Inkhorn Perspective

A Teacher’s Day Gift
By Claudio V. Tabotabo

Desiring to make writing an ordinary routine in the students' lives, I assigned them work while I checked the day's attendance. Students write something instead of staring blankly at the ceiling or making unnecessary noise. On a one-fourth yellow, they write down anything they want for five minutes every day before a lesson starts.
This daily one-fourth as we call it did not simply gear up the students; it provided me a window to see the world of the teenager. This world is not made up of fantasies with unchartered forests, high waterfalls, far-flung plains, or a kind of winged fish in the oceans. It is a world of reality with unanswered questions, unsolved troubles, and shattered dreams.
On the one-fourth students make comments about the professors they do not like. There are words like; favoritism, boring, lazy, sleepy, arrogant, inconsiderate, and so on. Some students bluntly said “I do not like this writing activity. Is there anything else?” From the one-fourth, I discovered their problems. A maritime student wrote, “The ceiling fan is spinning, but my girlfriend is pregnant.” There is a girl, a business education student who said “I broke up with my boyfriend and his best friend impregnated me.” In the classroom, there are cute little creatures so delicate, fragile, and modest, with a childlike innocence. In the one-fourth, one of them said “How can I pay the tuition when the money dad sent was done for my baby’s milk?” The crime of the parents the children suffered; through the one-fourth, I see it too. Some students smudged their paper with loneliness. “I hope Mom and Dad are okay now. My brother and I left home without breakfast. Who could eat when plates and spoons are flying?” But the students’ frequent comments are; I don’t like the noise of the students outside; I don’t like my seatmate; I don’t like to do anything. Some students have the same exclamation. “Thank God dad has found a new job.” “It’s almost vacation; I can finally go home.”
One day it was a very rare occasion when I received a neatly written one-fourth. The handwriting was pleasing to the eye; there were no erasures. All letters sway together to the same direction like countless rice stalks swerve as one at the passing of a wind. There is a balance in the size of paragraphs and length of sentences. It was a work out of discipline.
As it was already time, I took the paper among the quibbles of its kind and shoved them together into my working table in the faculty room. There was a poster that said “Happy Teachers Day.” Perhaps the dean hastily put it there as I did not see it in the morning when I came in. Then I went back to my unfinished reading of the one-fourth. After a short verification of the name, I learned it came from a student who made a report about the novel I assigned him to read. The Tale of Two Cities he said is so hard; I didn’t understand it. As he said, his expression signified truth beyond doubt which convinced me to let him pick up his title. With my permission, he took another one. This time it is a modern novel, Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye by Kaza Kingsley.
I want my students to read the classic although I am open-minded when it comes to their taste. It is another thing I learned in teaching, the necessity to adjust our tastes when they collide with those of the students. I let him go with his chosen title. He spent time reading it; he was deeply absorbed until he came to the point of looking for the other edition because it was a series. He said he went to different bookstores in Manila, yet he did not find another one in the series. But his yearning was so strong and intense. He was hungry to devour the other segment of the series. Then it came to his senses to search for the author on Facebook. Thanks to social media, after a few clicking of the mouse he came across the writer. Followed was an exchange of messages, from a Filipino reader to an American author. Until this time, he has regular communication with the novelist.
In his one-fourth he said, I never liked English in the past so I decided to take up this Engineering program. At first, I attended this English course because it is a requirement in the curriculum. This taste only changed when I found joy in reading and the daily one-fourth assigned by our professor. I found beauty in letters as I found them my exit from the troubled world. But now vacation is coming and this daily one-fourth will come to an end. God Bless my professor, I hope he can touch more hearts the way he touched mine.
I cannot remember how I touched his heart as he said. Perhaps it was in the inclusion of reading in the course English One of which he was one of the students. If such is the case, then his popping interest to reading solidified my confidence to give reading an emphasis in the English classes. This further hardened my conviction that the interest of the students is right within them waiting to be roused. With all these technology-driven gadgets our greatest rivals to get the attention of the students, reading could still be put ahead of everything depending on how teachers present it. No expert will agree with me to make reading a requirement as I did in the past. It was not simply fruitless; it made reading boring and laborious to the students. In the end, it kills their interest in reading.
I only saw a flicker of assurance when I shifted my style, from assigning them titles to allowing them to choose their own. They consider the price of the book, yet I have a student who easily bought a 500-peso one with a title of his liking and I know he was a working student. It is not the price; it is the interest to read.
Borrowing of books is allowed although having a personal copy is encouraged. There is more beauty in the eyes of the teachers to see a student going out of a bookstore with a bag bulging with books, than a student going out from a computer shop empty-handed. There is a feeling of well-being of someone who comes in a room with books on the shelf and a reading table rather than a room crowded with electrical wirings and sets of appliances. Books could be decoration but these decorations are necessary to make the environment favorable to learning. If there is there a crime-inducing site, there is also an education inducing one.
In a student lodging bookshelf and reading table should be considered basics. Dormitory owners must think of these considerations and not simply the rent at the end of the month. It is important to remember teachers put students into a gear to read but the actual reading is not done in school. Reading is done outside most often in the boarding houses. Teachers establish the students into a desire, but the chance to follow the desire is beyond the teachers’ grasp.
When students are outside the school they are on their own. They are free to dispose of themselves; reading or no reading they are free. No teacher oversees their work and like anyone else students love a free life outside. No one likes to be entombed in a classroom or to be nagged at home. Students want freedom from the pressures of their parents and teachers.
But at whatever cost, students must turn into a reading person. Education is a failure if students leave school unlearned to read; unconvinced about the importance of reading to their professional life, unconvinced further that reading itself is already education. This country is made up of unlearned men who brag about their diplomas granted to them by some prestigious universities, yet when asked about their opinion on some issue one will find them on the same level as the bystanders on the street, superficial, arrogant, and bombast.
In the clamor to change people, the government can do something to help the teachers. It is not about the increase in pay or other benefits. It is about helping them form a culture, a reading culture. Now there are small public libraries scattered in many communities of Metro Manila. These are public libraries different from the academic ones inside the universities. It is public means that everyone can go there, borrow, and read with amenities for free.
It is a very nice start to forming a reading culture outside school. The Philippine Daily Inquirer had started a free copy of its paper in some train stations in Manila. Public libraries can do the same with an augmented number of pages that cover a variety of topics. It is an initiative of making reading closer to the people. Filipinos do not find reading their priority, so make it available to them. If necessary, hand them a material and make it free. The word free is so sweet to the Filipino ears. Providing racks laden with books in public places for free may be impractical this time. There are pirates who will haul them all and sell them at Recto. But a time will come when Filipinos can pick up a paperback from a rack in a public place. They can bring the book home, read and return it to the same rack they picked it up. It will be a sign of education and refinement which people in other countries are already doing.
It may be a long road to go but we have started it; we have made the first step, a necessary move to attain the true meaning of education. I am not concerned if I have touched the hearts of my students, or if I have insulted them. I am only trying to imagine them reading a book, the unassigned one. After all, it is teacher’s day; you made my day son.
End

