Lift

 

LOVE came disguised as fear. Professor Madrileña dela Cerna had a formidable reputation even among the terror teachers undergraduates love to parody when they are unable to separate love from the farrago of fear and awe.

Later, when I taught in the same campus, I respected from a remove a senior member of the faculty, research director, and advocate of causes from women empowerment to history and heritage.

In 2007, I crossed the threshold when Ms. Madz became my editor in the Cebu Provincial History Project.  

The husband and I conducted field interviews and archival research for the histories of Badian and Alegria. We worked on the field with our two sons in tow and, once or twice, with Ms. Madz, not quite yet a tita but no longer the paragon of academia whose presence always snapped me out of my slouch, real and imagined.

After work took the husband off the research, I continued with the writing of both histories and lapsed, time and again, in meeting deadlines. I dreaded the confessionals with Ms. Madz.  Bending slightly over the short maternal figure and leaning to hear her soft-voiced inquiries, I felt the weight of my transgressions. 

Being Ms. Madz, she jacked me out of that sinkhole. If ever there was a person destined to be a mentor, she was. She shepherded our team to cross the finish line years after the deadline with ferociousness and empathy. 

Ferocious because she recognized no obstacle in seeking the truant among us. She persisted and succeeded in getting a contemplative order to grant her a phone call so she could ask a fellow writer, who was in strict seclusion in monastic silence, about a manuscript in progress.

Empathetic because she made us listen to another writer digress into the manifold ways the families in one town cooked “humba (braised pork belly)”. Ms. Madz praised the writer after this soliloquy, which made me savor history for the first time as pork lard simmered slowly melts on the tongue and suffuses the soul.

“Humana gyud (finish it),” she said in her soft as steel Madrileña tone after she listened to my personal Calvary. And we did, those town histories. As I did years later, my master’s thesis. 

When I talked to her about the dissertation I am pursuing on Cebu journalism, Ms. Madz was already my mother’s “classmate” in a renal unit, undergoing regular hemodialysis. 

The familiar figure was much diminished by the machines softly whirring, flushing and cleaning blood. Somehow she always turned our talks to focus on what I had to finish. Last July 27, my shepherd, and for countless other students and mentees, went home. 

“Nahuman na (it is finished)”. Puhon, Ms. Madz, in our next confessional.

Source of the image of Prof. Madrileña de la Cerna: cebudailynews.inquirer.net

* First published in the August 1, 2021 issue of SunStar Cebu's Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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

“Angkla”

“Wa jud ko magtuo…”

I don’t know whose disbelief was greater, mine or hers. Last weekend, I received a text message from a former student, Eunice Borlasa.

One of the perks of teaching is remaining friends with one’s students long after they’ve left the campus. But I was unprepared for Eunice’s update: she was now teaching at a public high school in Camotes Island.

In the nearly 30 years I’ve been lecturing and then teaching at the University of the Philippines Cebu, I’ve seen the shift in choices that swept away our graduates to trendy and well-paying careers in communication.

Quite a number enter the program, passionate to become a journalist. Television still remains undimmed in beckoning the young.

Yet, the stress, risks, and perceived lack of security of deadline-beaters is not as alluring when undergraduates reach their senior year and corporations and call centers pay court. Freelancing in new media and creative work is on the upswing.

Teaching? It isn’t unpopular but it’s also not hot. Being an English tutor to foreigners plumps up many undergraduates’ ascetic allowances. However, in the panorama of choices opened by a college degree, teaching is perhaps a speck, a micro-dot.

Even Eunice, with parents and an older sister who are public school teachers, segued after college to GMA Cebu and then Sugbo TV. She considered taking Education units at the Cebu Normal University as “lingaw-lingaw (pastime),” and passing the Licensure Exam for Teachers as “suway-suway (trial)”.

Yet, why not Education? As Mass Com undergraduates, Eunice and partner Donna Loayon introduced blogging to the campus-based Niños Foundation in 2009. The tandem could have just treated the project to help a group come up with a blog as another class requirement.

Eunice and Donna believed in the group’s advocacy to help street children and saw the potentials of new media in converting others to this cause. Midway in the semester, the Niños were blogging on their own. Their blog is still updated up to now.

Stubbornness sheathed by a mild, non-confrontational demeanor. That was Eunice then.

That’s still Eunice. Her Facebook journal portrays the idyllic life in Poro, part of the Camotes Islands, once known as the “Lost Horizon of the South”.

Among her photos and posts of rusting anchors, drowsing kittens and bonding moments are glimpses of the life of a young person whose meandering has led her to share classrooms with more than 100 grade 7 and third year students of her alma mater, Luciano B. Rama Sr. Memorial National High School.

