Lesser Teacher

I fiercely disagree that those who are literate cannot be numerate and vice versa. I believe otherwise, as literacy is concrete and numeracy is abstract. Ergo, if you are good in the concrete then it means that you are also good in abstraction.

Yes, the school year has ended, but my experience for this year has only given me enough material to bitch about come vacation. And this is that time.

We deliberated on whether certain students will pass or fail certain subjects or be a retainer. Well. I have two students who will take summer classes.

Here in my place, English, Science, and Math are the three major subjects. I have always believed that if you failed English, then you got to be the most lazy-ass person in the pack, because, you know, out of these three major subjects, English is essentially the easiest. And to top it all off, English teachers here in my school actually do all of the interventions and remedies that could be made just for the students to pass a subject. Like, giving the student a retake of a quiz if he failed it, or making a student write an essay in place of a research paper he didn't submit. Or again, to a greater extent, "adjusting" the grade of the student, if you know what I mean.

That is why I have a hard time passing this certain student. I already gave all the intervention that could be given, gave him the talk, talked to his mother, gave some more remediation and voila! Still, he failed the subject. It even came to the point that I told the mother that his son is bound to fail. With a three consecutive failing grades on his report card, he goddamned needed to have an a satisfactory grade for the last quarter to have a passing average so he could avoid having summer classes and seeing my face again. So, with much reflection and determination on my part that I will defend the grade that I was able to calculate, I gave him the red mark.

Come deliberation day, and this student actually failed Math, Science and English. So my colleagues properly concluded that this student was bound to repeat the whole curriculum. Now, I think I already made it clear before in my earlier posts that this school babysits students when it comes to grades, so one of us (me, the Math teacher and the Science teacher) were expected to give way and give the student a passing grade in his/her subject so that the student, instead of being retained, would just have summer class.

It turns out that this school has always been expecting the English teacher to give way.

But it also turns out that they hired a teacher who's not up to expectations.

I know they know the grading system of my subject, but I still gave them a detailed breakdown of the student's grade. And added the fact that I gave the student necessary remedies so he can pull his grades up, but to no avail (the reason for these remedies thing is for me to justify the student's grade in situations like these. It serves as a proof that sometimes, a few students are some serious slack-offs). Of course, the Math and Science teachers are tenured teachers and I know that everybody in the conference already knew that nobody will back-off.

Before the verdict was given, the homeroom adviser was asked about the students' character. Well, he did a pretty neat job of saving him through glossing over the character of the student. But it didn't just cut it. Not when the student does not have enough character to invest in his future and study.

So, the student was retained.

And it makes so much sense.

Here, all of the subjects are taught in English (except for Social Studies and National Language), Science and Math included. So, it follows that if you have troubles listening, reading, speaking or writing in English, then you will have a more difficult time in the content areas and vice versa.

So I really do not see the reason why there are some people who actually expect English teachers to give way. Is it lack of respect for the subject? For the language? Is it a blatant abuse of the generosity of the teachers themselves who let themselves (and their computations) be questioned?

That is another story.

Advanced English Classes Rant

I am going to have an advanced English classes this coming Monday. And I am having mixed feelings about it.

It will be a 2-week class and the students will be attending classes in their major subjects, English, Math and Science. What I like about this is that my students will be the best students of the incoming sophomores. And I am toying with the idea of making this an almost college course. No predictable motivation, presentation, discussion and all those things that bores students in a normal situation. And I am planning to apply everything that I have learned in college about task-based teaching. Therefore, it would be the students who would be doing more work than I am, which, you see, the very reason why these techniques were formulated in the first place. That every lesson must be student-centered and students must be the ones responsible for their own creation of meaning.

But still, I couldn't get rid of preparing an outline of the topics that we will tackle for these two weeks, and I plan on making it oral-intensive. And this is because I noticed that most of our students, if not all, know English grammar perfectly based on standards-based assessments. They know the grammar forms, but they, even the best students, have difficulty in speaking in the language. So this is what I want to hone for two weeks. Apparently, a cohort told me that my lessons for these classes must be introductions of what they are going to discuss come regular school year. And that is just like cold water thrown on me, because I know that our lessons will be research paper and grammar intensive. Yes, we do have a speech program, but sometimes, it is relegated to the sideline because we need to cover topics that will be included in the summative tests. And this defeats the purpose of learning in the first place. But still, still, I am going to push through with my plan, anyway, this is advanced classes. What they must know are things which are not going to be discussed in a regular classroom.

