However, I am a product of the “old system”—
one we had before people with masteral and doctoral degrees started to “improve” it.
These “improvements” began with extending basic education to twelve years—adding two years on top of the traditional 6-year elementary and 4-year high school curriculums (alright, curricula) that I went through.
Of course, that also blurred the boundary between elementary and high school. Honestly, when a kid tells me today that she’s in “Grade 9” I don’t know quite what to make of that. She has completed 8 years of elementary—two years more than I did—but she hasn’t graduated?
Back in the day, that would have meant that you were a 2-year Grade 6 “repeater” and your parents would be livid.
But I guess I’m a dinosaur with an ancient educational skillset, I should just keep my mouth shut pertaining modern educational philosophy.
In fact, maybe this is a good time to focus on what I DO know like the back of my hands—the “old system”—and realize what a horrible system it was.
Children today are introduced to computer technology so early, I am green with envy. Even at Grade 3, they’re already just clicking dialog boxes on a computer touchscreen—I guess the digital equivalent of our “multiple choice” tests—except if they clicked (or guessed) the right box, the screen exploded into a myriad of cascading screens of text, photos, videos and sound expounding on that one box that the kid clicked correctly.
We had no computers when I was in Grade 3. We didn’t even have calculators. In fact, my memory of the time was of me—and thousands of kids my age—bawling in the middle of a shop that sells notebooks (the paper kind, not the Acer brand) and tugging relentlessly at my Mama’s “palda.”
I wanted her to throw back her first choice of notebook, cause I wanted her to buy the OTHER kind for me: the one that had the whole multiplication table printed on the back cover!
“Pastilan, anak! Anong gusto nimo, mandadaya na lang kamo sa imong arithmetic?!” she castigated me in her halting Visayan accent, tugging at my right earlobe on every syllable. (To this day, I think THAT must be the scientific explanation why my right earlobe is bigger than the left).
She said she would TEACH me how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and, on top of that, MEMORIZE the workings of basic math. But how can she? She’s only a high school graduate, for Christ’s sake!
You’ll be amazed.
The toughest line in the whole multiplication table was the “times 9” series. Mama said take any number, say 8, and think of the next number lower to it: 7. Then ask yourself, “how many more before 8 becomes 10?” it’s 2—ergo, 8 times 9 equals 72.
I tried it with all other numbers between 2 and 9 and, sanamagan, it DOES work!
WHERE did Mama learn that? She said from an American soldier who taught her and a bunch of other kids under the spread of a mango tree back in her hometown in Leyte after the war. Mama was about eleven at the time. She was born in 1933, which means she’ll be marking her 90th birthday this December.
Today kids CANNOT be asked to write long essays, it would be too stressful for them to conjure up ideas out of thin air. The pressure to come up with “something out of nothing” encouraged altruism and “fictionalization of thinking,” this leads to them learning how to MAKE UP things—in other words to LIE.
Of course! How could my Grade 5 teacher NOT have thought of that?
Mrs. Leonora Cachero Adalim (that’s her name, God bless her soul) made us buy this hideous thing called “Theme Notebook” and once EVERY WEEK (that’s thirty-eight weeks for a whole schoolyear!) she would make us turn to a fresh page of that thick notebook and give us a topic to write about.
Forget “What I did last summer” she already used that LAST year and parents said she never repeats her topic list. So she asked us to write something about “what I think of shadows.”
WHAT??
We were tiny little Grade 5 “uhugin” brats, you can’t expect us to tackle philosophical subjects like that. So predictably, all we could come up with were senseless banal stuff like, “a shadow is what I see when my back is turned and I’m not facing the light.” How profound.
Somebody else wrote, “when I look at a shadow it makes me think a day is gloomy even though the sun is bright.” How thought-provoking.
Just more stupid, stupid things like THAT—certainly nothing that can trigger deep intellectual introspection. But that’s not the worst part.
She also told us to write on the front side of every page ONLY, never on the back. Also, we were to leave the OPPOSING page blank. We wondered why.
We found out why.
After a day or two, she returned our Theme Notebooks to us, with her comments. She peppered our essays with a whole gamut of proofreading marks.
Sometimes she just encircled a misspelled word. Or sometimes TWO words—a noun and a verb—and connected the two circles with a line and a big question mark that meant, “these two do not agree, fix this!”
The thing I hated most was when she drew this long loopy arrow to the margins where she wrote a paragraph-length remark that you were supposed to CONSIDER in your rewrite—oh, but you’re NOT allowed to copy anything SHE wrote.
My classmates and I would compare notebooks, “ano’ng nilagay sa iyo?”
“Ang dami nga, eh, nakakainis!!”
So THAT’S what the opposing blank page was for. We wrote 38 decent-length essays (in Grade 5!) and then REWROTE every single one of them after she was through mangling each one.
How did she even find the time to read all our notebooks? There were forty of us in her class. The government must pay her a lot of money—but, then, why did she WALK home and not own a car? And why would she pack her lunch just like we all did back in the day?
Today, kids cannot be put under undue pressure, like having to do too much homework. Affirmative action parents clubs maintain that schoolwork should be done IN SCHOOL—not at home where a child must be free to engage in non-curricular interaction with non-academic peers (like online gaming opponents halfway around the world). Otherwise, you are harming that child’s “holistic development.”
My God, that totally makes sense. Why didn’t anybody say this to all our horrible teachers in Baguio Central School in 1973?
Whenever they gave us any seatwork, it was ALWAYS under time pressure. Not only were we expected to complete a task, we were supposed to do it within a non-extendible deadline. So you often heard that classic line, “Finished or not finished, pass your papers!”
How cruel.
So now guys like me still suffer from the devastating long-term damage that those cruel teachers did to us. Give us a topic today and we would regress right back to those dark days of mental torment, and turn it into a long grammatically-perfect discourse. Ugh! That is so disgusting.
I wish our teachers back then had given more thought to our feelings. I wish they had never cheapened our achievements by turning our good deeds into some kind of exchange currency with which to pay for our bad deeds. Seriously, what's the big idea behind “RIGHT MINUS WRONG??”
It compelled you to aim for perfection and to abhor mediocrity. How absurd.
How dare our old teachers indoctrinate me about responsibility and accountability by making ME correct my best friend Frederick del Prado’s spelling testpaper. I had to put an X-mark on his “judgement” because there’s not supposed to be an “e” after the “g.”
Freddie didn’t speak to me for a whole week, and there was no point trying to escape his wrath, because there’s no denying I cost him a point. The evidence was all there because Teacher made me write “corrected by Joel Dizon” on Freddie’s paper. She made ALL of us do that. How primitive and predatory.
Today DepEd policy prohibits teachers from delegating correcting tasks to theirs wards because that encouraged "victimization."
Also, making another child aware of your child's mistake exposed him to "peer contempt and prejudice" which is a violation of your child's right of privacy and a form of "violence" against his tender juvenile self-esteem.
Of course! By golly, that IS correct, what took parents and teachers this long to WAKE UP to this basic reality?
Good thing for kids of this generation because now both parents and teachers are “woke” people finely attuned to the cutting edge awareness of modern educational philosophy.
Our teachers in the 70s? Forget it. NONE of them are “woke.”
I guess that’s because I don’t think any of them really went to sleep.*
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