On Jan. 28, 2013, Eunice posted a close-up photo of three sets of ruled paper covered with her round-shaped handwriting: lesson plans approved by a supervisor. Eunice observed that all the rewriting that went into the “3 LPs” could produce a book.

The pace inside classrooms may differ from that of newsrooms. Yet, the discipline of learning and imparting information energizes both. Immediately after she was hired in July, Eunice relied on her college notes to train students competing in the Department of Education-organized press conference.

Her college degree prepared her to handle English 7 but not her other specialization, Chemistry. In June, she posted that she was seriously studying again Chem (“magtoun nako'g tinud-anay).

It is not enough for her to understand a subject. She wants to simplify a subject so that everyone in class understands before she moves on to the next topic.

“Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen every day,” she quoted H. Jackson Brown, Jr. in a June 27 post.

Love for natural science is not high on the virtues of Mass Com majors. But studying AND preparing LPs on Chem reminds Eunice that, “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”

Another perk of teaching is having teacher and student swap places. It’s a privilege to take life lessons from Eunice, who, for her Facebook cover photo, posted the image of an anchor (“angkla”) buried in the sands of Camotes Island.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 22, 2013 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday editorial page column

Teacher's pet

I WILL never forget my kinder teacher, Ms. Espina. She had a soft voice, calm hands. She was the kindest woman. In my five-year-old mind, she was the best thing about school.

For a while, I thought that our class was named after her: “kinder” for the woman my classmates and I were all drawn to, like ants homing in on molasses.

When I was promoted to prep, I was heartbroken to learn Ms. Espina stayed in my old classroom and I had to enter a new one. This was ruled by a teacher shorter and smaller than Ms. Espina.

Boy, was she fierce.

When a pupil bawled and ran after her mother on the first day, and my other classmates hiccupped and started to cry and also moved towards the door, our new teacher herded all the runaways back to the room. She locked the door. And leaned against it. And looked back at us.

My heart almost stopped beating as I wondered if I would ever see again my mother and father and Ms. Espina across the hall. When our class was dismissed shortly after recess, I walked past my old classroom. Ms. Espina was at her desk but I didn’t go in.

At six, I felt old, wise and doomed. Not only can I never be with this gentle soul again, I could not imagine the other teachers lying in wait out there until I finally would be old enough to never enter a classroom again. E-ver.

Well, I recently turned 47 and I’m still wondering about those teachers. Last June, I entered graduate school.

Two of my former students became my classmates. Instead of passing notes in class, we update each other through email, Facebook, e-groups, text. When our professors posted our class standing, the use of student I.D. numbers to mask identity didn’t apply to me. I have the only I.D. number that begins with “1983-…” while the rest of the class have “2000-…”.

I’m even older than my professors. One teacher and I are the only ones in our class that saw President Ferdinand Marcos alive. Later, I learned that my professor was still in high school while I was a senior undergraduate during the dying days of the dictatorship. While he was still into Archie, I was reading “Das Kapital” in comic book format. Cool.

Yet, sitting inside a classroom as a student, not as a teacher, I realize how I’m not drastically different from the six-year-old who realized that the only secret to getting unstuck from that seat and walking out to take deep gulps of blissful freedom is to please the one who can lock and unlock those doors.

That’s essentially how I got to be such a teacher-pleaser. I like school. I like assignments. I like commuting early to be in campus eight hours before my class starts. I like libraries where no one is selling coffee, blowing smoke my way or hoarding the newspapers. I don’t much like exams but I like tussling with a problem, pinning it down and walking away, feeling like the Terminator. Yeah.

Most of all, I like being a student and trusting my teacher to take me to a place I’ve never been before. No one will ever take the place of Ms. Espina in my heart, but it was actually fierce, tiny Ms. Prep who, true to her name, stood me at the edge of the precipice, challenging me with her eyes to jump.

Backwards to safety or forward to vastness and possibility.

On World Teachers’ Day, I write this letter to reassure Ms. Espina she will always be my first love but my gratitude goes to her and Ms. Prep and all my teachers who make magic.

Jump.

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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 7, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Teacher's pet

I WILL never forget my kinder teacher, Ms. Espina. She had a soft voice, calm hands. She was the kindest woman. In my five-year-old mind, she was the best thing about school.

For a while, I thought that our class was named after her: “kinder” for the woman my classmates and I were all drawn to, like ants homing in on molasses.

When I was promoted to prep, I was heartbroken to learn Ms. Espina stayed in my old classroom and I had to enter a new one. This was ruled by a teacher shorter and smaller than Ms. Espina.

