Back in the day, we only went up to Grade Six. The first half of that six-year elementary program (Grades 1 to 3) was called “primary education” while the second half (Grades 4 to 6) was called “intermediate instruction.” That’s why when you graduated from elementary, you progressed on to SECONDARY education—meaning HIGH SCHOOL.
You could never be confused because even your educational supplies went along with that distinction. In “primary school” you wrote on “pad paper” that was HALF the size of a full “intermediate pad paper.” From Grades 1 to 3, it was assumed that your cursive writing was not yet that developed, so the “primary pad” paper sheets were ruled in alternate black and blue lines. That way, you had visual aid in keeping the height of your “small cursive” between a black and a blue line, while your “capital letters” must touch two black lines.
Then when you progressed to using “full intermediate pad”, the blue lines disappeared. But you became conscious that you would always tend to spill your writing off the right edge of the paper and couldn’t be consistent with starting your next line directly below the line above it for a neat look. So to help you along “margin lines” were added on BOTH edges of the pad paper: black on the left side, red on the right side. This meant you could not write on the sheet upside down!
From Grades 1 to 2, it was really all just the “3 R’s”—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic (obviously, THAT’S also the root of bad spelling). The “rithmetic” was rudimentary, of course—just adding 1 to every number. So 1+1=2, then you go 2+1=3, followed by 3+1=4 and so on.
You learned to tackle “two digits” in Grade 2. Grade 3 is when you really discovered that the Arabic numeral system is infinite going positively higher (you didn’t learn until high school that “integers” went infinitely BOTH ways, positive and negative).
In Grade 5, we learned that the way we normally count is in “Base 10” meaning the digits go from 0 to 9—there is really no “ten” as such, it’s really “1 of the tens column, and ‘0’ in the ‘ones’ column.” That’s counting in “Base 10.”
Although I could think of no practical purpose for it, we learned how to write down (or as Mrs. Leonora C. Adalim, my Grade 5 classroom adviser would say) to “represent the value” of any number in Base 3, Base 4, Base 5, Base 6, and so on up to Base 9. Why was there no Base 2? Because that would be the “binary system” where the only valid digits are “1” and “0” it becomes too unwieldy and too abstract for our eleven year-old brains to tackle. Later on, of course, the digits “1” and “0” would conveniently correspond to the “ON” and “OFF” state that would become the basis of the computer machine language. But in the 70s we know none of that.
By the time you reach Grade 4, you now had to MEMORIZE the Multiplication Table, which was printed on the back cover of every notebook you could buy. That’s why during tests, the first thing Mrs. Elsie P. Gutierrez, my Grade 4 classroom adviser, would do is tell everybody to bring their notebooks and deposit them up in front of the classroom. No fair peeking at those multiplication tables!
I had classmates who were of Chinese descent—guys like Lee Ignacio, Warren Lee Abad, Napoleon Lechoco—I hated those guys! They knew how to do math calculations using nothing but their fingers and knuckles! I, on the other hand, had to struggle with long division and three-digit multiplication, mouthing crap like “carry one,” “borrow one” or “cannot be” etc. until I stumbled on the right answer. These disgusting Chinese mestizos aced the math tests every single time, submitting their papers a half hour before time is up. I always only barely made it to “finished or not finished, pass your paper.”
Grade 5 was more like MY wheelhouse. The subject “Music and Arts” was added. We left the regime of just coloring inside the lines to understanding the colorwheel. The primary colors were red, blue and yellow—which looked like the Mercedes Benz logo. Between the red and blue stripes lay violet; between blue and yellow lay green and between red and yellow lay orange. It was easy to guess from there that between red and orange lay “red-orange” or between blue and violet lay “blue-violet” and so on.
More importantly, I found out that if you take any color and pair it with the color OPPOSITE it on the colorwheel—they were called “complementary colors” and of, course, if you take ANY number of colors as long as they lay right beside each other on the colorwheel—those guys were called “analogous colors.”
