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

Silang Mga Idol
Here is a group of nonreading college students. The class section was dominated by Architecture students and few from various Engineering and non-Engineering programs. It was a course in Rizal and the discussion was the hero’s writings which cannot move on without citing the novels.
To start I asked if anyone in the class has read a novel. However, the question brought us to a lull of silence. They looked back at me in blankness, then those in front looked around hoping one would raise a hand and break the dullness of the moment. A girl dared to do it; she raised her hand and said yes, then she named a title. Another raised a hand, a guy he said he read the Odyssey. In my mind it is an epic poem and not a novel, but it is okay. I counted 40 students with two claimed to have read a novel.
If all the rest in the class do not read a long narrative which is done for entertainment as reading of literature in general is for entertainment, then it is safe to say they do not read anything at all that is outside of entertainment. On that day in the said class this claim was confirmed.
We read together orally the summary of the Noli Metangere of Dr. Jose Rizal. One student led the oral reading then all us followed him with our eyes. The led-reader can hardly read the words persuaded, sabotage, forlorn, fray, litigation, counsel and many other words. When I called other students to lead the reading, the same reading defects are repeated. A series of reading leaders were called and the consistency of the defects persisted.
I wanted to discuss issues like hegemony and counter hegemony in the Noli, intellectual revolution, emerging Filipino consciousness of the Nineteenth century. But I could not imagine students in that level of reading skill can find meaning in these discussions. Enough time had to be provided to convince them the importance of reading particularly of long narratives and the habit of doing it. These students need to understand that people’s enthusiasm to read is what differentiates the educated and from those haggard looking standbys hooting at passers-by they see every day in some streets of the city. I do not remember anyone who is able to reach the top his career without reading as part of his routine.
College students of the century must know the great minds at the back of the technology they patronized today. Marc Zuckerberg is not simply a book lover. He founded his own book club, and he made it sure to himself to complete a reading of a book per week. Remember the advice of Bill Gates; pick up a book he said as he himself is a voracious reader. He loves fantasy novels. The late Steve Jobs was also a prolific reader, the kind of attitude demonstrated in his early life that increased in his adult life as book was the discussion of the family at dinner. Among the fathers of computer Allan Turing was a mathematician, a genius and a reader. According to the library records at Sherborn School he borrowed 33 books between 1928 and 1931. Among the subjects Mathematics and Physics there are titles of books on fiction.
It is clear; the greatness of technology is product of the reading minds. Sophistications and intricacies of producing technology became possible as there were minds also with sophistications and intricacies. Simple mind cannot produce anything great. It may come up with something good but not great. And the greatness of the mind is not given for free. It is a product of a voluntary reading.

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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The demotion of Lam-ang

In a bookstore browsing the children’s booklets and some magazines that transform the classic novels into comic form, I found not a single copy that glorifies the name of fictive Filipino superheroes that like their western counterparts they too have defended their nations. The bookstore is owned and ran by a Filipino and the items displayed are authored Filipinos. Even the foreign materials adapted and adjusted to the taste of the children are made by Filipinos, yet there is nothing about the Filipino superheroes. In our neighborhood I roughly interviewed dozens of boys who are going to graduate from Elementary in March. I asked them if they knew Lam-ang; the answer was intense negative. Local aficionados have lost enthusiasm to Filipino superheroes.
The name of Lam-ang and some others are mentioned in the textbooks, but their deeds and their value system, the epic elements very important to implant nationalism are not given emphasis. They are simply named which then appears like an epitaph in a grave. The epitaph tells us that heroes once lived in this land, but these heroes are no longer here today.
Admiration to superheroes is a demonstration that deep in our imagination we unconsciously believe that one day at the height of trials and tribulations a hero will come to a rescue. Filipinos unconsciously believe that one day a hero will come to cut out the necks of thieves in the city halls and congress. But it will not be Lam-ang or Ibalon. Deep in our minds we do not just reject our superheroes; we welcome their enemies, the outsiders. For us Lam-ang is already dead hence inutile. His physical strength and the power of his amulets are already defeated by the Japanese animated superheroes.
An echo of the situation resounded in the south where singers of epic poems are said to be found. In 1995 under the blistering sun, I ventured the mountains of Zamboanga Del Norte in search of a gumananen, Subanun epic singer. It was an exact adventure and a full pledged detective work. I went from one village to another, and to get through the villages, I had to cross mountains. In one of the villages, I learned that a meeting of timu’ay - Subanun village leader was to be held in the town of Sindangan. With the help of Datu Agdino Andus I discovered a female epic singer during the meeting. She sung the epic aptly titled Su’ Guksugan Mikatag Di Tai’bun – The Adventure of Ta’bun. I discovered the singer in a whole month of search.
The complete text of the epic with its English translation is now in the library of Ateneo de Zamboanga. According to the borrower’s record, it was not borrowed since it was put there in 1997. No body likes to read it.
The minstrel who belonged to a family of singers lamented the fact that none of her family now likes to learn the knowledge of epic singing. The young Subanun, the minstrel said have found a new source of diversion: the drama over the radio. In her family she is the last minstrel.
Two years latter I came across with another minstrel, this time a man. This one was unaware about the changes that took place in his village. All that he told me turned out wrong. He lived with his grandson in a hut located by the creek a distant from the huddle of houses in stilts. He was old and almost a complete blind when I met him in 1998 and his grandson at the time was ten years old. With pride and confidence, he said his boy will become a good epic singer.
In 2007 that was nine years after, I went back to the place bringing some recording materials. The minstrel was not there anymore but the boy had bloomed to a man. He recognized me and he remembered how I came to their barrio. But when asked if he can sing an epic, he was stern to say “no”. He refused to say more. He only said he worked in Cebu those years. I saw he had an MP3 player.
Epic poem is part of the great body of knowledge called today as folk tradition. Guman is the epic poem of the Subanun, and like the great epics of the world, it also traveled from the far away past via telling and retelling until such a time when writing was invented. But many disappeared along the way to civilization.
Looking closely at the guman of the Subanun, the Mahabharata and Ramayana of Indians and some other epic poems of the Philippine ethnic groups, features common to them could be found. Some of these are; repetition of number seven which experts say it is a lucky number among the Asians, the long travels of the dramatis personae, talking animals, signification of kerchief and dead returning to life. By virtue of these, it can be hypothesized that these epics have one origin. It is a mere speculation but it can be a great scholarly achievement if pursued.
But more than anything else the epic poems embody the ancient Filipino dreams and aspirations. And these dreams and aspirations should be understood if we meant to be serious in our search for national identity and eventually to improve our human condition. It is a way of looking back at what we started in order to achieve something rather than to start and to restart. If we go on starting and restarting one day, we wake up to see our country creeping through the series of centuries yet her people are still in the infantile period. Let’s look back in order to go on.
Today there are poems still in oral form waiting to be recorded before this last batch of chanters is completely gone, and those already written, now in some libraries are also waiting for anyone who can decipher their meaning. We only need a hero to do this great job.