Boy, was she fierce.

When a pupil bawled and ran after her mother on the first day, and my other classmates hiccupped and started to cry and also moved towards the door, our new teacher herded all the runaways back to the room. She locked the door. And leaned against it. And looked back at us.

My heart almost stopped beating as I wondered if I would ever see again my mother and father and Ms. Espina across the hall. When our class was dismissed shortly after recess, I walked past my old classroom. Ms. Espina was at her desk but I didn’t go in.

At six, I felt old, wise and doomed. Not only can I never be with this gentle soul again, I could not imagine the other teachers lying in wait out there until I finally would be old enough to never enter a classroom again. E-ver.

Well, I recently turned 47 and I’m still wondering about those teachers. Last June, I entered graduate school.

Two of my former students became my classmates. Instead of passing notes in class, we update each other through email, Facebook, e-groups, text. When our professors posted our class standing, the use of student I.D. numbers to mask identity didn’t apply to me. I have the only I.D. number that begins with “1983-…” while the rest of the class have “2000-…”.

I’m even older than my professors. One teacher and I are the only ones in our class that saw President Ferdinand Marcos alive. Later, I learned that my professor was still in high school while I was a senior undergraduate during the dying days of the dictatorship. While he was still into Archie, I was reading “Das Kapital” in comic book format. Cool.

Yet, sitting inside a classroom as a student, not as a teacher, I realize how I’m not drastically different from the six-year-old who realized that the only secret to getting unstuck from that seat and walking out to take deep gulps of blissful freedom is to please the one who can lock and unlock those doors.

That’s essentially how I got to be such a teacher-pleaser. I like school. I like assignments. I like commuting early to be in campus eight hours before my class starts. I like libraries where no one is selling coffee, blowing smoke my way or hoarding the newspapers. I don’t much like exams but I like tussling with a problem, pinning it down and walking away, feeling like the Terminator. Yeah.

Most of all, I like being a student and trusting my teacher to take me to a place I’ve never been before. No one will ever take the place of Ms. Espina in my heart, but it was actually fierce, tiny Ms. Prep who, true to her name, stood me at the edge of the precipice, challenging me with her eyes to jump.

Backwards to safety or forward to vastness and possibility.

On World Teachers’ Day, I write this letter to reassure Ms. Espina she will always be my first love but my gratitude goes to her and Ms. Prep and all my teachers who make magic.

Jump.

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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 7, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

The reader

I DIDN’T expect BJ to be back in the faculty room. (All students’ real names are withheld.)

She didn’t just look different; she was older, changed. She had gained weight, perhaps post-partum. She left her baby with her mother in her hometown.

She was back to finish her studies, she said.

When I first knew her as an undergraduate, that would have been a statement I never expected BJ to make.

BJ was a free spirit. Handling a 7:30 a.m. class and teaching a writing course that required submission of articles by 8 a.m., I was bound to clash with BJ. Though she lived in the campus dorm, she almost always stumbled in late—more often with a pretext, not a paper.

It didn’t help that I gave back her drafts “dripping in red (-inked corrections and comments) “. If someone asked us, BJ and I might even have to argue about who stressed whom more.

Then one day, she gave this paper. I read it. I didn’t read to review and comment. I read the paper because I wanted to. Despite the fact that the essay was different from all her earlier articles, I believe she wrote it. It had BJ’s voice, her spunk, the BJness I glimpsed sometimes in the bored, aborted attempts of past submissions.

I asked BJ about her essay. I asked her where she had been hiding all this time.

Sheepish, she said she had been loitering in the dorm one time. She had nowhere to go, no one to spend time with. The teacher managing the dorm saw her on the verge of driving herself crazy. He went back to his room and came out with a book. He told her to read it. She did. She wrote that essay.

I believe things happen for a reason. If he hadn’t noticed her that time, if she hadn’t opened the book, if she hadn’t written that essay—I might not have seen BJ back in the faculty room, seeking clearance to resume studies, picking up where she left off.

Yeah, I believe books are magic. Where well-meaning criticism shrivels interest before it has a chance to surge into full passion, reading a good story can inspire one to not just pick up another book but also write stories and own them.

What can stories do? To paraphrase a Fine Arts student’s motto: “Imagine the impossible”.

Books, though, are inanimate. They need to be passed from one reader to another convert.

The man who put a book in BJ’s hands passed away last Sunday. Professor Mike Mende was a figure hard to miss in our campus. His silence could cut quicker and deeper than another person’s harangue. He put his faith in actions, a quirk in someone who loved throughout his life words, ideas and the abstractions that make some of us jittery.