In Music in the 70s in Baguio Central School, we learned how to READ NOTES! And I mean sheet music. We had some of the best music teachers on the planet and although I’m sure there must have been more in that school, I only knew the names of two: Mrs. Anita C. Peña and Mrs. Thelma S. Ferrer. Mrs. Peña taught us how to sing—headtones, nasal tones, falsetto and the one she preferred best: diaphragm tones. She taught the girls how to reach those high B’s and B-sharps on the third octave with “whistle tones”—the way Mariah Carey--and, locally, Nina—would sing them.
Mrs. Ferrer was a consummate piano teacher who patiently tried to make us understand the “circle of fifths”—but few of us, if any, could quite “get” it. But, at least, we learned about key signatures and how to transpose from one key signature to another. To this day, many “Centralers” like me playing the guitar can go up and down the scale even without using a capo.
Our “Music and Arts” subject, which was in the morning, dovetailed nicely with our Practical Arts in the afternoon. Our teacher was Mr. Pulmano who introduced us to crafts like woodcarving and simple metalworks. No, we did not weld metal—mostly we just cut, folded and pounded thin salvaged aluminum or steel sheets on hollowed out wooden molds to turn them into dustpans and soup laddles—but with an element of art.
There were other "projects" of course. He sent us off to this chalk cliffside site in front of Baguio City High School (behind where the DOT buildings are sitting now, which weren’t there yet in the 70s). There we would pick off small blocks of limestone each—all 25 or so of us BCS Grade 6 boys—and run back to Central.
In the school industrial shop, we would fight to take turns over ten table vises were we would clamp on these limestone blocks and start whittling them down to an ashtray.
There were no “limestone carving tools”—we had to make them ourselves. Mr. Pulmano gave each boy a six-inch nail, we cut off the pointy end of it with a hacksaw and pounded it endlessly on the anvil to form a half-inch wide chisel. We took turns on the hand-cranked grinding wheel (that’s why a “best friend” in elementary school is obligatory, you could never finish a project working by yourself). Your best friend cranked the grindstone while you machined your chisel into a sharp flat edge. You ended up with a one-of-a-kind metal chisel made of US-grade wrought iron, we personalized our chisels by fashioning wooden handles out of sawn-off pieces of dilapidated school desks. No two chiels were the same, you couldn’t BUY one of those things from any hardware store!
But having a metal chisel as sturdy as that wasn’t necessarily meant to enable you to work faster—a lesson I learned the embarassing way. You were supposed to use the chisel BAREHAND and scrape off a little bit of limestone at a time from the center of the block, until it “bowled” enough to look like an ash tray. If the limestone fought back, you would coax the chisel gently along by tapping it with your soft flesh-padded palm. Then you used a 40-grit sandpaper rolled into a small dowel to grind a cigarette rest on the lip of the bowl. Done CORRECTLY it took about a week to finish an ashtray.
I would have none of that. What the heck, I thought, I had the sturdiest chisel that could cut marble, why be so gentle with this bloody little piece of limestone? So I took a mallet and aimed at the center of the block with my hardened chisel and took a whack at it. You should have heard my classmates burst out laughing when my limestone block shattered in a million pieces with a sickening cracking noise.
“What did you do??” Mr. Pulmano demanded to know as his hulk loomed over my shoulder.
“I thought it would be faster if I just gouged a big hole in the middle first then enlarge it later, so I whacked it hard," I answered sheepishly.
"It's limestone, nakkong," he said, "don't let the 'stone' part fool you, it's still made of lime and sand. It's very brittle, that's why I told you boys to whittle it away bit by bit. You have to do it slowly."
"I'm sorry, sir, I didn't realize how brittle this thing was," I squeaked.
I could sense Mr. Pulmano’s deep disappointment with me. But he didn’t get mad at me, or anything. He just shook his head gently, and said, “You’re missing whole the point of this project, Joel."
He handed me a spare piece of limestone block that he had lying around, then softly said something I'll never forget--"I wasn't trying to teach you how to make an ash tray. I was trying to teach you PATIENCE.”
It was all I could do to keep from crying when this gentle old man said that.
I think we not only miss a good old basic traditional curriculum these days. We miss good old basic traditional teachers like Mr. Pulmano, Mrs. Ferrer, Mrs. Pena, Mrs. Adalim and Mrs. Gutierrez.*
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