One thing that made me pissed off with this affair, though, is the compensation. We are already spending our "vacation" by making and editing lesson plans and this added burden of teaching in summer is just a bummer. We teachers of the advanced classes will only be given $16.00, tops. Two weeks, people. Fucking two weeks. That wouldn't make so much difference in the long run, wouldn't it?

Well, that's life. Get bored with it.

Repost : A Mental Asylum That Is The School

A repost of an essay which I read from eons ago. I want to thank Elizabeth Lim for letting me.

As in every ordinary day in the lives of students, I, a student myself, have to endure the routinary going and going to schools, of attending to classes, of reciting memorized facts and unloading it on the test paper, of pleasing our professors, of pretended listening to them and to our classmates who report on it.

But did we really ask for this arrangement? Did we really ask for us to be educated in the first place? We always say that we wanted to study, so we will have a better future blah, blah, blah, but is this really what we want? If yes, why then are we always dragging ourselves to attend our classes? In rainy days, why do we always choose to sleep in, and not hurry because we will already be late for the first period? I certainly don’t know the answer of course. But we always said that we wanted to study because we wanted to be better individuals. Many parents have said that education is their only legacy to their children, that is why at our very young age, we, the children go to school in an effort to fulfill our parents’ wishes, which, inevitably and unconsciously, we will imbibe as our own conviction. This is the very reason why we work our butts of for fourteen to sixteen or more years: we are not studying for ourselves; we are studying (and eventually we will work) only to fulfill somebody’s dream.

As in every ordinary student, we fulfill our professors’ wishes disguised as academic requirements. We endure attending classes all in the name of fulfilling the 10% requirement for attendance even though we already know what will happen: the same professor babbling the exact thing written on the subject’s reference book, the exact same slides which were used for god knows how many semesters already, the exact same classmates not listening to the babbling and who are having their own mini-conferences, reading a manga or texting, or simply staring by the window at the swinging palm trees and the neighboring building.

The students are bored, the teacher is bored, and so what do we students get? Nothing. We endure memorizing facts only to be unloaded in our tests papers indifferent to the value of the facts itself (whether or not it can be a million peso question in some TV quiz show). Yes, we know that we belong to the species homo, the Philippines is near the equator and will always be, but we really don’t care. Besides, we can’t really use those facts right? What is its significance when we will work abroad as engineers, or nurses, or mechanics, or domestic workers right? We memorize that the age of fishes is the Devonian period and we are in the Cenozoic era and the Piltdown man is a hoax. We memorize and memorize and memorize. Write the correct answer on the blanks provided. Pass your papers. Get out of the testing room, and pray that you will get enough points to pass the exam.

We endure submitting papers which were made supposedly for us to contribute to the banks of knowledge and sharpen our grasp of a certain topic, we write about a paper on nationalism, of ultranationalism, a reaction or a discourse analysis of a modern adaptation of “As You Like It”, a reflection about Corazon Aquino’s death and its implications on Philippine politics, and a case study about the English speaking skills of a Korean. We tap on our laptops, desktops, or make our fingers bleed in writing drafts to be later typed on a desktop computer at an internet shop. We do those papers, yes, even in the ungodly hours of the night, midnight, and early morning. Click File, Press Print, OK. The clerk manning the internet shop will snatch the print-out and hand it to you and you the most obedient student will hold it as carefully as you can, and check for any errors, crumples or misprints. Oh, you find a misprint, and you say to the clerk, “Uhh, can you reprint it? The whole text is misaligned.” You see the clerk frown and turn to the computer, and reprint your whole 11 pages paper to be submitted right now. We then run to our classroom to hand it over to our professor. Or if our professor suddenly decided to postpone the class, or if he did a no show, we will just have to slid it under the professor’s room, tack it on their office’s door or put it on their pigeon hole of their department.

