The year  South Korea hosted the Summer Olympics was the year I started my journey as a teacher. That was 1988.

Those many years I spent in the academe, 24 years in the Philippines and 6 years here in South Korea, taught me a lot about the teaching profession – more than those that I learned from undergraduate and graduate schools. My experiences as a classroom teacher and as a school administrator enabled me (and they still do) to look at issues, problems, and disputes using the lens of the one teaching and that of the one formulating and implementing school policies.  My having been in the position of  both made me understand how it feels to be in-charge of students and to be in-charge of both the teachers and students.

Those 30 years in 10 different schools in 2 different countries made the following very  clear to me: that it is not easy to wear the hat of a teacher; that teaching is not just another job; that teaching is not just a means of livelihood but a way to serve; and that everything schools, from the simplest activities to the most complicated policies, should be student-centered because the students are the reasons schools exist.

There were many times that I reflected on teaching as a profession and education in general. Those reflections resulted to essays and research works.

This is where I put them (essays I wrote on education and  some of the research works I have completed  here in South Korea) together. I added also in this section the dissertation and thesis I wrote as requirements for my PhD and Master’s degrees, respectively.

In the university where I completed my PhD and Master’s, the research papers  students are required to complete are called differently –  dissertation for PhD and thesis for Master’s.

The other studies listed in the subsections identified below (with links) include those that I presented in international conferences and were subsequently published in SCOPUS-indexed international journals. Papers published in international journals are usually longer that the versions presented in international conferences.

The following is my most recent research work:

English Proficiency of Tourism and Engineering Students in Two Asian Universities – A Comparative Study

I presented this in an international conference in Manila earlier this year and is currently waiting approval for publication in an SCOPUS-indexed international journal.

Links to the international journals where some of the articles were published  as well as links to the websites of the conferences where they were presented are provided on the pages allotted for the papers.

This part of my website is divided into the following subsections:

My Essays on Education

Papers Published in Journals

Papers Presented in Conferences

My Master’s Thesis

My PhD Dissertation 

Unpublished Papers

My website also features the following section:

Personal Essays

Most of the articles found in this section are my very personal reflections on education.