Looking up to our teachers (Repost)

Looking up to our teachers ROSES & THORNS By Alejandro R. Roces (The Philippine Star) Updated September 08, 2009 12:00 AM

A month-long national campaign for teachers is being observed this month. This was launched on September 4 and will culminate on October 5, a day proclaimed by the UNESCO as World Teachers’ Day. Teachers of today are faced with a great challenge as the world becomes more and more a global village and the country to which they belong needs to put up with increasing competition for growth and survival. The need for constantly upgrading their knowledge and skills comes to fore in the light of rapidly changing information from the internet and other media sources such as the television, radio and newspapers, from where students get more and learn more, both good and bad, and sadly, without guidance.

Today, we also observe International Literacy Day, and focus is trained on a staggering 780 million adults in the world who are illiterate, with at least a hundred million children lacking access to education. In our country, although the basic literacy rate (the ability of a person to read and write with understanding of a simple message in common languages or dialect) is fairly high at 93 percent for individuals over 10 years old, millions remain out of school and more found to be functionally illiterate, especially those among the indigenous cultural communities. These are the pocket areas where the special need for teachers with genuine commitment, a missionary heart driven by a strong vocation to impart knowledge should be directed. Without the benefit of schools and teachers in these remote areas, these marginalized people will remain in the doldrums of ignorance without caring people to reach out to them. Few people remember that some of these marginalized groups (like the Tasadays in the seventies) have not once been taken advantage of for self-enrichment and selfish ambitions of a few “knowledgeable” individuals. This is because of their lack of understanding of the ways of the world because they kept much among themselves, with no one to teach them the basic facts of life in relation to others outside of their sphere.

The role of teachers today is sadly relegated to the mere imparting of knowledge and skills, seeing through the accomplishment of academic requirements until their students graduate from a stage of education to the next or helping them attain a degree in higher learning. To anyone, undoubtedly, teaching is indeed a noble role and being able to help a student realize a major achievement in life while making him become a responsible citizen, gives them a sense of fulfillment in their chosen vocation. They cannot help it that competition is ingrained from the early stages of a life’s learning process, but in the same degree that this drives a person to achieve, a spirit of competition, unknowingly, also helps plant the seeds of corruption and false ambition to be the greatest one day. Hence, today, it is not uncommon to see the most privileged and educated individuals, some of them in “public service” involved in the most corrupt practices, entangled in their ambitions to have more and become more no matter who gets hurt in the process.

We read of awards citing the most outstanding teachers for their achievements in their line of work, who made a difference in the lives of their students and co-teachers alike and who went beyond their limitations and difficult situations in order to encourage their students not only to learn more but to contribute valuable and novel ideas for the betterment of society and its citizens. We salute our teachers who develop the best in their students, because they put their hearts and minds for them. They instil in people the values of hard work, sacrifice and discipline, encourage attitudes towards learning more and caring for others at the same time, leading them to have a greater vision beyond their ambitions.

May we have more of these kinds of teachers in our midst today. With them, our hope for a better future for everyone is alive!

More Titsers

More ‘titsers’
There's The Rub column item by Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:32:00 02/05/2008

After writing that column on teachers last week, I tried to recall some of the movies I’d seen that had to do with teachers and teaching. I was astonished to be able to list down quite a number of them.

I’ve always been in awe of teachers, and hold their profession in the highest regard. I never thought to become one simply because I realized early on that the profession did not just entail knowledge or learning, it entailed some degree of oratorical skill and/or theatrical flair. I can churn out a speech as well as the best of them (I don’t mind being immodest in that respect) but, as I said in the preface to “Tongues on Fire,” I’ve never been able to do justice to it by my delivery (I wish I could be equally immodest in that respect, too, but reality knocks too loudly on my door). As to theatrical skill, well, I had Rolando Tinio for a teacher, which is why I know that teaching at its best requires that, too. He was an awesome teacher, quite apart from being an awesome artist, combining learning, oratorical prowess and dramatic flair. And, man, did he inspire.

But to go back: You want the country’s best and brightest to consider teaching as a profession, or vocation, you’ve got to inspire them. It’s the appeal to idealism, or more precisely (and perversely), the poetry of near-certain impoverishment, that’s more likely to do the trick than the promise of untold riches and fame. And one of the best ways to inspire is to show them movies about teachers and teaching. The ones below are some of my favorites:

“The Blackboard Jungle” / “To Sir with Love.” I saw “To Sir With Love” (1967) first, while in high school, though “The Blackboard Jungle” came much earlier (1955). I’ve put them together because they have a lot of things in common. One is that they both produced smash hits. Lulu’s song of the same title went to top the charts while Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” helped spawn the monster called “rock and roll.” Two, both movies deal with a teacher who confronted juvenile delinquents in an inner city school. Specifically, both movies deal with a teacher who is terrorized by one exceptionally anti-social thug, whose conversion becomes the key to salvation of the entire class. And three, both movies have Sidney Poitier in them -- in “To Sir With Love” as the teacher, in the “Blackboard Jungle” as the thug. The first is the more hugely popular, but I’ve always liked the second better.

