Speak To Us of Teaching

As a high school freshman in Ateneo de Naga back in 1988, I would relish looking at my test papers whenever examination papers were returned. 

Today is a different story. In my classes, my students would usually dread examinations, frown at their tests, scowl at the thought of their projects, and even cringe at the thought of a new lesson. The dissimilarity between the two eras is disconcerting. But teaching students these days brings in insights that reflect the tendencies and inclinations of the youth today and their possible future. 

Maybe what they say is true—it’s teacher factor, teacher factor. It’s how the teacher approaches the students with the subject matter. As far as teachers are concerned, they have been trying varied methodologies to approach the situation more eclectically to cater to the diversity of today’s students. 

The students today are not really as diverse as we think they are—they even come from the same lot—kids with very short attention spans who belong to the “remote-control or YouTube generation. They simply want the same thing—they would want to relax during class hours, relish doing nothing in the class during literature classes—etc. Simply because the media must have taught them that everything is attainable at the click of the remote control. 

Someone put it more aptly when he claimed that we cannot always point the finger at the school if there’s something wrong with the students—rather we must check society or the real world and all it has—because what’s wrong in our society makes everything wrong in education. The media and other social external influences have since defined the individual learner.

Because students come to classrooms from their own families, orientations and influences, the manner in which they behave in their classrooms point to the way they are bred and reared in their families. The levels of the education then and now are far from each other. Today’s schools may just be way far different from what schools were before.

True enough. Schools are the second homes—yet it is not the entire breeding ground of character. If homes are more powerful influences to the youth, what does the school have as its ace? The school just takes on where the family [or the sense of it] leaves. 

Nowadays when we hear elderly people whine and tell us, “Times have really changed. It was not like this in our time, blah… blah… [or something to that effect]” maybe they’re just making sense.

When you are a teacher, most probably, you are a more blessed worker. Despite the meager salary, now and then whined upon in bureaucratic circles and other work entities, your efforts as a teacher are usually paid off [or extremely otherwise shortchanged] the same day you put them forth. In the classroom, you are disposed to see how students display varied reactions about a certain topic. Their sparkling eyes will glow whenever they get a point clarified and learned. One of the joys of teaching is in being able to find for yourself how a student learns on his own and not through your own means.

Moreover, Aristotle said because we are what we repeatedly do—thus excellence is an act of habit. It is the habits that the teacher seeks to impart that matters most to the learner. It is in the way the teacher conducts himself or herself in front of the learning environment that will stick to the mind of the student who, impressionable as he is, will simply copy what he finds desirable or beneficial from his teacher.

Teaching traditions and lifestyles have already changed. Some teachers can get away with being Miss Tapia to their students. Others are becoming more open to democratic and eclectic ways of making the pupils and students learn. They attend seminars and numerous group dynamics to learn much about the styles that suit today’s learners—from their talents to their eccentricities. Therefore, a teacher is a continually challenged worker. He determines his own growth because he is at his own pacing as a learner.

Sadly, however, despite the monstrously large statistics of new teachers each year, the teaching profession may be an obsolete career—with the unceasing demand and supply for call center agents and domestic helpers. The latter jobs prove to be more lucrative and financially helpful. In fact, some teachers abandon teaching to be domestic helpers abroad just to support their families sensibly while they shell in foreign currencies for the government. 

One thing is clear, though. Teaching may not at all be far behind because in each child born to the world, someone out there will just have to make him see about life’s stark realities.

First published. 2006