Old homes via mail

One of the blogs I subscribe to via Google Reader is Interesting Thing of the Day. Given my love for trivia, I find the varied topics discussed there, well, interesting.

Recently, the topic was on the mail-order homes offered by Sears during the early part of the 20th century. (Goodness, saying that makes it seem so long ago.) While it was entertaining to read about the logistics entailed by mail-ordering a home during those times, I was more curious about the house designs then.

So I visited the archived Modern Homes Sears website hoping to see floor plans of the Modern Homes that were offered and was amused but not surprised to note some common features of the houses back then:

• As expected, the kitchen layout didn't indicate the presence of a refrigerator until the later models. Pantries appeared to be the standard instead in the early models.
• Some models didn't have a living room per se but rather a parlor (is this a Britishism for living room?).
  
• Cooking ranges appeared to be rather large. I think they were still using wood stoves as today's gas stoves were most probably unknown at that time and electricity was a luxury? (Sorry, I'm not an expert in this area.) The description of one house (The Wabash, Model Nos. 248) in fact explains that "Under the work table [in the kitchen] is a fuel box which can be filled once a week. The ashes drop from the stove through an iron pipe to the concrete ash bin beneath the floor."
• Long continuous kitchen counters didn't seem to be the norm either. There would be a sink with just enough counter space for dishes, a work table, the aforementioned range and a cupboard or two.
• Bathrooms were optional particularly in the smallest houses. The main page explains that "An outhouse could be purchased separately...". If ever a bathroom was present some floor plans, particularly that of the early models in the 1900's to 1920's, seem to indicate the old free-standing footed bathtubs rather than the fitted ones in use today and apparently introduced in the 1930's. Even then, each house was generally equipped with just one full bath. There was no such thing as a separate bath for the master bedroom which in itself was nonexistent as most rooms were simply labeled as bedrooms or chambers.
• There seemed to be greater variety in the architectural styles in the later models: a few houses featuring what I think is the Tudor style started to be introduced.
  

What I also found intriguing was a sentence in one of the descriptions that implied the imposed gender roles that was typical of that era:

From the screened porch you can enter direct to the combination dining room and living room without disturbing the women in the kitchen.

That statement seems to not only assume that women were relegated to the home and kitchen but also that it was a man who, being responsible for providing a roof over his family, was the one going through the sales catalog and likely the one as well to make the decision regarding the choice of a home.

Altogether, browsing through those floor plans provided me with a rare glimpse of the lifestyle a hundred years ago.

Trying to please everybody

I've already mentioned that one of my responsibilities at work was setting teaching assignments for our department for each school term.

This involves first of all deciding how many of each type of class (lecture or laboratory) each faculty member will be handling. This is a tough thing to do given the we are short of staff compared to the courses that we have to offer each school term. Most of the time, I have to make the painful choice as to who would have to handle more than the required normal teaching load.

The next thing I do is decide which courses will be handled by whom. In doing so, I naturally have to consider each faculty member's teaching preferences and, to a certain extent, qualifications to handle a course. As always, there are the very popular courses, which are those that most would prefer to teach, and then there are unpopular ones which are the courses nearly nobody wants to teach. (I happen to be handling a pair of courses that nobody else wants to teach and this is the main reason why I've been stuck with these two courses for nearly ten years now.) Most of the time, I get to assign to each faculty member the courses they would like to handle. But since somebody has to teach the unpopular courses and there are not enough sections for the popular courses for all those who want to teach them, I have to make another set of painful decisions regarding who would be forced to teach the unpopular courses and who cannot teach the popular ones.

Then the last thing I do when making these teaching assignments is assign specific lecture and laboratory sections to each faculty member so that the class schedules are not in conflict each other. While this is complicated as well and takes a few hours to do manually, this is not as big a hurdle as the one regarding teaching preferences.

Once all is done--and it sometimes takes me one or two days depending on how I get interrupted at work in the office--I finally release the teaching assignments to the rest of the teaching staff in the department.

And that is exactly what I did yesterday. I mailed everybody a copy of the teaching assignment and waited in my office for the first bomb to drop. And sure enough they started coming.

From those who were forced to teach the unpopular courses I got the expected howls of protest. But what can I do? I simply tell them to find somebody to swap courses/sections with if they really don't like what's given to them. There are those who also let me know that they don't like their schedules because they would like to have so-and-so day of the week free. So I tell them the same thing I tell the latter group: find somebody to swap sections with. Others are more resigned and accept what is given to them. But generally to those who are unhappy with their teaching assignments I just have to step back and wash my hands of the matter because I've done what I can do.

Besides, I've tried handing over the responsibility to others but they've all refused. They all understand that it is after all a very tough job trying to please everybody.

A very brief meeting

Yesterday I received a note saying that I had to attend a meeting this morning to present one of our curricular revisions to a the committee who is in-charge of evaluating such things before it is passed on to other committees higher up in the administrative hierarchy of the university.

