The Highest and Lowest Points in Teaching

This essay was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements in one of my education courses back in college. I felt a need of documenting how my beliefs are changing. And ideologically, I am going strong. Still, it's nice to look at my essays during these times. It feels so naive yet idealistic at the same time.

Some teachers say that they find joy in teaching. Honestly, I believe them in a sense. There is always a sense of fulfillment whenever students learn. Yes, I feel that temporarily, but just to be true to myself, I didn’t have a highest moment in student teaching though I have a lowest.

Teaching is a noble profession?

Call me insensitive, I don’t care. I think that being happy about the performance of the students is something that should be reflected about. Why are we happy with it? Is it because the lesson plan went exactly as we want it to be? Is it because the students are behaved? These are, indeed, factors to be considered, but we should think that when the lesson plan is followed and ALL of the students behaved exactly as we wanted them to be, then we have a problem. The problem is that we make them conform, and conformity is against my very philosophy that I must respect my students’ individual differences. I made them all follow me and I turned them into unthinking robots for a period. Do this, do that. Therefore, I didn’t made them think freely, I didn’t make them make their own meaning. I am just happy with my teaching whenever I sense that they grasped the lesson in different ways. I don’t want to get a high moment from teaching, because I didn’t take Education to make hordes of students make me happy. I teach you; make me happy. That I think is not a good attitude. Teaching did not dawn to humanity to inflate teachers’ egos.

But I'm sure as hell don't want to look too stressed about it...

I also didn’t have a lowest moment in teaching itself, because this would truly affect the atmosphere inside the classroom. I don’t want to enter the classroom depressed and in turn, depressing my students. But I did have a lowest moment in my relationship with the other teachers in school. I like my opinions being questioned, but I don’t like my ideas being blocked, especially if the topic that I’m talking about would surely affect the students like RH Bill. One teacher did it, and I was seething in disguised annoyance. This is only one of the many examples in which schools sometimes kill the positive energy that young teachers bring. If we are so serious in educating our students and making them think, then the school must be an institution of the exchange of ideas not just between students but also between the teachers themselves. The teachers must be the ones who must start a healthy intellectual discourse about pressing issues that will surely have its effect in education. This brings me to my philosophy that teachers themselves must be free to think. If teachers smother each other to prevent them from thinking, then they would do the same to the students. They would just stunt the minds of the students and turn them into a mindless horde.

Some teachers say that they find joy in teaching. Yes, I believe them, as there is always a sense of fulfillment whenever students learn. I am yet to have that highest moment, but I’m not bracing myself, because these same teachers didn’t tell us if schools are havens for thinking, anyway. 

Shut Up, Teacher

A little essay I wrote out of frustration. I forgot about this essay until I found it in my computer's many many folders. Wrote it way back when I was doing my practicum. And looking at myself from two years ago, I realized that being in a conservative school has never diminished my beliefs.

It was a sunny late morning and the heat of the incoming summer was starting to be felt in our faculty room.
Flux of graduating students also went in and out of the room, as it was a deadline day. At my table, I was reading an article from a newspaper about the reproductive health bill and since majority of the teachers that were with me in that room were married and had have kids, I asked them if they were in favor of the bill. The teachers gave me an assertive answer, as they felt that there was nothing wrong with it and they were not killing anybody in using contraceptives. A teacher also asked me if I was for it, I said yes, and I also said my criticism on the church’s stand. However, another teacher whispered to me which dragged me away from the friendly sharing of opinions, “Do not engage in debate yet, you're still a student-teacher.” As she was saying this, the topic was still being discussed, and the said teacher asked me my motives. I said that I just felt agitated with the church’s logic. She nodded her head and turned her attention back to what she was doing.

As soon as I found a way to go back to the conversation, I looked closely at the highlighter marker pen that I was holding and said, “This highlighter's cool; it looks like a lipbalm.” I felt a sense of success as one of the teachers who answered me took my highlighter and examined it; they really welcomed the change of topic. They ate my bait.

As I went back to reading the article, I wondered on why student teachers are not allowed to give their views on pressing issues. Sure, I am young and I still do not understand a real public school teacher’s reality. But the issue at hand must surely be a part of a real school teacher’s reality, as the topic that I opened concerned not only the parents, but most especially the students, their students. I heard their god-knows-how-many conversations about their students getting pregnant at age 16 and younger, so why prevent a healthy discourse about a soon-to be policy that would have an effect in the educational curriculum? Should we as teachers be aware of these things? Should we stop ourselves in participating or even initiating a potentially intellectually fruitful conversation? I heeded the teacher’s call for me to stop babbling about the topic; I saw her point that I was not in the position to open the topic up, but I am sure that I am in the position to open up the topic as a concerned youth concerned with her fellow youth. It seemed to me that she was trying to impose the don’t-talk-because-you-are-the-state’s-robot type of silence on me. But how about her? She is in the exact position to participate in discussions, as the double-edged sword of being a citizen and teacher is on her shoulders. She is a full-pledged teacher; can she do what I can do? She is young; can she be as concerned? The school cannot be considered as an institution in a vacuum, and teachers cannot stay apolitical for so long just because the government is putting money in their pockets. We are political beings whether we like it or not, and it is our choice to be either become a catalyst of change or a perpetuator of state oppression.