“Goodbye Mr. Chips.” I haven’t seen the 1939 version; I’ve seen the 1969 one. You can always read the book if you want. Like the movies above, the Peter O’Toole version also produced some smash hits, notably “Fill the World With Love.” The critics didn’t particularly like it, particularly in comparison with the Robert Donat version, but I saw it early in my college years and fell in love with it. The movie tells the story of a classics teacher who seemed to have become an irrelevancy over time, with a harsher, meaner, world coming in to take the place of a kinder, more peaceable one. The harshness and meanness particularly taking the form of World War I. In the end, he shows that he in fact is the most relevant person for those times. “We did teach them to be more polite to each other” (or words to that effect), he recollects with a friend in the twilight of his life. Ah, but if only the world had listened.

“Lean On Me,” “Stand and Deliver,” “Dangerous Minds,” “Freedom Writers.” Roughly the same theme, a teacher who rescues a bunch of black and Latino kids given up for lost by everyone, including themselves, from a future of misery and death and turns them into veritable achievers. “Dangerous Minds” I remember for Michelle Pfeiffer explaining Bob Dylan’s “Tambourine Man” to his class, specifically how Dylan, given the censorship in his time, had to disguise smoking pot with that magical metaphor. The most inspiring of the lot is “Stand and Deliver,” with Edward James Olmos as the math teacher of a rough East LA school who, despite the derision of his peers (“You can’t teach math to illiterates”), almost miraculously gets his kids to pass the AP Calculus Exam. His advice to his kids is something we can relate to, not least because he uses the same word for it: “gana.” You have to have gana, or enthusiasm.

“Dead Poets Society”; “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” I suspect the first did a lot more to spark interest in poetry among the kids than a bunch of lectures on it. Certainly it made the phrase “carpe diem” (seize the day) the motto of a generation. The second is a much older movie, which thrust Maggie Smith into the limelight as a teacher in a conservative girls’ school in Edinburgh, Scotland, who demands from her students that they embrace the extraordinary life. Like “Dead Poets,” this is a far more complex movie than the others, and not the kind to get audiences off their seats to cheer. Like “Dead Poets,” it shows as well the tragedy as much as the glory of exploding truth and/or illusion in dangerous and/or impressionable minds.

“Mr. Holland’s Opus.” The one I like best as far as teaching goes, if not as movies go. Richard Dreyfuss is a composer who settles for a job teaching music in a small high school to pay the rent while he struggles to compose his masterpiece. He never gets to do the latter while he ends up doing the former for 35 years. In the end, frustrated and not a little bitter at having wasted his life, he attends one last school function before he goes. The function turns out to be a surprise party for him by all the students he had taught and whose lives he had changed forever. Not unlike James Stewart in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” That is Mr. Holland’s masterpiece, that is his magnum opus.

You don’t get inspired by all this, you deserve to be a politician.

Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Titsers

‘Titser’
There's The Rub column item by Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:48:00 01/29/2008

MANILA, Philippines -- On the few but happy occasions that I see my elementary and high school classmates, who are often one and the same, talk drifts to the pranks we mounted on our hapless teachers and how the same teachers dealt with those who were caught in the act. We remembered those teachers well -- to a man, woman, or priest -- their foibles and their virtues, the names officially given to them by their parents and the names we secretly gave them for some characteristic or other. Most of them we recalled with fondness, especially the ones who, quite apart from the terror they filled our hearts with, also filled our minds with the light of learning.

I don’t know if that is a generational thing or not, or indeed if it is a provincial thing or not. I do know that the teachers of my time and place were held in high regard by our community. In my street, there was a widow who taught preschool in her house and drew a not very small class to it. It also subbed as some sort of day-care center. She lived to a ripe old age (she was already advanced in years when I was in elementary school) devoting pretty nearly all her life to her calling. People said she renewed her marriage vows only with her work after her husband died. When she died, poor if not entirely penniless, it wasn’t just our street that turned up at the wake and plunged into deep mourning.

