To chelchel_am: The faculty awards are organized by Celadon, which is an Ateneo student organization.  Ateneo does not have a monopoly on poking fun at our teachers--I imagine other schools have similar awards.

Celadon organizes this "contest" close to the birthday of Confucius, with an "awards night" on the birthday itself.  The mechanics of the voting as I understand them is that you pay P5.00 to nominate a teacher. This also counts as five votes.  Each succeeding vote is P1.00.  Hypothetically, someone can plunk down P100 on a teacher and that will count as 100 votes.  I don't know if voting is restricted to students only--though I guess it wouldn't make sense for a teacher to nominate or vote--that would sort of defeat the purpose.  The funds are then donated to a socially-oriented project.  The don't raise a lot of money, but mostly it's fun.

To punzki: As you might know, Akie and I are team-teaching one section of CS 21 A.  He suspects that he didn't make it to the board because they thought he was a terror and he's proving to be one. :) 

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We had a meeting with a big company that wanted to establish industry-academe linkages. There's so much of that happening these days!  And very few people know how do it right. 

Their program was pretty boilerplate, nothing very new or innovative.  They weren't offering us anything we weren't getting from them before. The relationship has potential, but they have to use their imaginations and vision.  In my own experience, Microsoft, Smart, PLDT, HP, and Sun are among the companies with imagination and vision when it comes to relationships with academia.  We gave them a few examples of how we might extend this relationship to something truly new and innovative.  They listened to the suggestions.  We'll see if anything becomes of them. 

The meeting had some unpleasant moments.  In their very first slide, detailing their objectives, they made no attempt to veil their motivations. They said outright that they were doing this to make their company the employer-of-choice of our best grads. 

The worst part of the meeting was that the rep, in an attempt to add levity to the discussion, told us that another school had asked what they would get out of the relationship. The rep replied, "I'll give the president a new computer."  I was incensed!  My tongue broke free from its restraints and I said, "It's going to take more than that to convince us.  I hope you have more to offer."

There's a lot more I wanted to say during that meeting, but I was in polite company.  There's a lot more I want to say in this blog, but it's not fit for print.