August is over and tomorrow is a new month. this means i survived my first month here in the US, yahoo! as much as i am starting to like it here because the weather is nice as well as the people, i am counting the days until i get home.
anyway, to update you with my life, here goes…
My second week at Skyline started with welcome program and faculty meetings. Extensive discussions on budget cuts were present in all these programs and meetings. Even out of the academic setting, there were talks of budget cuts, foreclosures and hard life.
I was able to register for History 110 (California History) and ESOL 853 (Intermediate Listening and Speaking). The history class will hopefully bridge the gap between my obtuseness of what California is and appreciation of California’s history and its people and culture to survive and live well. The only predicament with this class is the monthly test involving a lot of memorization, which I am not really good at. Meanwhile, I took the ESOL class to learn some strategies on teaching listening and speaking from a native speaker’s perspective. My predicament with this class is that it is kind of boring because I know most of the stuff that we discuss and I guess we are all considered not very good in English.
Apart from these classes, I assist in the FILI 110 (Basic Tagalog) class of Dr. Jeremiah Resus. I was supposed to assist also in the advanced Tagalog class of Dr. Araceli Resus but it was cancelled because there were only 18 students who registered and 11 who showed up on the first day. Because of the budget cuts, they cancelled classes which have less than 20 students. Anyhow, I also assist in ENG 110 (Composition, Literature and Critical Thinking) and ENGL 104 (Applied English for Cultural Production) which are Liza’s classes. All these classes are under the Kababayan Program, the learning community for and by Filipinos and Filipino-Americans at Skyline College, which I think is the most intensive, comprehensive, and active of all the learning communities in all the universities and colleges in the US for and by Filipinos and Fil-Ams.
I also have 6 hours/week of tutorials. However, we haven’t started with the sessions because I have yet to attend the demo session for the Language Laboratory on the second week of September. I am also waiting for a call from the Language Laboratory staff for the orientation on the use of their newest language software, the Rosetta Stone.
My other big blessings are my long-time friends Mae and Joel who are the reasons why I don’t feel so homesick anymore and why I have a laptop and can write about all these.They’ve been my friends way back home in the Philippines and we have been reconnecting here in California. It was also a great blessing that I was accepted at Skyline which is within their area. I’ve been spending my weekends with them and they’ve taken me to some places.
My first weekend here was a tour of the bridges – San Mateo Bridge (which is the longest bridge in San Francisco Bay Area), Bay Bridge, and the famous Golden Gate Bridge – bridges which link one place to the other, bridges which make us see what’s on the other side, bridges which link the gap between two areas.
It was also the start of what the Fulbright Program aims to achieve – to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.
i would love to post some of my pics here but the files are just too big and i can’t convert them to smaller files yet because i have some things to do.
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