We also endure that thing called reporting. I admit, sometimes its good, but most of the time it is not. Just imagine yourself listening to another student who was assigned to report, say, Perennialism and Essentialism, you already read the reference book, and you liked the theory of those two, but suddenly, your classmate seemed to just read everything from the book when he presented it. You walk out of the classroom feeling dejected, and feeling that you shouldn’t have attended the class at all. There are also times when we report on something, and the professor suddenly barks that you are wrong. Then if it is wrong, the professor shouldn’t have required reporting in the first place when he doesn’t trust his students anyway. It is ironic to think that we entered the university to study and to learn from these enlightened people, but then what happens is that we endure listening to our classmates who are also groping in the dark about their assigned topic. Pity them for no one will help them (only the very unreliable internet), and pity those who listen to them for they will get nothing. It seemed that the professors, enlightened they may be, are not really experts in imparting that knowledge, because what happens in the classroom when they “teach” is that the students are fed with too much technical terms and jargon: syntax, subject position, phenomenology, objective correlative, chemiosmosis blah blah blah that the students get out of the classroom feeling dizzy. As a remedy, these enlightened professors do not simplify their words, worse, they make the students do their work. Thanks to them, reporting became the sole teaching technique in most subjects in the university.

Who is to blame for all this boredom? Well, that is like asking the chicken and egg question. Of course the professors will blame the students, and the students the professors, but thinking about it, it is not so much about the students being lazy butts. On the contrary, we students are not, because if we are, then we wouldn’t really waste our precious time in fulfilling academic requirements, worse, we could just have dropped out of college. This boredom of the students comes from the repetition of everything that they already know by instinct. They already know that a professor will teach them, they already know that the said professor will give them requirements, and they already know that they will have to do everything that a student needs to do like listening and sitting for one and a half hour without speaking, passively accepting every information and every word from their professor. Why? Well, we students have been sitting and standing and listening for a good fourteen or so years of our lives. In preschool we were taught to behave, to sit properly to be labeled a “good boy” or “good girl” and to be given a star at the end of each class. In grade school, we are taught to respect our teachers and to do what they say we do like dusting the eraser, or buying the teacher her merienda during recess. In high school, we have our all rebelling hormones that tell us to do the very thing our teachers don’t want us to do like smoking or petting in CRs or bringing mobile phones, or simply not wearing our uniform properly. But in the end, we are harassed by school officials, saying that we must not do those, lest they will give us low grades in Values Education. We are taught not to think, not to question, and just please everybody, so we will be labeled a good boy or good girl. If we question, if we defy, if we talked back and reason, we will be labeled “bad” students, and be sent to the guidance counselor.

And then college, all of those restrictions that kept the teenager from pursuing what he or she really wants during the earlier years of schooling were tossed to the pits of history, no more uniforms, no more teachers telling you that cellphones are not allowed, no more preaching teachers, and most importantly the teenager can now be free to reason and to think. However, boredom came in, and the poor teenager’s passion was doused with water, with apathy, not caring anymore if he or she passes. She just continues with her life, waking up and preparing herself to school, entering the classroom and listens to the professor and if it happened that it is her turn to report, she will just read from the powerpoint presentation that she prepared, and go on to the next class, and repeat almost everything that she did in her previous class. All of this we have to do for four to five years in college. Why did it become like this? Well, maybe we became too obedient when we were in grade school and high school that we became very passive students, and we will just yawn and heavily lift our butts from our seats if ever we encounter a professor who wanted to stoke the fire of energy in us.

Then we will suddenly realize that we are out of college; that we are already in the adult world, and no thanks to the education that we received for fourteen years or so, we basically still don’t know what to do. Even though we already have that piece of paper called diploma, we would still end up following the whims of somebody: this time, our boss, our manager, our supervisor, our principal, and Ma’am and Sir. We will still end up in crutches, and it is because we were controlled too much in school, and unknowingly, we followed too much.

The education we received, therefore, is not education, but a control that made us dependent on other people; that made us like servants waiting for a master to tell us what to do. The schools are not producing better individuals therefore, it only produced stringed dolls that can’t think and are blind, and ever wary of the perpetual gaze of the panopticon.

Most Challenged Books

Brought a 2010 almanac and found this section about the "Most Challenged Books". Listed there are the titles of the books and the reasons why they were challenged. And the reasons were homosexuality, violence, religious viewpoints and political viewpoints. Well, fuck, I downloaded and read one or two of them without batting an eyelash.

Point is, if you challenge a book, you are actually luring readers to read the whole fucking thing which you don't want to happen in the first place.

