and dependency on gadgets may increase the risk of anxiety and depression (Rosen et al., 2013[18], Thomée et al., 2011[20]).

Information or cognitive overload can lead to indecisiveness, bad decisions and stress. Indecisiveness or analysis paralysis occurs when you’re “overwhelmed by too many choices, your brain mildly freezes and by default, [and] you passively wait and see.” Or you make a hasty decision because vital facts get wedged between trivial ones, and you consider credible and non-credible sources equally (Tartakovsky,2018).

So, why not regain our control over things which we cannot control and focus on the things that we can? We can lessen the time we spend exposing our minds to multiple information that our minds could sometimes do not accommodate?

As adults, we can detach ourselves and our children’s attention to the virtual world and focus on the real one. We can appreciate better the birds (which are still) on the trees, chirping.

Life will be easier to fathom.

No Surpassing!

Way sajop, pirme eksakto! Lately, one can observe that difficult people are thriving all around. We can hear them complain on everything. In public utility vehicles, they won’t consider the elderly and even other passengers by sitting as if they own the vehicle. There are those who find minute details in the services of a restaurant just to underscore his or her presence. They point out “wrong” details crossing borders by shaming the service-providers. There are those who would slave-drive hotel personnel for them to be served right. Most of them are adults.

When we point out the humane side of things, they give retorts telling you that it is right for them to give the right services! When you ask: even to the point of embarrassing them? YES! Is the big answer.

In 1999 Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, coined the eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their own capabilities (Cherry, 2019).

Difficult people believe than they are better than anybody since their perceptions of their intellect and abilities are the topmost of all knowledge and skills. They do not understand that learning and knowledge are dynamic. And when someone manifests higher intellect, they still do not agree since their sphere of understanding about capabilities are only limited to what they have.

Cherry continued: this phenomenon is something you have likely experienced in real life, perhaps around the dinner table at a holiday family gathering. Throughout the course of the meal, a member of your extended family begins spouting off on a topic at length, boldly proclaiming that he is correct and that everyone else's opinion is stupid, uninformed, and just plain wrong. It may be plainly evident to everyone in the room that this person has no idea what he is talking about, yet he prattles on, blithely oblivious to his own ignorance.

What causes such behavioral phenomenon?

Dunning and Kruger suggest that this phenomenon stems from what they refer to as a "dual burden." People are not only incompetent; their incompetence robs them of the mental ability to realize just how inept they are. Incompetent people tend to: Overestimate their own skill levels; Fail to recognize the genuine skill and expertise of other people; Fail to recognize their own mistakes and lack of skill.

Dunning has pointed out that the very knowledge and skills necessary to be good at a task are the exact same qualities that a person needs to recognize that they are not good at that task. So if a person lacks those abilities, they remain not only bad at that task but ignorant to their own inability.

They then continue to believe that they are better than anyone. NO ONE CAN SURPASS THEM!

In organizations, these people tend to cause chaos and conflict. It takes a self-mastered manager to point out their inadequacies and teach them how to humbly accept their incompetence. And since most of them do not contribute a lot to the group, there must be a focused intervention for them to become better.

Since their area of belief is only focused on their own, exposure to successful figures and icons is necessary for them to be taken out from their ignorance. They can also be given reprimands which may shatter their bias.

Psychology Today says that the Dunning-Kruger effect has been found in domains ranging from logical reasoning to emotional intelligence, financial knowledge, and firearm safety. And the effect isn't spotted only among incompetent individuals; most people have weak points where the bias can take hold. This tendency may occur because gaining a small amount of knowledge in an area about which one was previously ignorant can make them feel as though they’re suddenly virtual experts. Only after continuing to explore a topic do people often realize how extensive it is and how much they still have to master.

We sometimes learn to live with them. But if they cross our lines, we can give them a dose of their own medicine.

When Educators Cheat

Pwede baja? A system will malfunction if one of its parts do something NOT aligned to the different processes which are geared towards specific outputs. What will happen to the teaching-learning processes when the educators lose their integrity? When the new performance-based evaluation was set by both the department and the Civil Service Commission, there were some raters and ratees who “calibrated” the results for their benefits.