As the meeting was set at 9am, I once again showed up at work earlier than usual to attend to other matters before I left. Then after posting a note on my door on my whereabouts and letting our department secretary know that I wouldn't be around for the next hour or so, I set off walking at around 8:50am to the venue which was at a building about a couple of minutes away.

Upon arriving there, I was shown to the conference room. To my surprise and slight irritation, I found the place empty: I was the very first to arrive there. Knowing that I would be wanted back at my office to sign papers as usual, I hoped that the members of the committee would arrive soon so that we could get the meeting over and done with. After all, we only had three short curricular proposals to discuss.

[This so-called Filipino time where Filipinos generally arrive very late for meetings or gatherings is one of my pet peeves. I recall being asked to be piano accompanist to a group for a particular event. I would always show up a good ten minutes before scheduled rehearsals to set up my keyboard and other paraphernalia. But the the group's members would always arrive half an hour late. I was so irritated with having to waste so much time waiting that I refused to play for the group for subsequent events.]

After waiting for about 5 minutes, somebody finally did come. We had to wait for a few more minutes before the committee chair arrived. And then it took another ten minutes for two more committee members to arrive. Still, the meeting couldn't start yet because a quorum of five was needed.

Finally when it was apparent that nobody else would be arriving--it was a few minutes past 9:30am!--the committee chair decided to start. So we went through the usual procedure of taking up curricular proposals: I as resource person would present each proposed revision and the committee members would make comments. As expected, we were done in a mere ten minutes--which is a laugh, because it took more than twice that time to wait for everybody to come.

Anyway, we all made our quick goodbyes--the committee chair was just as anxious as I was to get back to his office to attend to registration matters--then I started my walk back to my office building. I had gone less than ten meters when I heard somebody calling to me. It was one of the staff at the office where we had the meeting: I still had to sign the attendance sheet and would I mind waiting for the snacks to arrive? It turns out that the office staff had ordered some sandwiches and drinks but our meeting was over so quickly that the snacks had not yet arrived by that time!

In the end, when the snacks did arrive a good twenty minutes later we all just grabbed a sandwich each and left the drinks to the office staff. (By the way, I had the sandwich for lunch.)

Stood up and harrassed

Yep. I got stood up today but it wasn't such a big deal. After all, it was just a "date" with a colleague to discuss a proposal to institute a new course. Haha.

This happens to be the third time our meeting had to be postponed. We had agreed to meet two Fridays ago but I fell ill in the morning and had to go home before lunchtime. Before I left though, we reset the meeting to the next Wednesday, 31 October. But when I dropped by his office on Tuesday to confirm that meeting, he said he couldn't be around because he was driving his mother to a province far up north to see her dying father. So we decided to have our meeting today and as it turns out, he apparently forgot about it.

I had reported to work early today in order to get some things done before our meeting which I believed would start around 10am since my colleague usually shows up at work around that time. But as the hours rolled by and my colleague remained absent, I decided that he had forgotten all about our meeting (my cellphone battery was dead so I couldn't contact him either) and turned my attention to other pressing matters I had on my to-do list. So it wasn't so bad that I got stood up.

Besides, I had important letters to write for various purposes to administration officials in relation to the coming registration period. I was also busy with setting teaching assignments for our teaching staff for the coming semester--which is one of the toughest tasks I've ever handled as we are don't have enough faculty members to handle all the courses we need to offer each school term.

In fact, I nearly didn't get those done as I was always being interrupted by a constant stream of students coming in to my office to see me for all sorts of reasons. A small percentage of these were students who were dismissed due to failing grades and needed my recommendation to back up their appeal for readmission. These cases take a lot of my time as I have to review their supporting documents and talk to each student before deciding whether I should recommend approval or disapproval of his/her readmission. Some of the students were those whose final projects I was supervising as well and it took some time as well to read drafts of their final papers before I could approve of them. Most of the students though who came simply needed my signature for all sorts of forms they had to accomplish for the coming registration period. While it doesn't take too much time for me to ask a few questions before affixing my signature on the forms, these brief interruptions can still be annoying as they usually break my train of thought when I'm especially working on something difficult--like making teaching assignments!

Sigh. Such is my life in between school terms.

Proposal presentations

Most of today was spent with a couple of colleagues at one of our lecture halls listening to students present proposals for their final projects. The main purpose of these presentations held at the beginning of each school term is for us to assess whether each student's proposed project is worth implementing as a final project.

As there are around a hundred students enrolled in our undergraduate degree program in each year and only a handful of instructors who can serve as project supervisors, this is a long and tedious process. We instructors are practically forced to sit nearly all day scanning written proposals for their main points and watching slide presentations while listening to the students explain what they plan to do.

The presentations provide one of a few opportunities for me to pick out students whom we might tap to join the teaching staff when they graduate. I'm usually pleasantly surprised to find some students who can prepare good slide presentations and explain concepts clearly in straight Filipino or English--a rarity these days when most people use a shockingly ridiculous mix of both languages.