Eloquence and politics, though, pass. What lingers is the sense of a person who lives on in others.

When he was an undergraduate, you could talk to Mike for hours while standing in a hallway, both of you on your way to somewhere but somehow waylaid by films, photography, pining for a used book he returned to a store pile and never found again.

When he was a teacher, Mike always made time, in between family, teaching, research and advocacies, for students. He didn’t make the mistake of giving up on anyone.

Though he was much younger than me, Mike subscribed to a tradition that opens two choices for those who teach: every young person passing through school you either hold back or give something to take for the journey.

I remember Jane and Jay enrolling in Mike’s class. A system glitch let them through despite the lack of prerequisites. By the book, the two seniors should have been dropped from class, postponing graduation.

No academic heavyweights, Jane and Jay yet pleaded to do extra work. I pleaded how overstaying in college could do these kids more harm than good. Mike’s prerogative: he assigned them extra readings and tested them separately from the rest of the class.

When I say that Mike is a figure hard not to miss in campus, I meant that I see in him each and every student he met and made time for. Salamat kaayo for making a difference, Mike. Padayon!


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 24, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Copy and perish

“HELL Week” is inaccurate but apt for this time: the last remaining weeks of the semester when some students wake up and find out there is a final grade due and it’s not a white rabbit they can pull out of a trick hat but a computation based on their outputs and performance, or lack of it.

Is it my imagination or am I seeing more uniforms in libraries and churches?

Not all, though, rely on their own labor or divine intervention.

Others fall back on a dependable alternative: “borrowing” someone else’s work to pass off as one’s own.

Hours silently passed with fellow teachers, poring over manuscripts, made me realize that Hell Week, in the Bright New Age of Copy and Paste, increasingly means tawdry assignations with an infernal triangle: student, teacher and Plagiarism.

Aside from being uncomfortable with threesome arrangements, I dislike the effort wasted by a naïve or ignorant second party on a third party, known and visible to only the first party.

That is because I line-edit manuscripts to offer suggestions for rewriting. In a memorable interlude, I ended up asking myself how could it help Diana Athill to know that I thought she botched her transitions? Or writer X, who did not believe the low grade I gave her essay on spirituality, ghostwritten unknowingly by Athill, an editor who reviewed for half a century the works of Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul?

At that time, of course, X did not argue. She could hardly blurt out that I only thought I had been reading her but was actually reviewing Athill, or Athill chopped up and stitched together with a horrific disregard for clarity and cohesion that calls to mind Hollywood and Dr. Frankenstein’s attempt to bring to life the Creature.

Years later, after I acquired a secondhand copy of the Spring 2006 issue of the Granta magazine and read Athill’s essay, “God and me,” I remembered the disbelief of X and had to belatedly agree with her. Had I known that she robbed Athill, I would not have failed her composition. I would have asked her to repeat the course.

Academic honesty and scholarly discipline should not be fully entrusted to chance. For years, teachers required several drafts to ease students into the process of prewriting, writing and rewriting. This method allows both writer and teacher to discover, familiarize and immerse oneself with the writer’s voice: the signature that reveals how a person uniquely thinks and expresses.

Now, detecting plagiarism has been updated by Copyscape and other software that can trace plagiarized text, even those buried deep in the 100th page of documents uploaded on or outside the Net.

According to Professor Rose Arong, who uses Copyscape to verify her suspicions, the program can assess if at least 10 percent of a work is copied, the minimum for establishing plagiarism. Without proper attribution of sources, a student has a hard choice to make: admitting and apologizing for committing plagiarism (reaping failure for that exercise) or denying any wrongdoing (with evidence of plagiarism, repetition of the course is the consequence).

Given the gravity of content theft and its consequences—academic failure, dishonor, a pall cast on future accomplishments—the investigation of plagiarism should be carried out only by a disinterested panel of experts. On no account should doubts or suspicions be posted on Facebook, possibly leading to trial by publicity and cyberbullying.

Failing grades and criticism, though, do not go to the heart of plagiarism: why does one claim someone else’s work? Plagiarism doesn’t render vulnerable only the lazy and deficient but also the most promising and passionate to copy words, images and other forms of expression. One eventually stumbles in the race to excel? The best form of praise is imitation? There is no original thought? Or the Internet ends all taboos?


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Oct. 9, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Lessons from “Alo”

“Nganong nag-apil-apil?”

It’s a short trip via jeepney from the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu in Lahug to a Vhire terminal at the North Reclamation Area. Usually, I enjoy this ride at the end of the day. I’m going home and can let my thoughts drift this way and that.

Last Thursday, though, my fellow passenger gave me the longest 10-minute 04L ride so far.