There were even times when some educators instructed teachers and other personnel to alter the result of the National Achievement Test (NAT) so that their credibility will be “saved”. Their integrity was smeared to conceal a mistake; to hide a flaw; to fill-in a gap.

Integrity is a personality trait and comprises the personal inner sense of "wholeness" deriving from honesty and consistent uprightness of character. The etymology of the word relates it to the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete).

Seth Meyers (2015) says that the root of integrity is about doing the right thing even when it’s not acknowledged by others, or convenient for you. An individual with integrity is the antidote to self-interest.

But in the international scale, there are those teachers and school heads who manipulate the assessment results of their students. Some do this so that no further workload in remediation will be given to them. Others put up a face of being effective so they resort to manipulate the results of the learning outcome.

Education Week reports on various studies showing teachers who have cheated on standardized testing have a long-term negative effect on students, and new research from Stanford University economists looks at what happens to students whose scores were fabricated. One consequence is that some students were subsequently unable to take remediation classes or partake in other kinds of intervention that may have otherwise helped their academic performance. In the long run, they will not master the needed competencies.

But what is the deeper meaning why educators cheat?

Cheating on academic work involves a diverse array of psychological phenomena, including learning, development, and motivation. These phenomena form the core of the field of educational psychology. From the perspective of learning, cheating is a strategy that serves as a cognitive shortcut. Whereas effective learning often involves the use of complex self-regulatory and cognitive strategies, cheating precludes the need to use such strategies (Anderman, Murdock, 2007).

So, we can infer that since they want to have cognitive shortcuts, they need to have lesser “work” in the cognitive side. Does it mean they can be stressed thinking or their absorptive capacity of cognitive learning is less? Or, this could be a by-product of being NOT motivated to let the learners learn in the correct flow of the different processes. Is this the reason why there are supervisors and school principals who tag a teacher as LAZY?

One recent study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), looks at New York’s Regents Exams, the high-school tests in a handful of subjects that students are required to pass to graduate. Until 2010, teachers were responsible for grading their own students’ exams; they were also required to rescore any tests that fell just a few points below the proficiency threshold. These scoring policies, the economists found, enabled widespread manipulation: 40 percent of the scores near the cutoffs—or 6 percent of all the exams in core subjects—were inflated.

Alia Wong (2016) mentions that there’s good evidence that score manipulation does harm kids, particularly when teachers are falsifying their responses outright for the sake of avoiding sanctions.

So, another reason is self-preservation? An educator cheats so that s/he will not be reprimanded for the lack of efforts to perform the job assigned to him/her. But then, isn’t this the thing that workers do? A cook will make actions to better the taste of the food by adding salt or water before it will be served. The teacher could accept the result of the teaching process and consider remediation!

A cheating educator discounts the value not only his or her good name, character, and trustworthiness, but also the key element of education — learning. The teacher who cheats abandons faith in his or her ability to learn. Exam manipulation is a symptom of profound self-despair and loss of confidence.

So what must be done? There is a need to overhaul the system and revisit the value of INTEGRITY. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation must also be reflected deeper by the individuals so that the person inside could do GOOD to her ecology.

Scribble

Pag journal dakan! These are often heard when someone continues to lament and complain on things happening to the culprit’s life. Also, when someone verbally airs out ideas and often digressing to the main point, chances are some friends would irritably say: write them down than allow us to feel dizzy.

Personally, journal writing has become an extension of my thinking. Jotting down ideas, notes and observations seem to empower the person inside that it even allow this writer to know how to confront emotions either good or bad.

Journaling is an aid to self-discovery and personal growth through writing. Keeping a journal of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences helps one’s well-being. In general, it helps you “know yourself” in isolation and leads to greater understanding and behavior change in your interactions with others.

Atherton (2018) mentions that keeping a journal is important because it creates a space amid the general chaos and clutter from which to pause, collect, organize and untangle. Journaling enables a person to set things down, sort through them, unpick them, understand them and heal them. Also, journaling presents the opportunity to reflect, dissect, analyze, learn, understand and future-proof against detrimental repetition.