On the other hand, I'm appalled that most are still unable to make a decent presentation. Instead of including just key words or phrases in their slides, they write entire paragraphs--often verbatim from their written proposals!--which they tend to read off the slide rather than expound on using their own words. (There was one student who did have phrases only on her slides but read right off her written proposal.) I sometimes wonder if they were ever taught the proper way to present a seminar in the required undergraduate seminar course which they were supposed to have taken last school term.

This disappointment together with the fact that listening to proposal presentations hours on end can be very wearying--we had lunch almost an hour late today--is what I don't like about this part of being a project supervisor in particular.

Nevertheless I find the exercise very enlightening and gratifying at the same time especially when students surprise me by coming up very much on their own with unique and unusual topics that I most probably would never have thought of.

Grand Tour 2007: Bringing art to the people

I was sort of bored yesterday: there was nothing that new to read on my Google Reader and I was pretty much done re-organizing my stuff here in my room. So I thought I'd check the television for a change and switched through channels yesterday in search of something interesting to watch.

That's when I saw something being shown on BBC that I found odd: a framed painting by Monet--or at least a full-scale facsimile of it--hanging not in a museum but on the outside wall of a building. And then came another, this time a portrait of Spain's King Philip IV by Velasquez hanging on some street corner apparently somewhere in London. A third was a magnificent painting of a famous horse named Whistlejacket by a painter named George Stubbs. Still another was a self-portrait by Rembrandt. Every time a new painting--each hanging on some wall out of doors--was shown a reporter came along to comment on it.

By this time, I was intrigued and couldn't resist looking up the Whistlejacket painting on the Internet (which is a habit of mine whenever I want to find out about something). That's when I learned about the National Gallery's (in London) Grand Tour 2007.

A press release by the Gallery about the special "exhibition" reads:

For twelve weeks, the streets of London are being turned into a Gallery - as around 30 full size recreations of National Gallery paintings are hung on the walls, in the most unexpected and unusual of places.

Masterpieces from Caravaggio to Constable will be vying for position among the bustling streets from Soho to Seven Dials. Celebrating the richness, diversity and stories of the National Gallery's permanent collection, the Grand Tour aims to encourage people to make the short journey to visit the genuine works, and many more, for free.

Each picture will be in a replica frame, and have an information plaque next to it - just as it has in the real Gallery. The plaques will also include a phone number, which people can call to access a specially recorded audio guide to that particular painting, and its artist.

Isn't that an wonderful concept? Although it's some sort of advertisement for the National Gallery's impressive art collection, it's an innovative way of introducing and educating the public about these masterpieces.

I wish they could do something similar here in this country to at least help familiarize our people with our local (professional) artists or even about classical music in general.

I've heard of the likes of Juan Luna, Felix Resurrecion Hidalgo and Fernando Amorsolo and have seen a few their paintings mainly in pictures in books or postcards and, in a few exceptional cases, in special art exhibits. But that's it. I think nearly the rest of their works are hidden in some expensive museum or remain unseen by the public in someone's private collection--which is a pity to say the least.

Plus I'm sure there are a lot more Filipino artists from the Spanish times whose body of work has been sadly lost or at best is virtually unrecognized nowadays. (I should know: My family's got a few intricately painted portraits whose creators are little known painters in the 1800's.)

Such art should be more accessible to the general public for it to be better appreciated as well as for the people to be more familiar with the long history of Filipino art.

Actually, I must be an old soul: I am partial to the neoclassic--not sure if that's the right term as I'm no art expert--works of Luna, et al., to that of the modern ones like those of Manansala, Baldemor or Sanso or those that I see on the covers of PLDT phone directories. And I think the younger generation is getting too much into the Japanese anime type of artwork, though I admire the style myself.

Anyway, I for one would love to see more of Hidalgo's paintings. I saw one of his portraits, that of an old friar, at the Bangko Sentral museum a couple of years ago and my jaw dropped at the sight. I never realized what a talented painter he was until then. In fact, after seeing that painting and a few more others at the same museum, I now prefer his style to Luna's.

A bright morning and lost in time

Just a couple of thoughts. (Ha ha. I suppose it's obvious I have a lot of time in my hands nowadays.)

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First, I woke up this morning to find my bedroom bathed in sunlight filtering through the white curtains on my bedroom windows which were facing southeast. It was a wonderful sight. Such a thing happens only during this time of the year when the sun is low and angled to shine right through my windows in the morning.

I'm really glad that I decided to switch to white curtains after having boring peach-colored ones for more than a decade. Having white curtains definitely brightens up the room.

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These breaks between school terms are a very welcome respite from the drudgery of teaching day in and day out. The only trouble is that I tend to lose track of time or what day of the week it is.

With Monday earlier this week being a holiday for instance, I was momentarily confused about what day it was yesterday when I reported to work. The different classes I would have each day of the week obviously served as some sort of time markers during the school term.

And this morning, I was slightly depressed to realize that today was already Thursday and that practically most of the week had gone by. I also began to wonder what I had done with all that time only to recall with some relief that at least I had spent it cleaning up my room and meeting with my numerous students at work. Thank God not everything had gone to waste!