I remembered these things in light of the project of the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) called “1000 Teachers Program,” which aims to recruit the country’s best and brightest to become teachers. The project aims to restore the luster in teaching, changing the public’s perception from “titser lang” to “titser ko, idol ko.” “In reality,” PBEd says, “teachers are not just teachers. They are classroom managers. They are chief operating officers of cramped classrooms with some of the most rowdy and academically challenged students.”

It’s a laudable project, and I’m all for it. First off though, Jesli Lapuz is right: the first thing you need to do to improve the lot of teachers, never mind their image, is to give them better pay. I’ve said it repeatedly: Every time I hear talk about raising the pay of soldiers (which gets to be rife when they get to be restive) because they’re risking life and limb to protect the country and receiving crumbs for their pains, I think of the teachers. Soldiers risk life and limb to protect the country’s body, teachers risk life and limb to protect this country’s mind. Which do you think is more important?

As to scale of impoverishment, I recall that the Association of Concerned Teachers once used to call public school teachers “the new national animal,” having replaced the carabao for that dubious honor. No profession is more grossly overworked and underpaid. Which is why public schools often resemble a tiangge, the teachers supplementing their income by selling tocino and bra payable in four “gives.” But which is better than soldiers supplementing their income by enforcing drug and gambling activities and robbing banks.

But raising pay alone won’t make them better teachers, or draw better entrants to the fold, any more than raising reporters’ pay will make them less prone to corruption, or draw better-quality recruits. The only way really that you can do that is by appealing to idealism, particularly youthful idealism in the case of prospective recruits. That is not as unrealistic or unreasonable as it sounds. The best and brightest of my generation were drawn to activism like moth to flame or like knight to lonely quest on the strength of it, on the heroic notion of changing the country, if not the world, even if one had to give up one’s life for it.

There’s no lack of encouragement from the movies for such a choice in life. Only recently I saw a powerful one in the form of “Freedom Writers,” which tells of a young teacher’s miraculous feat of turning a “hopeless” group of kids mired in a culture of death and violence into achieving students. There’s a lot more where that came from.

You do need to change the environment, too, to make that choice an attractive one. The appeal of activism in my time also rested to a great extent on the public acceptance, if a violently grudging one by parents (something I can appreciate only now as a parent), of activism as a noble, if quixotic, calling. Teaching isn’t greatly admired these days, publicly or privately.

That isn’t helped by sayings, though quite witty ones, like, “People who can’t do, teach.” As horrendous, and foolish, a belief as you can find, many teachers also being great doers. In any case, I don’t know that Alexander, who did, would ever surpass -- or even come close to -- Aristotle, who taught. It’s not helped either by songs like Juan de la Cruz’s “Titser: Public Enemy Number 1” or Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” ("We don’t need no education”) at least where they are taken out of context. For all its seeming anarchy though, “Titser” is just being playful, not cruel.

Certainly, it is not helped by lauding teachers as the CEOs of schools. That is not a promotion, that is a demotion. I recall my teachers with the greatest fondness not because they managed to discipline me but because they managed to inspire me, not because they managed to put order into my life but because they managed to drive me to quest restlessly for knowledge. At their best, teachers rank among the most creative of them all, among poets, artists, and philosophers. At their best teachers produce the greatest masterpieces of all, their canvasses being young minds, vast as the universe itself, their opuses, as “Mr. Holland’s Opus” shows, being the army of students sparked with the love of learning.

At their best, teachers don’t just teach, they do.

Summer Reads Part 3

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

At age 66, Frank McCourt published his memoirs, and Angela's Ashes (Pulitzer Prize winner) and 'Tis. Ten years later, his third memoir has come out. This book focuses on 30 years of teaching experience that shaped McCourt's writing career. Hmmm, let me see, I'll be on my 26th year in teaching. So there must be hope for me as a writer yet. :)

I've read his first two memoirs and they were really moving and poignant. Angela's Ashes reads like an Irish version of a poor Pinoy's life in the slums. Squalor, nerve- and gut-wrenching poverty, bigotry, sickness, death, you name it. 'Tis chronicles his life in the USA and the struggles he went through to carve his niche.

A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt

First, before you get turned off by the "sacred & profane" image evoked by the title, an explanation from Malachy McCourt, Frank's younger brother: the title is from the prayer Hail Mary: Blessed are you amongst women (the last two words misheard by him as a monk swimming).

Following in his brother's footsteps, Malachy carefully avoids treading the same biographical ground (their common childhood) by recounting his upbeat life in the USA as a raconteur, actor, bar owner.

Now this is a serio-comic tandem of books I plan to read back-to-back.