So far, it has been an interesting read, and so far I am not offended at all. So what if American teenagers are having sex while in high school? Don't we know that universally? So what if these teeners are gay and are banging on each other while on drugs? It's not like they won't do it anymore once they have their own families. It's more like, you know, they do fuck each other while on drugs for practice.

Why aren't these moral freaks reacting to the sex, drugs and all the yummy things that are in TV and now in our youth's minds? Talk about consistency again, people.

And mind you, I haven't even read everything, yet. And that's telling something.

Evanescence's Very Much Awaited Album

The year was 2006. Evanescence released their second major label album, "The Open Door."
 

And that's the last I've heard of them.

So, after five years, it's actually a refreshing news that they are already FINALLY going to the studio to record their much (100X) - awaited third album.

Wait.

Isn't this the same news that I heard last 2010?

Yes. They are already in the studio LAST 2010 to pull-off that electro-inspired album with Steve Lillywhite. But you know, it didn't quite fit. And I have to be happy for that because I have always wanted a "heavy" Evanescence record, and so far the band has not yet scratched that itch. I wanted it to be heavier this third time around because "Fallen", is a commercial crap and "The Open Door," is the I-don't-know-what-to-feel-with-this-album album. Also add to the fact that Evanescence is too watered-down for their music to be really considered metal and for them to be truly respected by the metal crowd.

But to be true, when they said they are going to make an electro album, Portishead was not the first thing I thought. It was "Origin."

But suddenly when they announced that they are leaving the studio to write more songs, I was like, "Fuck it, until when will I wait?" and then suddenly I lost interest waiting. But I kept on visiting Amy's and Terry's twitter for any updates, hoping for a sliver of hope.

Fortunately, they announced just last two weeks ago that they are again going to the studio to record with Nick Raskulinecz (I so hope I got that correct).

Here's the guy.

Who, upon listening his other produced works, made me happy. Here is the heavier record I was waiting for.

But again here it is, the band basically dumped pictures and a video and a magazine interview to salivate for and then - silence.

I don't know, but sometimes, Evanescence just likes to jerk-off with their fans. I mean, Twitter is so convenient. 150 characters? Wouldn't take much of their time, actually.

Whatever the fact that's making them tease us unendingly, I do hope to grab that album come Fall.

P.S. Amy twitted a photo of her piano in her studio. Amy's Office
Evanescence is always unpredictable. :D

Japanese Hoopla

I can't understand the brouhaha that people make of with what happened to Japan.

Okay. There was an earthquake. And that is natural because Japan is in the Pacific Ring of Fire. Okay. There was a tsunami and it was because the epicenter of the earthquake was in the sea, so naturally, you would have a tsunami. 

Suddenly all these people seemed concerned with Japan and I can't stand it.

It's natural for Japan to have these kinds of calamities, you just need to get bored with it and thank any existing god that it didn't happen in your backyard.

What do you call it again? Yeah.

Shit happens.

End of School Year Blues

I am just blinks away from the end of the school year.

And I am fucking loving it.

 

So I renewed my contract and all, but it doesn't mean that I like the school. No, I just did that so I wouldn't have difficulties looking for another school. I don't want them asking me why I left the school for only a year, because I don't want to tell them that I freaking hate the TOO much paperwork. I need to save my neck, you see. At least if I stayed for two years, then there is the possibility that they'll think the school where I came from sucks. So, on with my 2-year stay.

I have been making my incoming absence in the lives of my students felt. Today is my last day of classes with them and most of them, well, feel relieved or sad that they wouldn't see me again given that they would have a different teacher next year.

It has been a stressful year for me. I could only count on my fingers the moments when I felt that I am happy with what I am doing. Being the natural worrier that I am doesn't help me at all either. There were days when I felt that I am not human anymore, that I am just waking up and teaching these students just for compliance and for covering the necessary unnecessary information that they need to know to be unloaded on their test papers.

Today, however, I felt that I am going to miss my students.

 

But I do not want to be stuck with them for another year, so...

Go on bastards.

Not looking forward to another school year either.

Approaching Requiem

Only a few weeks and this school year is, finally, going to end. The students are already feeling restless, for they know that vacation draws near. As for me, I feel this wanting to end all of this work and to finish all the requirements and be done with it.

One of the things that we need to do as teachers in that school is to administer oral and written test to determine who among our students would be given an award.

 

I have students from my classes who qualified. And they did well on the written tests.

