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”

Swapping teachers

CAN a college lecturer switch to high school?

That’s a possibility facing hundreds of college teachers when senior high school begins in 2016. The implementation of the K to 12 enhanced basic education curriculum will keep junior high school students from graduating and entering college.

From 2016 to 2017, the first batch of senior high school students will still be in grades 11 and 12. Given the expected drop in college enrolment starting 2016, teachers in higher education institutions and technical-vocational institutions are prioritized by law for hiring in secondary schools.

Under Republic Act (RA) 7836 implemented in 1994, those qualified to teach in elementary and high school are only education graduates who passed the Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET).

The creation of the additional two years of senior high school imposes a higher demand for LET passers. To enable high schools to have their needed teachers, there is a relaxation of the RA 7836 rule. Non-LET passers are required to pass the LET within five years after their hiring so they can continue to teach full-time.

These are the transitions envisioned for 2016, reported the Philippine Daily Inquirer last Feb. 3, 2013.

Seen in this light, the shifting around of teachers seems as elementary as changing classrooms. Upon reexamination, though, things don’t seem to be as simple.

To be qualified for the primary grades, a generalist education degree is needed. To teach high school, the degree must be specific to the subject one is teaching.

In addition, there are two different approaches to teaching. Pedagogy is child-centered while andragogy is focused on the adult learner.

Given the complexity of molding young minds, pedagogy is also focused on teaching the teachers. It lays down the techniques for mentoring even as it structures the content comprising the foundation of learning.

Many of those who instruct college undergraduates are not even required to have a formal background in andragogy. The basic requirement to teach in college is an academic and professional background, preferably specialization, in the area one is teaching.

What will happen when a college instructor handles high school students? Can a teacher used to working with adults be effective in connecting with and motivating children, preteens and teens, the last categorized as young adults in theory but infinitely more complex in reality?

One who has been preparing undergraduates to join the job market brings some advantages in senior high school. Under the K to 12 system, senior high school students are supposed to have the skill sets that will get them hired if they don’t choose to proceed to college after graduation.

When I was studying and then teaching in college, a common complaint was the number of General Education subjects required before an undergraduate could proceed to the majors that taught specific theories and skills needed to get a job.

For many students and the families that depend on them, a college degree is one’s insurance to security. The Arts, Sciences and Humanities viewed by educators as essential for providing a well-rounded send-off to a life of learning that should continue after graduation are viewed as a burden and added expense by those who see education only as a prerequisite for work.

Can a college instructor bridge the expectations of humanizing and retooling middle school students? They should.

This requires changing the teaching mindset, a maneuver more intricate than switching classrooms. Teaching high school, a college instructor needs to acquire pedagogical and andragogical tools. In the junior high school years, pedagogy may still be relevant since the students are young enough to be guided by their teacher.

However, teacher-directed instruction will have less relevance in senior high school. The students will start flexing their independence and along with it, the desire to direct what they learn and the way to handle their problems and challenges.

If a teacher commits to accompanying the intellectual and personal journey of his or her students, he or she must see teaching as being more than a job between jobs. Many college instructors are part-timers. Some await the results of licensure exams or a better job offer. Others fit in teaching as a second or third means to pay bills.

For the K to 12 scheme to work, schools need to recruit more than LET passers or instructors for retooling. People with a vocation are prerequisites for 2016.


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



*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 22, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column