Roar, Id!

HONESTY is the new best policy.

At the end of term, my fellow teachers and I move, in reverse order, from the hell week of final exams and terminal requirements to the purgatory of determining whether to pass or fail a student.

From conversations, it would seem that the new normal among Millennials is to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, in contrast to past generations’ survival instinct to concoct the most elaborate excuse to explain tardiness.

Teacher: Why are you entering my class an hour late, Isko? And where is your assignment?

Student of old: I joined a multi-sectoral mobilization to protest the onerous priorities of the U.S.-backed, military-propped dictatorship to foist their imperialistic bombast through grossly inaccurate and ungrammatical textbooks. We ended hours of street marching with a book- and effigy-burning spectacle. As a symbolic act, I also threw the books in my knapsack into the bonfire. My assignment for your class was inserted in one of the books that are now, inevitably, part of the cold ashes that is but a precursor of what will happen to all U.S.-backed, military-propped dictatorships. “Ibagsak!”

Student today: I forgot the time while having lunch with friends.

What do the young think when they explain that they cannot possibly wake early enough for a 9 a.m. class? I appreciate direct honesty, specially because I don’t have to wade through Marx and Mao (or Freud, if the student prefers psychoanalysis over polemics).

However, my fellow teachers and I wonder about young people’s chances with future bosses who will hire or fire employees not according to liberal principles of freedom of expression but the values of the marketplace.

On a deeper level, teachers are concerned about the sense of entitlement that lies beneath this indifference to the consequences of saying the first thing that’s on one’s mind.

“I couldn’t get up early” can be interpreted to mean many things, each one only varying in degrees of unpalatability: I prefer sleeping to the class. I’m not going through the effort of making an excuse. Why should I apologize when the class is too early for insomniacs like me?

In standard English: I don’t care. IDC, according to Internet slang.

Words and actions have consequences. That’s probably the earliest restraint the Superego and the Ego put on the Id, to simplify Freud. The primal urges we satisfied heedlessly as babies should be submerged or managed by our more mature selves.

That’s a challenging message to put across to 16-year-olds now. See a pretty lady? Wolf-whistle and leer. Like a woman who’s indifferent to your attentions? Joke about raping her (even if she’s indifferent because she’s dead).

Criminals? Order “shoot-to-kill.” Criminal suspects? Same prescription. Corrupt journalists? Endorse “assassination.”

Chastising Millennials for saying and doing less insensitive things changes in the time of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte.

Parents and educators have challenges lined up when the infantile and the puerile, the dehumanizing and the polarizing emanate from a 71-year-old politician whose foul mouth and antics failed to dent a landslide victory that handed to him the leadership of 100 million Filipinos.

One is so tempted to shrug and walk away: IDC MEH. But what then?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu's June 5, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, "Matamata"

Old tricks

SOME old tricks are worth teaching to new dogs.

I took part in undergraduates’ defense of their research six times last week. Just before the panelists quizzed the researchers about their studies, the students were asked to record the comments and suggestions for incorporating in the final manuscript.

When instructed to record the discussion, the students whipped out their smartphones. However, when asked to also write notes as a back-up documentation, the Millennials scrambled for paper and pen.

This sequence happened six times with 16 different young people. After the last defense, I concluded that a mobile phone is to a Millennial what pen and paper were to my generation.

Not surprisingly, during all sessions, I was the only one writing notes with a pen (at 50, I was the oldest in the classroom).

I didn’t even take out my basic mobile phone because I kept an eye on the time with a kiddie’s wristwatch whose dial design of Mickey Mouse and Pluto keeps me buoyed up, specially during the college finals appropriately named Hell Week.

Our state-funded classrooms are far from hi-tech; the students are. Many students prefer that their teachers post their presentations, assignments, and class updates on social media, preferably Facebook, according to a qualitative study conducted early this year by UP Cebu Mass Communication seniors Julienne Hazel E. Penserga and Stephanie S. Adalin.

While most of the UP Cebu teachers interviewed by the tandem preferred face-to-face engagement and avoided Facebook as too personal for academic use, the students did not perceive the social media portal as intrusive. For these Millennials, academic pursuits should also be online since technology already connects seamlessly the many spheres of their young lives.