Restructuring a mindset in learning to teach
under the new normal

When online teaching was announced and Canvas as the main platform, some teachers in our department decided not to have a teaching load. I too was in the verge of giving up. But I know no other means for a living. I had no option than to immerse, plunge and kiss the dust.

The first and perhaps the most difficult obstacle to learning the online teaching using the Canvas was my attitude toward technology. I never liked technology. It was not part of my system to the point that when a student speaks to me in a language that sounds connected to technology, I flared up, and to me the student is a pretending idiot trying to appear “sosyal-social climber” by using the language of modernity. Paperbacks the classic and the flipping of pages are all that matter, while the clicking of mouse was for me a curse. Before the Pandemic brought in the cruel new normal, our school (TIP Manila) had already required us to learn and apply Canvas in our classes. I attended the series of trainings, but again I have no ears for any noise related to technology.

Then attitude of whatever kind was altered as the world was shocked by the Pandemic. Canvas was the medium of teaching during lockdown. Now it matters not whether one is a holder of a Ph D. degree or a plain college grad. What is asked about is the skill to deliver knowledge in a long distant teaching. Inability to do it means a teacher would entomb himself at home jobless.

There is no other way but to press into the medium of the time. Things have changed, and everyone has to align with it. It was hard just like you were asked to eat food you never liked, and you were told it is your food for the next months or year.

At home when everyone was asleep, I was awaked; and when everyone is awaked, I am also awaked peering down at a laptop following the canvas tutorial provided to us by our school. If the tutorial guide became obscure with its direction, I opened Youtube and find for a clearer instruction. It was difficult, and I was alone; no one at home can help me, and I cannot simply ask anyone about Canvas when all of us are told to stay at home. I went on finding my way into the world of teaching in the new generation.

Immersion into the situation provides a chance to widen up understanding of the existing scenario. It is by degrees, but a modicum of discovery everyday was a milestone to me who was trying to adjust and accept the style of the generation.

I began to learn and understand the functionalities of the key words in the column at the left side of the Canvas page called navigation. After several attempts I came up with my own design of a Homepage. I persisted to the other commands until I found I am capable of embedding in my Canvas account regular classroom activities such as lecture, quizzes, assignments, group works, recitation and administering an examination to students who are far better than me in Canvas. But again, I persisted until classes under the new normal came. First, we had to demonstrate our skill before the big names in our school including the Vice President. I felt I was a fresh college graduate applying for a teaching job for the first time. But I persisted, and I was given teaching loads.

Teaching is already a demanding profession. Every now and then teaching mode changes,
and while it is changing on its own, it also has to catch up the changes happening outside. This reality makes a man with a closed mindset so hard to survive in the academe. Anyone intending to create a life in teaching has to condition himself to the hardship and intricacies waiting for him in every doorstep in school. One has to be tough to square the challenges, but one must also be soft as sponge to absorb the changes.

I was able to make a breakthrough into the teaching in the new normal just when I began to alter my attitude toward technology or modernity in general. Experts have a phrase to describe my situation - migration of the mind.

end

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