How can we change our students if we keep silent? How can we contribute in making a better society for our students if we ourselves refuse to put into question the issues that will deeply affect them?

I went to the lavatory and saw the much senior teacher who took my highlighter. I asked her.

"Ma'am, is it just fine if we student-teachers initiate topics like RH bill earlier?"

"It's just fine. It's just fine for a teacher to air her views. What's forbidden for a teacher is to endorse a politician."

Two conflicting views indeed.

The teacher went out of the comfort room to go to her class, and I continued washing my hands. I remembered my reason for staying in education, “to make myself a liberal working in an overly conservative working environment.”

I stared at myself in the mirror with anger bubbling up my chest.

Administrators are Prudish People

With all the hoopla that was UbD, I was most enlightened by the seminar my school had days ago. It made me realize that UbD is actually very simple, lesson planning-wise and execution-wise. But apparently, its the administrators who are pulling us down. 

Pulling us into the pits of academic insanity.

We teachers (who have been cheated so many times already), agreed to the speaker when she said that UbD is supposed to be simpler. We filled our auditorium with the sound of our agreement and relief. 

We're close to hysterics, actually. *sigh*

But you know, administrators took it as a voice of dissent. Well, yes, it was a voice of dissent not only of probationary teachers but also of our more seasoned teachers. So, it didn't come as a surprise when our area head (and I love her) told us that the higher-ups of the institution took offense. And I say, they really should take offense and responsibility, because if we didn't have that seminar, then we wouldn't know that we are bullshitting ourselves, and that it could have been easier if they invited the freaking speaker earlier last year.

BOOOOOOOOOOO!

That seminar caused confusion. Are we going to push on with our plans? Are we going to use the plans from last year? But the topics for this year are different! Are we going to edit it? But I'm through! And the list goes on. 

These administrators shouldn't take offense if we teachers are airing their discontent, it shows their incompetence all the more. This confusion was their fault in the first place. If they have that seminar earlier on, then we wouldn't write trash lesson plans all in the name of compliance. They told us to submit our plans in the middle of the month, and then suddenly they will invite a speaker who would point out our mistakes and then they would tell us to rewrite our lesson plans? Fuck them all. Let them write the plans themselves. And it doesn't help that they gave us a more complicated template. 

We're not sado-masochists, people. So why make it so complicated?

What these administrators do not realize is that, at the end of the day, it is the teachers who would bear the burden of it all. If you go inside a classroom with a faulty plan, then you'll have a faulty class, observation, class performance, grades, and faulty national achievement test results. And when you have these faulty things, of course, they put the blame on the teachers who are just basically following directives from the higher-ups (who fucked up the whole thing in the first place). 

So, these administrators do not have the right to bitch about us bitching about how we hate the current situation. They run a private school and they have the f*****g power to adjust the FAPE format or reject the format altogether just because they can and it can be more beneficial to the teachers. But hell no, they made us do it without realizing that it is not what the proponents of UbD envisioned. And now that they are garnering the teachers' wrath, they get back to us? That's the problem with following uncritically. Shows their level of incompetence actually.

As for the lesson plans itself, it has been decided that whatever we have finished  will be left as it is and that the proper format (of EU and EQ) must already be followed in the two final quarters. But what I am bitter about is that these administrators stuck with the FAPE format. I mean, I consider that format to be a format of some humbug trying to be more significant than the proponents themselves. Why can't they accept that that format is so f****** wrong? Oh well, they don't want to admit that they're wrong so, might as well stick with it, yeah? Christ Jesus.

Teaching is good, innovation is good, and change is good, but if you are doing it the wrong way, might as well don't do it at all.

I Don't Like Noisy People

I don't like noisy people.
It disrupts my inner harmony.
Enough said.

Okay, so one thing that I want to instill in my students is the value of respect, freethinking and shutting the fuck up whenever we have a discussion. It irks me really, especially whenever I stop so that they will stop talking, and then as soon as I start talking they would also talk. Now, how fucked up that is? It just drains me.

I am an introvert, so being a teacher is really counter-intuitive.

"Well, now, boys, you already got your classmates' attention, so shut up now, will ya?"

So much for destroying lives.

If these students' lives are whining, "Oh, my life is a waste...", then I suggest that they should fuck off from the schools and stop making life a waste for their teachers. Really, it disrupts my inner harmony.