Barely getting past the phalanx of knees, I was balancing my knapsack and tote full of books and papers on my lap when the man across me fired this question.

I instantly looked at my side companions, thinking I had interrupted a conversation.

The man called Chito corrected this assumption when he addressed me again, prefacing with “Ma’am” the question he didn’t give me time to answer—“Maestra ka sa UP?”—before consuming most of that 04L ride with a rant against “thoughtless” and “naïve” students and their even more misguided and wayward mentors.

Hanging on to my seat and my precious papers, with our knees knocking with every spurt and jerk of the jeepney, I messed up my chance to insert at least two complete sentences in my fellow parent’s nearly unbroken tirade.

Claiming that he will never allow any child or relative of his to enroll in UP “to get brainwashed,” Chito expressed a perception shared by others reacting to the arrest of three UP Cebu students after violence broke out over the fencing of a disputed property in Aloguinsan.

According to Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 30 report by Kevin A. Lagunda and Justin K. Vestil, 36 farmers and their supporters were arrested for pelting the police with stones, human waste and acid. Bayan Muna, Karapatan-Central Visayas and the Farmers’ Development Center (Fardec) countered that violence was initiated by the cops, who hurt the farmers and their supporters.

Chito’s exasperation stemmed from the perception that the students were sent by their teachers to Aloguinsan. He said that aside from disrupting their studies and worrying their families, the students’ arrest will make it difficult for them to find jobs. What have they got themselves into?, he asked in rhetorical Cebuano.

Those arrested were part of a group, including students of another university, that was transported by Fardec to Aloguinsan for their Basic Masses Integration (BMI), “an immersion program that is supposed to help them understand the farmers’ plight,” reported Sun.Star.

None of my fellow teachers sent the students to “Alo” (to use the students’ “nickname” for the site of dispute). I don’t know any teacher who condones lawlessness or excuses the neglect of family and school duties for “social transformation”.

I know, though, that many teachers and students believe in not confining their learning to the four walls of the classroom. This principle, so oft repeated it has become a cliché, embraces not just the virtual worlds opened by technology but the much older, much tested school of experience.

Non-government organizations may call this exposure BMI. Those in the field of Mass Communication call it the “field”. Whatever the jargon, personal involvement (“pag-apil-apil”) through observing, witnessing and even participating in the realities experienced by other Filipinos outside one’s stratum is education, I dare say the only valuable one for being authentic.

Yet, unlike in a classroom where the conditions can be controlled and the disputes are safely within the range of the anemic to the acerbic, life has few screens to sieve the decent, the rational and the civilized from what’s immoral, inhuman and barbarous. Thus, mentoring the young makes one responsible for widening their perspective to look beyond the moment, substantiate passion and rhetoric, and act on decisions after examining options and consequences.

Yes, Chito, it’s called teaching, not brainwashing.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 4, 2011 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Life is peanuts

BEFORE any whiff of New Society doublethink invaded our classrooms in the 1970s, we just gardened and sewed. The subject then was not known as Home Economics. We were not yet drilled to man our stoves and sewing machines so that, as dutiful wives and mothers, we could be the stalwart partners our men could lean on in war or in peace.

But if you spent your elementary years at St. Theresa’s College (STC) in Cebu, the subject known prosaically as Practical Arts was a discipline more exacting than science.

If my classmates and I thought we could take a break from serious striving during this non-academic subject, our teacher, Miss Tan, made sure we never repeated the mistake.

Brisk and tireless, Miss Tan was short as Napoleon. As consummate as that commander, she packed authority in every inch of that compact, bird-like frame. I talked to my peanut plants, driven to desperation by Miss Tan’s unannounced inspection of our garden plots. Advised by classmates who survived these lightning tests, I also wheedled my plant’s branches to look green and jolly, the leaves to dance as if they were on fiesta.

Woe to you if Miss Tan found your plants to be a bit jaundiced, a victim of criminal neglect. Or worse, if you forgot it was your turn to water the class plots. Once, I came to school almost late. Trying to beat the first bell, I dumped sprinklers of water on the plots.

Standing in line later, smug and smirking that Miss Tan’s pet peanuts had a drenching, I noticed my white socks were covered in brown spots, with a few clinging bits of soil and humus. As I had no spare, I took off the soiled socks, turned them inside out, and put them back on just as the final bell rang. Better to endure ickiness the entire day than fail Miss Tan.

All good teachers have the magic quality of being absolutely intolerable when you are under their tutelage, and virtually mythic and unforgettable when you remember their legacy. To teach us the variety of stitches, Miss Tan required us to practice on small squares of cloth. I enjoyed sewing, finding it more soothing than being hostaged by temperamental peanuts.