Lots of persons automatically react to situations allowing themselves to regret their actions related to the stimulus. But there are those who stop and try to write their feelings and even the resolutions to the things they experienced and make them as learning grounds.

The personal learning process stimulated through dialogue with oneself or with one's instructor over time arises from the cognitive and affective synthesis of shared thoughts and the meanings ascribed to these thoughts. Journal strategies have successfully been applied in traditional learning environments and should be carefully considered in different arenas (Davie, 1997).

Why do we have to reflect and write them down? Simple: We are the managers of our thoughts and our thoughts matter. These are the springboards of our decisions and eventually our actions. That is the reason why social scientists believe that the success and failure of a person depend on his/her calculations. There is an impact of writing your thoughts down. They will become tangible ideas printed on paper. And you can weigh things out through them.

In learning, students are encouraged to have journals. Most of the research involving journal writing has been qualitative in nature, with the journal entries analyzed for trends. Davies found that in the process of journal writing, students moved from being passive to active learners during their clinical debriefing sessions.

This type of paradigm shift was also reported by Sedlack, who found that journal writing aided in placing responsibility with the student for active engagement and self-directed learning. In addition, the students' self-confidence increased because the journals enabled them to identify their own lack of motivation (Walker, 2006).

Teachers, on the other hand, are encouraged to write their reflections in the daily lesson logs. This will allow them to dig deeper into the whys and wherefores of the lessons they have conducted during the week.

Research by Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, and Bradley Staats in call centers demonstrated that employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not reflect. A study of UK commuters found a similar result when those who were prompted to use their commute to think about and plan for their day were happier, more productive, and less burned out than people who didn’t.

So, why is it that it is difficult to write down our reflections? Some of us see that writing is a task. Something that is done in the classroom or in the office. There are those who do not want to confront their inner demons. And most do not find meaning in it.

Still, we need to keep a journal. It is heartwarming that notebooks are proliferating inside bookstores and there is a market for the young who jot down their thoughts and feelings. It is in doing this that we can be assured that people are still monitoring themselves.

Message Sent

Nakadawat sab kaw? There is this message going viral on Messenger with an icon of an envelope with the teaser “I am send a surprise message. Open this.” The ones sending these are close friends and even prominent personalities in different departments and even the academe.

If it is a virus or a commercial gimmick of an online company, one can really think of the genius behind the “linking” and “spreading” it. The maker of the message could really make this type of thing to happen. The only thing s/he or they lack is the simple use of grammar. I AM SEND A SURPRISE MESSAGE can ring a thousand bells for a receiver who is keen in the use of English language. One could wonder if this is really relevant when in fact the words sent are grammatically wrong.

Grammar is important because it provides information that helps the reader's comprehension. It is the structure that conveys precise meaning from the writer to the audience.

According to linguapress.com, with written language, grammar is essential; written communication is deferred or indirect communication, and is unidirectional, so there is no possibility for the receiver to demand verification - at least not under normal circumstances. Written communication and any other form of indirect communication thus depend on correct use of grammar or syntax, as well as of vocabulary and spelling, in order to ensure that messages are immediately comprehensible to the reader, and not meaningless or ambiguous.

So, by just reading the text, the mind begins to function or question the proper use of the words. Like, why is this message made with grammatical errors? Is this a forwarded one or something like that of a virus? These questions are actually part of the COMPREHENSION process. A keen reader could do such questions fast before deciding for the next action.

According to Timothy Shanahan, who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he was Founding Director of the Center for Literacy and chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, “there is a lot of evidence showing the importance of grammar in reading comprehension. Studies over the years have shown a clear relationship between syntactic or grammatical sophistication and reading comprehension; that is, as students learn to employ more complex sentences in their oral and written language, their ability to make sense of what they read increases, too.”

But with the influx of social media sites where everybody can do “shoutout”, it seems that the basic use of grammar became neglected. It is as if people are telling us that this is JUST a minute detail. There is nothing to worry since it’s just a minor glitch. Everybody commits mistakes, no one is perfect and the usual blabber of justifications. For them, as long as the message is sent, it is now the role of the receiver/reader to decode it.