Salubrious Living
Across the sea, south of the Philippines there is a patch of land the early people called “Menelangan.” The Subanun who lived a semi nomadic life are bewildered by the beauty of the sun when it appears above the ridges of mountains. It became their landmark and when their fellow villagers asked where they go, they said, “to the place where the sun is born.”

Menelangan means sunrise, but the early Bisayan who migrated to Mindanao misheard the word to Sindangan. The Bisayan did not bother themselves by checking the word. They immediately accepted and used it. It was further affirmed by the existence of a big fish they called Indangan. It has its kind back to their island of birth, the Visayas; the name was then approved without verification. The migrants in Mindanao latter carried the name Sindangan up to the present generation. The place had turned into a town with its life vested on the fertility of the land.

It is a place of tranquility, the artists’ chosen place to work; a place free from the madding crowd, far from the grating of machines, far from the saturnine look of drug addicts and hold up gangs, far from swindlers and far from the uniformed. The place is very kind to its people so that everyone is pleased with his assigned lot; there is more than enough what the family needs. And in that place of the world my father farms.

My boyhood experience in the place is always associated with the pulverized farms and the joyous faces of farmers during harvest time. In that place the morning announces its coming by the moaning of pigeons on the branches of the Santol tress surrounding our house, the endless murmur of the brooks as they joined to the wide Talinga River. And I could hear the shuffling of leaves that mingled with the tickling of spoons and plates from the kitchen which told me breakfast is ready.

I just could not explain why men had to leave the pastoral life to suffer in the urban centers. I also could not explain why civilization as men called it, always relates to the destruction of the Earth. The industrial revolution destroyed what God has created, and this technology that we have now is the descendant of that revolution. Technology hastens business but lessens the meaning of life.

Some experts put the solution of the economic problems by making the country industrial. Though the Philippines remain in its pre-industrial period, it cannot be classified agricultural because the government has no plans and investment in agriculture. Even the Coco-Levi fund, the money that belonged to the farmers had gone into some pockets of the government. The farmers suffer and they are branded ignorant and backward.

The New Zealanders have something to tell. Today they enjoy the lifestyle of Americans and Europeans yet they remain agricultural. We can still be rich without turning the country into industrial. We have the land and human resources; we only do not have the initiative to improve and develop what is indigenous because we always consider ours as inferior compare to something foreign

This article was taken from the HSSD Newsletter
by the author of the same title

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