But when I showed off my finished samples to Miss Tan, she flipped the squares to show me the disorderly tangle of knots on the underside. “Rip” was her terse advice, punctuated as usual by the pugnacious jut of that rock-hard jaw.

And rip we did. No one skipped corners by using a fresh square and throwing away the first mistake. Nothing got thrown away in Miss Tan’s class. We used discarded dusters and retazos for our rug projects. We picked and dumped leaves, twigs and even expired worms in a hole at the bottom of the garden. This disgusting stew, I was to learn later as a countryside extension worker, was compost, integral for the scientific, earth-friendly farming of which Miss Tan was an early disciple.

Last Friday, during my alma mater’s 75th year homecoming, I met Miss Tan again. I was curious to explore the newly curated STC Folklife Museum. She was an unexpected grace.

A teacher changes her students in unseen but telling ways. When I stooped a little to take her hand, I saw but did not see those familiar tresses, once swept into severe, neat plots by a plain and unchanging headband; I was assaulted instead by bizarre garden smells that come and go with first dew.

In my mind, I turned a leaf to check for aphids and came upon a mushroom; learned tenacity from watching the labors of a millipede undertaking the circuit of a twig. To this day, I discard words and rewrite paragraphs because, as Miss Tan drummed into me all those years ago, simplicity is its own reward.

Her hand is small but still tough. Held for the first time, her hand reminded me of the white-dusted lemon yellow blossoms put out by our peanut plants before the sun was high in the sky. If I eat peanuts piece by piece, not tossing them by the handful, it is not only because these plants are volatile and high-strung garden divas. If they earned the devotion of Miss Tan, they’ll get no less from me.

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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 27, 2008 issue

Rebuke and reckoning

IT MAY be baseless for me to judge reunions as I have never been to one.

If it is not work compelling me to be somewhere else, it is a predilection to doze off when I am in any gathering outside of work.

But I also suspect that reunions force me to remember absent peers. So despite the conviviality of such festive occasions, I end up missing more the company of the absent over those present.

This thought came, unbidden, as I read an article posted on the University of the Philippines (UP) Centennial website: “UP Visayas (UPV) combines revelry and relevance.”

I’ve experienced the former, just walking under the dripping acacias at six a.m., on my way to my journalism class. There is a palpable sense of anticipation as the community I belong to—first as an undergraduate in the 1980s, then as a full-time instructor in the 90s, and at present, as a part-time lecturer—is the “oldest regional unit of the UP System, having been established in 1918 as a junior college.”

Beginning July 12, UPV Cebu College (UPVCC) marks the first Centennial year with a three-day grand reunion to “pay homage to tradition as well as… glimpse the likely shape of its future.”

Certainly, revelry. But the relevance?

A week ago, I learned that three long-time junior faculty members were “five-up-or-outed.”

This is jargon for the inflexible university policy that a faculty member who has not earned a masteral degree after five years of teaching will have to leave the full-time post or be “reclassified” as a lecturer, without student advising and program planning duties.

Another policy—the equally rigid “publish or perish” rule—also terminates any faculty member that cannot have a research or an equivalent body of works published in a refereed journal. With such policies does the UP System seek to elevate the excellence of its faculty and standing as a learning institution.

These are sentiments fine on paper but rude and crude in reality. There is no long waiting list of hopefuls for teaching posts in the country, most especially to work in a state university where the pay is paltry, to be kind about it, and the promotion process is tedious and excruciating, best to be taken either as a lesson on acquiring preternatural patience or a warm-up for sadomasochism.

Whether a century old or a mere babe, a school beats with two hearts. Students live out the challenge of bringing the ivory tower’s standards to the “marketplace.” To be the best, students have to move on and take their rightful place in industry, with the community, among civil society.

It is different with teachers. Teachers have to stay within the real or virtual walls of the classroom. Despite better pay and more secure lives for their families “outside,” the best teachers sacrifice not a small bit of their selfish lives to carry out the verb at the root of who they are: “teach.”

Substitute: to listen, guide, inspire. Not one of my dozen or so dictionaries contains a synonym for “teaching” that requires a postgraduate title printed on special parchment or an extremely learned but unread treatise.

So come July 12, I may not be walking under the ancient acacias. Perhaps it is again the summons of work, or the unbearable heaviness of my eyelids when I hear again mention of celebrations.

Or perhaps because I can see another 100 years stretching on, without D, M and I. D. who guided Math-challenged seniors through the labyrinth of a new software literally from dawn till dusk, without any reward but the gratitude of the students and their families.

