Love letters

“MARKING papers” is an inevitability if one embraces teaching as a calling. The expression may confuse some but is actually more accurate than the Filipinism we favor: “checking papers”.

In reply to an expat colleague, who commented on the uncommon number of teachers bent over their desks in the faculty room, I explained that we were “checking papers”.

When she came back to the room to refill her mug of tea, she said that the expression was quite new to her. Indeed, reviewing papers means more often pointing out slips and gaps in the work than making neat little check marks.

Generations of students have this one abiding memory of being in my class: a trail of “bloody” papers inevitably demanding to be rewritten and resubmitted for more “marking”.

The journalist who taught me how to write news in college narrated how her teacher favored a green pen for checking copy.

The tradition was to use a blue pencil since typewriter ribbons came then in only two colors: black and red. “Blue penciling” meant scribbled “love notes” an editor left on copy that should not be ignored by a “green” reporter who wanted to spend a lifetime with ink-stained fingers.

Personally, I like red pens. Nothing like the impact of red against white paper to stand as visual semaphores: Replace that verb! Are you stringing along adjectives? What’s wrong with a period? Check, spell, get it right.

The advent of computers was supposed to lessen the writer’s post-editing traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Tidy, neatly-aligned-to-the-right balloons contained the editor’s comments, insertions and deletions instead of the slashes and unreadable, unprintable comments of the blue-pencil era.

I don’t mark copy in this virtual, bloodless manner. I tell my students it’s a compliment to have this kind of close, obsessive, ferocious reading of their works. Pay attention to your reader. Listen to what she thinks. If the copy is returned to you without marks, it may be already perfect. Or it was never read at all.

This midyear, seven students chose to apprentice with print newsrooms. That’s about 10 percent of a batch whose predominant choices leaned towards corporate or development communications.

This “Magnificent 7” intrigued me. Millennials have a different way of reading and, presumably, of writing. Of all the kinds of writing, news writing for the print medium is the least expressive, the most self-effacing, the most enveloped by conventions and standards.

At least two student moaned that they would never get a story published.

That was at the start of the course. The stories told by their writer’s journal tells another thing. At the completion of 200 hours, an intern submits a compilation of their published works. I require they pass the entire printed or online page so I can see how the editor treated their article and grade them accordingly.

More telling than the editorial treatment is the student’s filing of their body of works. Some articles were filed in the folios as if the writer was in a bloody hurry, impatient with an assignment once passed, already focused on the next one and the next deadline.

Other interns file their articles, even those of a few column inches, in a scrapbook to be scanned some day with a grandchild on one’s lap, hanging on intently to the retelling of the backstory behind each article. Once upon a red pen…


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 17, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Green lessons

UNFORGETTABLE were the fingers of a Japanese tomato farmer. I saw a television feature about this fellow who raised a difficult variety of tomatoes, which were well worth the trouble. His customers lined up to buy his tomatoes, a peerless blend of sweet and sour.

The farmer picked his tomatoes by hand, choosing only those that were the right shade of red. As a result, the two fingers he used to pinch off the fruit at the stem were permanently green-hued.

I was awed. How did I measure up against this man in the passion he brought every day to his work? He and his wife even converted their living room to a kind of holding area for his tomatoes.

Standing in a corner of their roadside stall like a Buddha in bandana and farming togs, the farmer listened to customers so he could raise better tomatoes. That’s how he learned to cultivate his second crop.

This is a tomato that’s cheaper but as nutritious. The farmer talked to a woman with a malady, which was aided if she ate tomatoes. Unfortunately, the farmer’s bestselling variety was beyond her means except as an indulgence. So he researched and went to grow the other tomato.

This part of the farmer’s story taught me how diligence is even better than passion when learning something.

Recently, I gave the husband cuttings from our oregano to share with officemates who wanted to raise this at home. The herb is good for relieving cough and flavoring jackfruit soup. We chose the broad-leafed variety over the Italian one preferred for cooking because we needed more the leaves’ pungent smell, which drives away mosquitoes.

Oregano is easy to grow, even by someone whose fingers know a keyboard more intimately than garden soil. Two months after we transplanted tender, pale green clusters at the height of the rainy season, the oregano had deepened to an emerald green and was as tall as a toddler.

And seemingly as willful. Another two months later, the tallest, thickest stalks swayed and fell to the ground. The herb quickly adapted, growing secondary roots along the stems that snaked on the ground.

Crawled it did. One morning, we opened the main door and pushed against oregano tendrils that crept overnight to the carport. The sons joked about the “genetically modified oregano (GMO),” vaguely menacing mutants compared to the prim, orderly buds bordering my grandmother’s garden.

To cut oregano for the husband’s officemates, I gave up the shears and used a knife to “saw” through thick, gnarled and convoluted stems. In the windless afternoon, the fur-like leaves left a rasping sensation, like tiny knives being whetted on my skin.

The thing was a survivor. Magnificent and monstrous, its undergrowth was a serpentine knot of yellowing, even black and rotting limbs that became green and pliant where the sun reached it. It spat on co-existence; not just mosquito but grass passed to nothingness underneath it.

In the end, I relied on what I knew of editing to manage the oregano. Hack off the trivial. Spare no mercy for the redundant. Remove the ornamental that’s disconnected from substance. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

I may not earn yet my green fingers. But the GMO that lives in our garden knows now for sure: editors have the last say.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 3, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”