like a research

The STC graduation controversy is trending all over the net and people from all over the world pass judgment so easily as if they know the case very well.

STC has been my second home, having spent my elementary and high school years, as well as two years of being a college instructor here. However, this is not a statement of my agreement or disagreement with the institution. I haven't made a stand yet as I have yet to get to the bottom of the issue (in short, I am still in my "imbestigador" mode). Even if this is my second home, if it has truly done wrong, then I would also push for it to be punished. However, this i not what this post is all about. This post is an expression of my thoughts and opinions regarding how people reacted to the matter.

I am quite disappointed with how the issue was presented to the public and how, in turn, the public has reacted to it. It just seems losided and unfair for people to make baseless judgments (proly in the same way the school is accused of making such baseless judgments of the girls, but again, this is not what this post is about).

I hope that people can treat incidents such as this as they would a research or an investigatory project. As in research, we go through a series of steps before making a conclusion. We strive to keep things objective by trying our best to get to the bottom of things and making sure all aspects of our research paper is flawless, unbiased, and objective. After knowing the problem, we formulate a hyposthesis and then gather, analyze and interpret data to test the hypothesis prior to making a conclusion. The third step is gathering data. When we gather data, we make sure we get a sample that is truly a representative of the population. Sure, we can go with the sbnowball method as it is easier, however, one of its major flaws is that it jeaopardizes the generalizabilty of the findings. Chances are, you approach people who share the same hypothesis with you and hence, you yield results which are biased and applicable only to the particular part of the population from which you  obtained your data. Objective investigation involves  listening and considering ALL versions of the same story, and not just fixating ourselves on one and then sensationalizing it (for drama effect). After we have gathered our facts from a "representative" sample, we analyze the data, before we make a conclusion.

If the STC graduation issue was a research paper, I think the problems is already very clear. And I am sure many people made very good and interesting hypotheses about it; however, many of these people stopped there and automatically made their hypotheses their conclusions.

I am appealing for people to be smarter about topics like this and to maximize the ALL our brain parts, not just some. Oftentimes we are carried away by our emotions, and we get overwhelmed with the vivid, the dramatic and the sensationalized that we forget that feeling emotions is not the only thing our brains are capable of. The frontal lobe, specifically, exists to help us be more analytic, objective and fair in our judgments and decisions. I hope we all take advantage of and utilize all parts and functions of our brains, and not just limit our cranial funcitoning to the midbrain which controls our emotions.

In a way, I cannot totally blame some people for taking the peripheral route as this is easier, faster and has less cranial activity requirement than processing information through the central route, which requires getting more facts, weighing the strength of the arguments, and making sure claims are based on subatantial and real information and not just mere hearsay. However, let me remind everyone of the perils of relying too much on our emotions and these so-called baseless "facts." It wasn't so long ago when the "Chona-Mae" incident caused a lot of unnecessary fuss among our fellow Cebuanos. Although I'm not equating the present issue with the failed tsunami alert, it is clear the frenzy was emotion-driven.

Anyway, I would like to make an appeal to people to maximize their brains to avoid losing it. I invite all of you to get your facts straight before passing judgement and be more analytical and less emotional in dealing with controversial issues such as this. True it requires more time and conscious effort on our part to think, but at least we can be more confident that our judgements and evaluations are less biased and more profound than the ones we make with our emotions.

Again, I am appealing for everyone to be more analytic and less emotional in dealing with the issue. Let make good use of our frontal lobes before they get pruned. :)