M. whose casual but generous sharing of well-thumbed novels helped many of his dormers survive loneliness, angst, rage and the tyranny of 7:30 a.m. writing deadlines.

Most of all, I. A firebrand student who once upbraided the college dean for the sorry condition of the Mass Communication laboratories, I., as an instructor, worked quietly to produce the essential proposals that got institutions to fund the present electronic newsroom of the college.

Because my university defines teaching excellence as a piece of paper, I share the hope that paper beats better than a human heart, at least for the next century or so.


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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 6, 2007 issue

Slipped desks

ON THE first day of school, I got reminded of an invaluable lesson.

I was leaving the university newsroom when I lost my feet and landed on the corridor. But after I gave the shiny floor the brunt of my accusing glare, I remembered that I already noticed the first-day sheen of the hallway when I arrived. I resolved to walk carefully then but forgot to in my distraction to get some references.

Bum smarting, I consoled myself: some of the most invaluable lessons take place outside the classroom.

The recent kidnapping of the ABS-CBN news team and their guide, which has sent shock waves in the nation and abroad, is particularly worrying in one aspect. What is its impact on the perceptions and attitudes of the present generation of Mass Communication students towards a career in news?

Dubious at best describes the pull of newsrooms’ attraction for college graduates. In the 80s and 90s, the glamour of television and advertising, and later of corporate communication and event organizing, diverted many from a life of pounding the typewriter or, much later, encoding stories for newspapers.

The lopsided competition for young blood has been recently reduced into an oxymoron with the entry of call centers’ pay and perks. Yet, it is not journalism’s undeniable lifetime of penury that makes many students turn cool about chasing the news.

A journalist’s life is risky and not worth it. That is the gist of the views of Mass Communication students of three colleges offering journalism. They either finished their newsroom internship or dabbled as news freelancers or full-time journalists at one time in their careers after graduation, according to undergraduate theses and tracer studies conducted by Mass Communication students and faculty of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas Cebu College.

Out of about 60 Mass Com sophomores and juniors met last week, less than 10 saw a life of newsprint in their future. Lack of confidence in writing, facility with English, or meeting deadlines were reasons some cited to explain their ambivalence about news gathering and writing.

But in a seatwork to select and analyze samples of news stories and interpretive articles, several students tellingly picked out banner stories and commentaries about the ABS-CBN kidnapping and the libel conviction of The Daily Tribune publisher Ninez Cacho-Olivares.

After a Makati Trial Court found Olivares guilty of libel for a 2003 article she wrote about a law firm’s alleged influence over the Philippine judiciary, administration officials pointed out the need for media to examine its sense of responsibility. If I were a neophyte about to learn how to write the news within four months, the hand gripping my pen would be understandably clammy: what separates news professionalism from the “pernicious practices” the government is accusing Olivares et. al.? When can one get away with using “he said, she said,” and when is this kind of sourcing malicious and libelous?

On the ABS-CBN abduction, any first-time news gatherer can break out in a sweat over the “ifs and hows”: was the military right when their officials decried the news team for failing to coordinate with them to pursue a scoop? Was it cutthroat competition or personal lapse of judgment that led to the ABS-CBN team taking up the invitation to an interview with an Abu Sayyaf source, the same offer that other journalists declined, citing suspicions that security arrangements seemed to be amiss?

Teaching taught me to heed students as well as updated references, industry trends and career vogues. To steer them past writing news for academic credit into contributing to public discourse, I must focus on more than the basics of crafting a lead.

More than a slippery hallway after all awaits those who leave the classroom.

mayettetabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 15, 2008 issue

Touché

FEATHER-LIGHT, a touch should be the least intrusive and the most inoffensive of gestures.

Yet in the recent case involving a Mandaue City instructor accused of harassing his students, the authorities may consider that, aside from cleaning classrooms and dusting books, back-to-school preparations for teachers and students should also include a refresher course on naming.

Unlike the seemingly innocuous “touch,” the French “touché” makes a point that all teachers would do well not to ignore.

In Oscar C. Pineda’s report in the June 7, 2008 issue of Sun.Star Cebu, two Mandaue City College (MCC) students filed a case of harassment against their instructor.

In their joint affidavit, the students cited six incidents when the teacher allegedly touched the breasts, embraced and kissed them, and made sexual insinuations against their will.

The teacher has denied these accusations. According to the Sun.Star report, he has presented notes written by students, clearing him of wrongdoing.

One note pointed out that “the issue is all about wrong interpretation of closeness.”

It is odd and disquieting to hear this old excuse is still part of public discourse, given that sexual harassment is more prominent than it used to be.