However, based on the results of the oral tests which were administered by my colleagues from another level, my students sucked majorly.

And it hurts me, actually.

I was thinking, "What did I do?" "What did I NOT do?" They are good in grammar and reading comprehension as what the standard test told me, but I observed during classes that they are not really that communicative, they are so inhibited, and try as I might to encourage them to speak, still sometimes, I do a monologue in class.

So, I saw the results, and no one among my students got the bacon.

And I am sad. As much as I love those students, there's this part of me that feels guilty; I have always viewed them as a reflection of myself. If they fail getting that award; then I failed too. Why do I feel this way anyway? It's because my students, though they are achievers, are always viewed as the underdogs. That was why I was training them as much as I can. We received triumphs like when they won second place in a theatrical presentation, not what we have expected and wanted, but at least, we beat the favorites.

But still, that award is the most important thing to my students, and them not getting it just depresses me.

I already submitted the results to my department chair, but the results aren't announced to the students yet. And I dread the day that I would see the frustration on my students' faces.

I was asking them whether or not they think they will get the award, and I think that they know subconsciously that they didn't get that award. But of course, there is still that tiny flicker of expectation that they would emerge victorious in the end.

Until then, I need to prepare myself to comfort these little, fragile souls, for whenever they look at me, I realize that they depend on me.

Slavery Renewal

It has been two weeks since I last posted something. I promised to myself that I am going to make this blog project a habit, that's why I'm here again, my dear rockers.

So, it's already almost the end of this new year's first month, and earlier, we were already given service renewal forms. I am supposed to submit it tomorrow, but until now, I am still leaving it blank.

I want to say no to renewing my contract and resign altogether because I do not want to do the wrong things that I did inside my classroom. As rebellious as I am, I have to admit that I have been a very bad and disrespectful teacher towards my students, and I do not want to repeat the same thing again next year. But at the same time I also want to stay because I want to erase those mistakes in the coming academic year.

I am feeling stressed while typing this, I already want to sleep now, but because I need to have some time for myself to reflect, I need to stay awake. I also want to stay because I am lazy enough to find my next job. I want to spend my vacation, refuel myself and recover from the emotional wear and tear that I have endured for a whole fucking year.

Again, practicality comes in, if I do resign with only 1 year experience, then it would be difficult for me to find another school to hire me, since they might think that I resigned from my previous teaching post because I had brushed with the powers-that-may-be in the said previous school. Fuck. I just want to say that I don't give a fuck whether I have a job or not. Hell, I can live on my own without even working, not with my apartment that I am renting out.

Teaching has been a very emotionally draining job for me, and now, I am just basically torn between practicality and preserving myself.

Fuck. I so want to rest.

Teen Sexuality or Catholic Propaganda?

Please.

Do not force me to listen to a teen sexuality seminar with a Catholic conservative as the speaker.
But well, when you are supposed to be with your students, there isn't really much thing for you to do but to fucking bear with all the shit the person has been saying.

I wasn't really able to listen to the seminar from start to finish, more like I was only able to see its middle. But anyway, the part where I am already with my students made me use my brains again. I have been taking notes while the speaker has been babbling about safe and so-called "saved" sex, homosexuality, contraception, RH bill, and abortion. And I have to admit that if I am going to give my students an alternative point on the views presented not only by the speaker but also by their school, then I really have to do my homework. And that includes being discreet about it.

As much as I want to, I didn't finish watching the seminar, as my period with the class that I am accompanying already ended. But I was able to scrape very yummy topics that I planned to discuss with them the next day.

Here it is:

"What is morality?"
"What should be our standards of morality?"
"Who/What should tell us what is moral?"
"Is there even such a thing as morality?"
"Is it fair to call gays sinners?"
"Why is the youth turning on to media for information about sex?"
"When does life begin?"
"What really is sanctity of life?"

I asked these 14-year olds whether there was any of their teachers who tried to process the things that they learned in the seminar. A resounding no. I also asked them if they took down notes or questions. Again, a resounding no. Well, the latter didn't surprise me at all, because they were just in that seminar so there would be no classes, and besides, it's not like the priests are dating them for their brains anyway, so I started with my discussion.

First question: Is it fair to call gays sinners?