There’s much to recommend the real-time speed by which information is transmitted through new media. However, some shortcuts bear watching and correcting.

For instance, young people now rarely make notes. During student-faculty consultations, my fellow teachers and I observed how we have to tell students to write down the points of discussion. Anything that is not visual or viral usually passes like liquid through the colander of Millennial attention.

Whether it’s passively listening and then snapping with one’s smartphone a professor’s whiteboard scribbling or PowerPoint Presentation, many youths rarely sieve, examine and reflect—which writing accomplishes reflexively.

I didn’t think I would but I worry that this generation doesn’t doodle enough or vandalize arm rests, the classic gauge for student inattention. Is it because the chairs are now plastic or they are too caught up with Facebook status updates?

Arni Aclao’s photo of early shoppers checking piles of notebooks and papers was rousing. Last May 25, Sun.Star Cebu’s Jeandie O. Galolo reported that savvy parents are buying downtown, where school supplies are sold cheaper than the suggested retail price.

According to the trade and industry advisory, a writing notebook is priced cheapest at P9; a pencil at P3 per piece; and a ballpen, P4. For less than P50, a student can be equipped with the fundamental tools for active listening, recording, comprehending and learning.

With change from the P50, a young person can still buy one national broadsheet and a local daily. Read and reread: some things never go out of style.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 29, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Campus sex

WHEN I call it a day in the college where I teach, I find that darkness has already fallen. Set off in the pitch-black campus grounds are the gazebos, where light and wifi connection attract study groups.

Where do students go after the library closes and the evening classes are dismissed? I assumed that they would be like me, hungry and looking forward to falling asleep before the evening soap.

Different students on different occasions gave one answer: gazebos offer faster connection than the nearby Internet cafés. And it’s free.

I remembered these interactions when I read a May 21 Sun.Star Cebu report that young women in Central Visayas are “14 times more likely” to “engage in early sex,” compared to their male counterparts, who are only “five times more likely” to be sexually active before the legal age of 18.

Lorraine Mitzi Ambrad, an intern of the University of San Jose-Recoletos, quoted the 2013 Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study (Yafs) 4. This is a national series that presents cross-sectional surveys of Filipinos aged 15 to 24 years.

Ambrad reported that the early “sex debuts” and frequency of sex among young adults alarmed health authorities because many of these encounters are unprotected. Having sex without a condom increases one’s risk of exposure to sexually transmitted infection, specially HIV/Aids.

For Cebu, the Yafs 4 findings raise another alarming trend: students who board are more vulnerable to early sex. An education hub, Cebu attracts enrollees from the central and southern regions of the country.

College teachers know from experience what parents whose children live in a dorm or boarding house fear by instinct: lack of parental supervision, coupled with landlord apathy or laxity and big-city temptations, may overwhelm young persons and distract them from finishing on time.

However, I’m not convinced that the proposal of presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte to impose a curfew and liquor ban will douse sexual hyperactivity among the young.

Republic Act (RA) 1224, passed by Congress in 1955, bans establishments located within a radial distance of 50 meters from schools, churches and hospitals to sell liquor to students and minors.

Section 12 of Cebu City Ordinance 1413, also known as the Liquor Licensing Ordinance, prohibits the issuance of a liquor license to a business located within an urban residential zone or within 100 meters from the perimeter of a school or hospital.

If RA 1224 and City Ordinance 1413 are strange, you are not alone. As a college freshman in the 1980s, I learned not to sit in the back row of the classroom, where the seriously drunk often slipped in or those with a serious hangover hid behind dark glasses. Most of my classes then were in the morning.

Resting the fate of young people on a curfew is as archaic. A 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. ban may prevent youths from roaming the streets; it will hardly clip their social media wings. Many transactions leading to sex are initiated online. Google is not a favorite search engine for nothing.

How can we help young adults? Educate them. Enable them to walk away from being coerced into sex for love or money. Make them mature enough to resist posting their sex trophies on Facebook. Give them tough requirements that keep them researching from dusk till dawn because they know, education is not about “cuarto o cuatro (motel room or conditional grade)”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 22, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”