In the university setting particularly, there are widely circulated guidelines regulating the faculty’s one-on-one consultation with students. For instance, the policy of leaving doors open is supposed to protect both the teacher and the student from the possibility of actual and trumped-up charges of harassment.

Inappropriate conduct includes jokes, remarks or gestures that are offensive to a party. There are grounds for filing a complaint of inappropriate behavior after the accused repeats a behavior or remark after he or she has been explicitly told to stop as he or she is causing distress.

According to The Cavalier Daily, the defense of “innocent flirting” is a bit of grey area sometimes cited as a defense.

But sexual harassment guidelines explicitly state that when there is an imbalance of power, all relationships beyond the professional should be avoided. Even a consensual relationship entered by a teacher and a student is risky because, according to statistics, many harassment cases are filed after a romantic relationship grows sour between a student and a teacher.

A teacher is vulnerable to accusations that he or she has taken advantage of his or her ascendancy to either academically reward or punish a student for personal favors or slights.

So the prudent advice is for teachers to take extra precautions to avoid, at the very least, of being misinterpreted. “Avoid any apparent or actual contact,” advises www.cavalierdaily.com.

Adds William Shakespeare, “Their touch affrights me as a serpent's sting."

Touché, teachers.

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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 8, 2008 issue

An interior life

“DON'T forget desert flowers in winter.”

Al-Hasa, deep into the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, is full of oases.

Crossing this region to Qatar years ago, Tonette Pañares came upon for the first time mushrooms buried in the sand dunes.

The accidental meeting with beauty reminded the historian of her teacher in college, Sr. Ma. Delia Coronel, ICM.

Although work and marriage had taken Tonette away from her alma mater, St. Theresa's College (STC), in Cebu City, Sr. Delia kept in touch with her, as she did with many of her students dating back to the '60s.

One day, while in Saudi Arabia, Tonette received a postcard with only one line written in the familiar Quink turquoise ink: “Don't forget desert flowers in winter.”

The line was quintessentially Sr. Delia because, Tonette reveals, she had a natural aptitude for the different.

While most of the nuns teaching Tonette favored her intelligent and accomplished classmates, Sr. Delia favored the talented but the original.

Her Al-Hasa discovery made Tonette realize how this contrary nun regarded her girls as mushrooms in a featureless landscape.

I came upon Sr. Delia while researching for an article on the Folklife Museum of STC.

Except for a sepia photo that showed me receiving my grade 1 diploma from the mini-skirted nun, I had no recollection of Sr. Delia when I began my search among the collection of artifacts she started with her Philippine history students.

Her papers though made me want to go to Manila and visit her at the ICM retirement home.

Elegant and provocative, her body of works embraced magazine articles, short stories and poetry.

The stories of her fellow sisters and long-time colleagues evoked a character, a “maverick.”

But it was an email from a former student that lifted one more veil in a question that I've always found tantalizing: what makes a teacher?

Dr. Amor Hernando emailed me six pages of her recollections, notes and anecdotes to give a “fair perspective” of the “educator-artist-nun.”

It wasn't just Ms. A's use of the hyphenated, triple-noun modifier that made me read and reread her “rambling thoughts.” The person who gifted Sr. Delia with Quink ink deserved, I believe, more than a reading.

“She had a way with her students,” Ms. A emailed. “In the 1960s, she ate out and saw great movies with them. Her favorite orders were pancit (noodles) and siopao at the old White Gold House located in Magallanes St. Later, she opted to eat at Majestic Garden beside the Belvic Theater.”

The “plain, yet very witty and funny” nun also had many students disliking her.

“We were trapped in her kasaba (scoldings) and her kasabaan (being noisy and persistent with her sugo or orders),” Ms. A. writes of her mentor. “(But) we found ourselves willing victims of her 'oppressive' ways.”

The nun who earned her bachelor's degree in literature and journalism (summa cum laude), masters in English (meritissimus) and doctorate in philosophy (benemeritus) at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) was disliked “mainly because 99 percent of us got failing grades during the midterms.”

Born in Luzon but nurturing a deep love for the south till her retirement, Sr. Delia upheld art and all things that reflected the Filipino.

“Despite the criticism, we adored her because… deep inside, she cared for each one of us in a different way.”

Finding it mind-boggling that her teacher stayed in the convent, Ms. A made it a point to observe her praying in the STC chapel.

“When I saw her on her knees, praying like she never prayed before, this set me to thinking: holiness is found in the interior life.”

Or as the turquoise ink would have traced it: “Don't forget desert flowers in winter.”

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu's Feb. 11, 2007 issue