Lawmakers laud Pinay teacher in NY

MANILA – Two lawmakers hailed a Filipina public school teacher, who was named one of the best teachers in New York.

Marietta Geraldino is teaching geometry in the 10th and 11th grade at the New York City's Frederick Douglass Academy II.

"We are very proud of her," Gabriela Party-list Representative Luzviminda Ilagan said.

lagan said Geraldino is an inspiring example who proves that Filipino teachers who maximizes their abilities and realize their potentials.

"My only wish is that she can come home and share her teaching innovation with her kababayans," said Ilagan who is also a former teacher.

Geraldino was one of the recipients of the Big Apple Award last June 12. She was chosen for making mathematics easier to learn in a US public school by deconstructing the most complex mathematical concepts and making them palpable to even the most resistant students.

Quezon City 2nd District Rep, Winston Castelo said Geraldino continue to show that Filipino teachers are capable of reducing complicated concepts into simple and easy to understand terms.

"This is the essence of teaching. A big part deals with communicating to students," Castelo said.

Born and raised in the Philippines, Geraldino earned her education degree from St. Paul’s University where she majored in Math and minored in English.

She taught high school and college at St. Paul University Surigao from 1987 to 2003 and also served as the vice president for academic affairs for St. Paul Quezon City's Bocaue campus.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

California teacher charged with having sex with teen student

A Merced County teacher has been charged with having an almost year-long relationship with a student she mentored, allegedly having sex with him more than 50 times.

Melody Carter-McCabe, a 27-year-old Livingston High agriculture teacher, pleaded not guilty Friday to nine felony counts of unlawful sex with a minor.

Sheriff’s officials say Carter-McCabe began a relationship with the then-15-year-old boy in September 2010, and it lasted until Aug. 2011, according to the Merced Sun-Star.

The paper reports the student began “hanging out” at his teacher’s house, and the two would do yardwork together.

The boy eventually leaned in to kiss his teacher, which led to a month of “making out,” the newspaper said. The pair began having sex about November 2010, according to the sheriff’s report cited by the Sun-Star.

The paper said Carter-McCabe was arrested Friday and faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted. A sheriff’s spokesman told The Times the teacher’s bail has been set at $250,000.

source: latimes.com

French preschoolers post messages to Twitter

French preschoolers near Bordeaux are posting daily updates to the micro-blogging website Twitter, despite not yet knowing how to read or write.

Since the start of the school year, the 29 schoolchildren have posted short messages of 140 characters or less about a daily activity to their joint Twitter feed, which has 89 followers, most of them parents.

“We gathered snow to see how it turns into water,” reads one tweet from the five-year-old students of the Albert-Camus kindergarten in Talence, a commune in southwestern France.

Another tweet references the cake they baked — the “galette des rois,” or king’s cake, which is traditionally made around the January Epiphany holiday in France.

The children’s teacher came up with the idea as a way to teach them to recognize the alphabet in different formats — cursive, keyboard, screen — and to learn to move from the oral to written word.

Each day the process is the same: the children propose topics, discuss them under the teacher’s guidance and vote on a winner.

All pupils then try their hand at writing a tweet, before the teacher combines them into a final post that two students type into the computer.

“We love writing on the computer like grown-ups,” said five-year-old Emma.

The teacher said that the goal was not just to teach the children but to educate the parents as well.

Around 80 percent of the parents have agreed to follow the class Twitter account, where at the start of the year only one had subscribed to the service and only a handful had Facebook profiles.

source: interaksyon.com