Decoding texts is much more than simply knowing the meaning of words (or being able to find out the meaning) and knowing about the genre and purpose. Aspects such as grammar and punctuation also play an important role in the meaning of a text. Ttexts are often used in teaching as a means of introducing a particular grammar point or some vocabulary. However, this doesn’t mean that grammar should be, or can be, ignored. Instead, grammar should be looked at in terms of how it affects the meaning of the text and not as a goal in itself (Tennant, 2019).

We simply opened the message because we trusted the sender. Also, we probably thought that this is a New Year greeting. But one these can be alarming: Did we think about it? Did we see the mistake? Or, we are already part of the generation where grammar, vocabulary and comprehension are NOT important.

Yes, we need to be vigilant. Those who work in the academic world must be concerned about this since our learners are already manifesting the decline of these basic things they must learn. We can hear others saying that this is only a minor skill to master but we need to understand that COMMUNICATION and COMPREHENSION are still important skills in the 21^st century.

One teacher was overheard saying “Di dakan siguro pasobrahan pagbright!” and this writer retorted: Ma’am, we are in a business where intellect is the prime product! Her face went blank and I wondered if comprehension took place.

Glossary

Ugsa baja siguro! Vice Ganda of ABS-CBN’s “Showtime” was asking the “madlang people” how to spell words worth five thousand pesos if one gets it right. The first word was subpoena. Three members of the audience tried but failed. The fourth got it right. The word etiquette then was asked to be spelled. A “cool-looking” guy tried without batting an eyelash but got it wrong. But the most annoying thing is that when the host asked the audience to spell paraphernalia. No one got it right even if most of them Googled the word as flashed on the TV screen.

The audience of the show was of mixed ages and profiles. Some of them were dressed to the nines; others were young and are in college by just the looks of them. So, this could be considered as a slice of the big whole on what is happening on the vocabulary of the people who are inside of the educational spectrum?

Lately, PISA released the result of the reading-related examination. Among 79 participating countries or economies the Philippines ranked dead last in reading, and we ranked second last in both mathematics and science (beating only the Dominican Republic).

Vocabulary refers to the words we must understand to communicate effectively. Educators often consider four types of vocabulary: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Listening vocabulary refers to the words we need to know to understand what we hear. Speaking vocabulary consists of the words we use when we speak. Reading vocabulary refers to the words we need to know to understand what we read. Writing vocabulary consists of the words we use in writing.

Vocabulary plays an important part in learning to read. Beginning readers must use the words they hear orally to make sense of the words they see in print. Kids who hear more words spoken at home learn more words and enter school with better vocabularies. This larger vocabulary pays off exponentially as a child progresses through school (readingrockets.org).

When one could not spell the word well, there is a tendency that it is not constantly used by the person in speaking, listening, reading and writing. Exposure to reading materials might be limited since they were not able to get the word well. Or they simply do not understand the word itself. (Digression: a lot of people I know did not realize that the word BUNTING is an English word. For them, the local term is BANTING, those embellishments we hang on the streets during fiesta.)

According to Steven Stahl (2005), “Vocabulary knowledge is knowledge; the knowledge of a word not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world.” We continue to develop vocabulary throughout our lives. Words are powerful. Words open up possibilities, and of course, that’s what we want for all of our students.

But what is it that allows a person to encounter a lot of words for him to know the world better? That is reading.

Reading Vocabulary plays an important role in word recognition. Beginning readers use knowledge of words from speech to recognize words that they encounter in print. When children ‘sound out’ a word, their brain is working hard to connect the pronunciation of a sequence of sounds to a word in their vocabulary. If they find a match between the word on the page and a word in they have learned through listening and speaking, and it makes sense to them, they will keep reading. If a match is not created, because the word they are reading is not found in their vocabulary, comprehension is interrupted. This is the case even if they are able to generate the correct pronunciation through the decoding process (Beck, 2019).