Well, most of them said, that it is not fair to call gays sinners (and I really thank them for thinking so, at least they can sense that sometimes, their religion is bullshitting them about gays). What made these church people think that these gays are sinners? One brave boy told the class that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with being a gay, the issue of the church with gay people is that man and woman were created for the opposite sex. I told them that gays eat, sleep, drink, walk, buy medicine from a drugstore and so as with straight people. So what's wrong with being gay?

Second: What should be our standards of morality?
This has been a gray area for them, they can't say anything because they are young, and I can't say anything too provocative either. So I let them decide. Thankfully, there was another brave boy who contributed to the discussion that there shouldn't be any standards because what is immoral to one might be just fine for another. A dangerous relativist in the making, I thought. But I told them that morality shouldn't be based on scriptures or doctrinal moral prescriptions and that they should adhere to the universal virtues.

So far, I was succeeding in taking my real perspective undercover while feeding these students the other side of the coin.

Third: Why is the youth turning to media for information about sex?

If my memory doesn't fail me, nobody was able to answer this. But I asked them again if their parents talk about them about sex. Again, a no, but one student was cocky enough to say sometimes. Anyway, whenever I meet parents and ask them if they talk to their children about sex, well, they always answer me with a smile and a shake of the head which is natural, given that sex is a taboo topic, and here in this place, teen sexuality is a kitsch. And asking these students if their school gives them enough information about sex is out of the question, they are in a Catholic school, so by default, nothing about sex.

So I asked them, "No info about sex at home and nothing in school. Where would you go?" Media came as the answer. And I added, "Of course, also from your friends, whose knowledge of sex may be faulty enough to get you into trouble."

This is where I inserted the debate about the RH bill. I told them that we cannot blame the State for doing its job, it is only providing basic services. And that basic service is health. Specifically, the State is targeting health of the mother who spends more energy in producing offsprings. The State knows that the youth and the general public do not have the information that will help them about sex, there is nothing in their homes, there is nothing in the schools, and that is where State enters the picture.

Of course, I also have to criticize the Church, so I added, "If these religious people are so against sex education in schools, why not FORCE the parents to talk to their children about sex in the first place? That would lessen their stress." I told them to require their parents to talk to them about sex, its only a matter of choice between their parents and the erroneous depiction of sex in the media. Choose. If they wouldn't be able to get it from their parents; they wouldn't get it anywhere.

Fourth: When does life begin?

These students are very factual, so they told me that for the Pro-RH bill people, life begins at implantation while for the Anti-RH people, life begins in fertilization. I told them that I believe neither and that the two sides are actually pieces of bullshit. If these people are saying that we can pinpoint when life begins, then there is something wrong with our bodies. Imagine this, if life begins in fertilization, then it means that the egg cell and the sperm cell aren't alive! And if they aren't alive, then there is something wrong with our bodies! How come that something that doesn't have a life actually resides in a breathing human body? It's like saying that the DVD player is working fine, except for its laser reader. I argued that we can never pinpoint when life begins. Their lives where passed on to them by their parents which they received from their own parents and so on and so forth. Life, therefore, is a continuous process. It goes on and on and on.

Fifth: What is sanctity of life?
For them, this concept means that we should respect human life and we shouldn't go killing an unborn child.
Okay. So I argued that this concept is subjective and in using this concept, I could argue that all of us there in that classroom are murderers.

They agreed that their sperm and egg cells have lives.

So, by extension, the girls, by virtue of menstruation, flush down the toilet a single life every month. And the boys kill 299,999,999 lives in a single moment of ejaculation.

And if we are going to be really consistent with this concept of "sanctity of life", why doesn't it apply to cockroaches? We spray Baygon on them. Why doesn't it apply to rats? We feed them Racumin. Why don't we feel guilt whenever we kill these creatures and to think that, to use their language, they are also "God's creation"?

Therefore, I concluded that we are all murderers in that classroom.

I checked if they were comfortable with what I have been discussing, and they said yes. Though there was one who felt uncomfortable... Well, I took it as a compliment, for I knew that deep inside him, he knew that I was right and he was disturbed by that fact.

But then I asked who among them are in favor of the RH bill. No hands. Anti? Well, majority raised their hands. And I realized that, yes, I was able to make them see the other side of the coin and that they were pleased that I discussed it with them, but my one-hour discussion with them is not enough to break the beliefs that were indoctrinated to them by their school for the past 10-12 years.