Dispensable

 

SUMMERS when A. came to live with us were good ones for my sister and I. Younger than I but older than my sister, A. was a perfect fit. 

But as kooky as she was about playing and chattering with us, A. loved Math, too. Studying in an upland public school in the southwest of Cebu, A. welcomed the workbooks we passed on to her at the end of the school year.

While we thought Math matched summer the way “bagoong (fermented fish)” complemented ice cream, A. answered the computation exercises with a gusto that awed. 

Saying the books would be used by her younger siblings and even teachers, A. avoided marking the books’ pages. A. sewed together the unused leaves of our discarded notebooks and made another notebook, where she worked on the computations. 

Paper is a material we take for granted as always being there, disposable because replaceable. Yet, while I was browsing in a bookstore, two women walked in and inquired about planners, only to be informed that none was carried by the store this year. 

In previous years, the display of paper journals began as early as December. Like wall and desk calendars, perhaps diaries are phased out, their commercial value fading with the rise of technology, the replacement of eminently more desirable gadgets, and shifting trends in consumption.

The year 2020 left a host of casualties, with planners one of the hardest hit. With work, studies, worship, malling, and other social activities suspended, what was there to plan, tick off, or reschedule after months and months of a pandemic of drudging sameness?

A few days ago, I watched the digital story of a friend who celebrated her unboxing of a planner. She even crowed about the free pencils received from the online seller. Another friend posted the printed designs adorning a desk calendar. These are former students, now colleagues, whose love for print I am familiar with.

The journals I kept in 2020 are sliced through with a wide track of unsullied paper, not just marking the days and months bled dry by state-mandated community quarantine but also stretches of instances left blank by self-imposed isolation. 

At the rims of these blank troughs are my scribblings. Before knowing mechanical print, paper knew the slopes of a writing tool held by a person following thoughts half-glimpsed in a trail of lines and slopes. 

By practicing penmanship, I found my way through last year. One’s cursive, like paper, seems always to be there until it’s not.

A. showed a long time ago what it took to renew and repurpose. Here’s hoping that, with this year’s journals, my writing hand will remember.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 31, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, 

Paper trail

PAPER’S time is nearly over. When I hold today’s thinner, narrower newspapers, whenever I encounter the academic jargon for newspapers and magazines printed on paper (“legacy media”), when my search for notebooks on Ebay and Marketplace cascades photos of gadgets, I accept the inevitable: paper will be jettisoned for other things bright and new.

Yet, paper is a kindred creature. When I recently came home to clean and clear after two years of being away, I realized that about a third of our household is made up of paper. Paper occupies space, attracts the most unrelenting pests, and traps dust, dog hair, and cat fur. Paper is the bane of virtuous housekeepers.

Such a surfeit of flaws hardly explains why paper is addictive. I find it nearly impossible to throw away paper. Can you take a photo of the sheet a son scribbled on in kindergarten, store the image as data in the Cloud, and deposit in a trash can that yellowing slip with ragged edges, misspelling, and the glimmerings of a young person emerging into his voice? One might as well consign love to oblivion.

Paper releases, along with dust motes and a mini-colony of silverfish, expression. Recently at the University of San Carlos Cebuano Studies Center, I spent a day going through the card catalogue, not the online public access catalogue that inventories the linked libraries in an institution but the old-fashioned cabinet with wooden trays holding index cards containing bibliographic information. Plus all shades and slants of librarians’ scribbling.

I first searched using key words but then shifted to alphabetical trawling. And that was how, in between Abac-Azne and Ga-Kyzyl, I stumbled on Epifania Labrada Magallon’s 1977 list of Cebuano antonyms and pseudonyms and John Wolff’s 1967 paper on the history of the dialect of Camotes Island.

In Greek, Latin, French, and English, the anonym is a person “without a name”. A pseudonym is a “false name” used by a writer. What was it about publication in prewar newspapers that drove Cebuanas to hide behind anonyms and pseudonyms but released their souls?

And remembering how Camotes village women once code-switched to Cebuano Visayan from Porohanon or Camotes Visayan, described as a combination of Cebuano, Waray, Boholano, and Ilonggo, when addressing visitors from Cebu City, I reflected how Wolff “put on paper” and articulated beyond ignoring and forgetting the cultural imperialism with which mother tongues drown and silence “minor” dialects with their discrete and irreplaceable history and stories.

Digital is king, but every time, I choose to follow paper trails.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 9, 2019 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”

The lost art of paper

I BRING paper to my classes. After three years of studies, I am glad to put to use all these discarded but still useful sheets.

I bring these sheets for reuse also because I’ve noticed that Millennials don’t have much use for paper. Rather than copy the lectures or assignments I scribble on the board, my students take a shot with their phone. They record thesis consultations. They present with PowerPoint.

When I announce an “exercise,” the one or two students with paper often end up sharing the pad with classmates. Perhaps like one awaiting word from someone on a journey, I push this pile of paper on my students because I would like to catch sight of their penmanship or read thoughts that haven’t first been Googled.

A Sept. 4 report from the International New York Times (INYT) confirmed what I always knew. Makers of backpacks—a $2.7 billion industry led by JanSport producer VF Corporation—are redesigning this student staple because Millennials bring fewer textbooks and more electronics.

A team from VF Corporation interviewed two groups of “extreme” backpack users: mountaineers and the homeless in San Francisco. The first group packs gear that must instantly be reachable. Because their life, too, hinges on this packing principle, the second stores disposables in shopping carts but also keeps money and food in backpacks.

All this industrial brainstorming is creating a new crop of backpacks that responds to the digital lifestyle, from designs that can fit solar panels for survival to so-called “Digital Burritos” that ensure cords and chargers will not emerge tangled from a bag.