Lately, the superintendent of schools where this writer is assigned instructed that a focused group discussion be conducted to identify the gap why we lag behind reading comprehension. It was then found out that educators do not even see the importance reading evidence of having NO reading programs in schools. The reading activities conducted are Band-aid solutions and for compliance purposes as well.

There is a need for teachers and school heads to consider the importance of reading among themselves since they could not develop plans of actions if they do not understand its importance. There is a need to develop the intelligent WILL among the educators to love reading themselves. They could not give what they do not have.

The curriculum must be revisited as well. There might be jam-packed competencies to be taught that teachers are hurrying to finish them NOT considering the BASICS like comprehension and numeracy.

For how could the future leaders discern and infer when they do not even know that the word JUDGMENT does not have an E after G?

Distinguished

Kagamay da ini sweldo nan maestra! A complain often overheard from a teacher or any other government employee. Another teacher posted on social media the different entry point salaries of teachers in other countries highlighting the Philippines as the lowest with P20,000 as the basic income per month. One could really wonder, why are they complaining? They are blessed with jobs, right? There are those who are jobless and are trying their best to find one.

Indeed, appreciation is a difficult competency to attain.

Appreciation or gratitude is “an emotion that is typically evoked when one receives costly, unexpected, and intentionally rendered benefits, and is thought to play a key role in regulating the initiation and maintenance of social relationships” (Forster et al., 2017).

The Harvard Medical School defines it as a thankful appreciation for what an individual receives, whether tangible or intangible. With gratitude, people acknowledge the goodness in their lives … As a result; gratitude also helps people connect to something larger than themselves as individuals–whether to other people, nature, or a higher power.

There are people, friends and even family members who complain a lot. This is maybe caused by training the mind to dwell on the negative side rather than looking for the positive/beauty in a situation. There might be traumas which cause them to complain a lot they have become unappreciative.

A number of authors have espoused a theoretical relationship between gratitude and well-being. In a very pragmatic way, this association seems logical. Experiencing gratitude, thankfulness, and appreciation tends to foster positive feelings, which in turn, contribute to one's overall sense of well-being. Therefore, gratitude appears to be one component, among many components, that contributes to an individual's well-being (Sansone, 2010).

The people who manifest positive energy have the tendency to have positive dispositions and eventually dwell on happy and peaceful spheres. The ones who bring with them negative vibrations often feel unease, discomfort which could eventually turn out to become illnesses in the mind and even body.

Why are they unappreciative? Here are some manifestations according to powerofpositivity.com:

People who aren’t thankful are always in need of some kind of assistance. Whether it is help with bills, watching the kids or giving them a ride. They always need something from you. They are in a perpetual state of emergency and it is usually things they create themselves either through poor judgment or on purpose in order to create the drama they feed on.

The thing is that unless they need something from you, then you never hear from them. They only turn to you for friendship when they are in a jam. You will never hear them say “Hey let me take you out to lunch” or “let me help you with that.” If everything is going fine then you don’t exist in their world anymore.

They may feel entitled to your help either because you are family or they feel that you owe them something for being their friend. They aren’t grateful because they feel they have earned your help and you are just paying them back.

Despite all of your help ungrateful people will turn on you. They will talk behind your back. They will say that you never help them. That they do all of the work and you are the ungrateful sponge. Despite all you have done for them they will tell their friends or other family members what a horrible person you are in order to get more sympathy from people who can’t help them.

Ungrateful people will never let you forget that one time you weren’t able to help them. Whether it was because of time constraints or lack of funds it doesn’t matter. They will hold that guilt over you until the end of time.

Contemporary research, though, paints a more complicated picture of ingratitude. People who are ungrateful tend to be characterized by an excessive sense of self-importance, arrogance, vanity, and an unquenchable need for admiration and approval. Narcissists reject the ties that bind people into relationships of reciprocity. They expect special favors and feel no need to pay back or pay forward.

So, maybe these people who are complaining are very good with their jobs. The teachers who are complaining about their “meager” salaries are highly-proficient or even distinguished?

Or simply they just complain and find faults because they feel that they are THE BEST?