And paper? The INYT article only mentioned water-resistant materials, which may be regular features that are in place to primarily protect electronic gear. More than three decades ago, I closely examined the straps of a backpack before buying to make sure the bag could hold all my notebooks, novels AND the books I would still be borrowing from the library.

In a coffee shop, where I take an occasional cup of hot choco to chase away midweek blues, I noticed that I seemed to be the first to shake open the shop’s newspapers, whether I came early in the day or just before closing. Even when they don’t come alone, the other patrons are often “in a relationship” with their gadgets.

So when I once saw a fellow writing in a notebook, I stared long and hard just to verify the pencil wasn’t a stylus pen and the platform, a touchscreen gadget in retro disguise, made to look like a notebook in the “classic” style.

As all letter writers, paper book readers, and other pre-digital dinosaurs know, a sheet of paper means communion. Blank or covered in script or text, paper invites indwelling, an emptying and a refilling that I’ve never been able to do in front of a screen.

St. Augustine traced the word’s origin to “com” and “unus,” meaning “with oneness”. His definition embraces every possibility paper can conjure, from a reader’s escape into a world spun by language and imagination to the daily acts of resuscitation that bring together a psyche sundered by timetables and minutiae.

While industries move on and embrace the digital as the future, I think I’ll stay with paper. I agree with mountaineers and the homeless: Keep your lifesavers close to you.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s November 22, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Seeking Peter Pan

FAITH was not the only beneficiary during the recent papal visit. The news media did quite well in the scramble to follow every step taken by the well-loved pontiff in Manila and Tacloban during the historic four-day visit.

Every day, after the novena mass at the Basilica Minore del Sto. Niño, I looked for a copy of Sun.Star Cebu and the Philippine Daily Newspaper. In our household, my 75-year-old mother and I have to get our hands on the paper edition of these dailies.

Unlike my teenage sons and husband, who are true digital natives, trawling the Net for updates leaves us in a state of digital vertigo. The paper edition also makes a good keepsake, dog-eared pages, smudged thumbprints and all.

Yet, it was during the daily scouring for the papers that I noticed for the first time how newsboys have become scarce. The figure I remember spotting loitering at every stoplight and street corner or weaving agilely among idling motorists, hawking a pancake pile of “hot, just off the press” papers, was now nowhere to be seen downtown.

I walked three blocks to find a sidewalk newsstand. The grandmother sold me the national broadsheet for only P4 more than the cover price. I wondered if it was because she still had several copies of the dailies and it was mid-afternoon already.

During the Saturday procession that culminated the Sto. Niño novena, I walked down Jones and Gen. Maxilom Avenues before I came upon, as twilight fell, a small roadside store with a few dailies.

Exasperated by my sidewalk stalking, the older son pointed out the vendors selling peanuts, hats, fans, and bottled water due to demand. I must be the only person in a million looking for a newspaper in the middle of a solemn procession, he griped.

Yet, more than the scarcity of the dailies on the streets, the absence of newsboys is a telling sign of the times.

After my street search, I discovered that the newsboy mascot is no longer in this paper’s masthead. In the paper edition, the image of an actual sculpture of the Sun.Star newsboy is found on the first page of the opinion-editorial section.

Would someone belonging to my teenage sons’ generation recognize this kid, in his several-sizes-too-big shirt, a pile of newspapers clutched to his side, mouth frozen in his street patter to sell dailies as hot as pan de sal?

When I was a news intern, newsboys—the term shrugged off age, applied to grandfathers and grandsons—converged like pigeons outside the printers, sorting papers before hitting the streets early in the day.

During the waning days of the Marcos dictatorship, a newsboy carrying the alternative papers was a sign that democracy was far from tottering; it took courage to carry newspapers the authorities confiscated.

My poet and blogger friend Myke recalled that reading the newspapers he sold for school allowance ignited his love for words. It would be sentimentality to deduce from the absence of newsboys the end of child labor.

In J. M. Barrie’s tale, Peter Pan led a team of Lost Boys, who ended in Neverland after they fell off their prams while their nannies were looking away. As the digital versions outrace the paper editions of newspapers, what do boys now sell on the streets?


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 25, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata

Script for life

NOTEBOOKS punctuate our learning more than we expect.

When a school year begins, we weigh down our shopping basket with this classroom staple: 90 or 100 leaves, sewn or spiral, iconic white-as-a-blank-tablet or politically correct recycled sepia.

At the end of the year, I see the notebooks again to weed out the used from the unused pages. When the boys were in the lower years, I recycled the remaining clean sheets to jot down grocery lists or mathematical exercises.

But as they grew older, the boys seemed to use fewer pages until it seemed, at the end of the school year, the notebooks looked as mint as they were when the year was about to start.

It’s not a surprise. Homework, readings, news, chitchat, photos, research, music, videos—from the Web unwinds the spool of their wired lives.

Computers, PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones: the young will sooner be parted from the womb than from the electronic extensions of their identity.

Will the digital age banish the notebooks of old to the trash-crammed pockets of last year’s knapsack?

I hope not. Notebooks, with their leaves of paper, are the spaces where we learn how to write. Recent research has psychiatrists and neuroscientists asserting that writing by hand lets children read more quickly and communicate more expressively.

In a June 2, 2014 article, “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” Maria Konnikova of The New York Times reported that a University of Washington study of children in grades two through five showed that those who composed text by hand produced more words and ideas than those typing on a keyboard.

In brain imaging, those with better handwriting showed greater activation of neural activity in areas associated with reading, writing and memory.

Other studies showed that, over tracing and printing letters, cursive writing has an edge, such as training self-control. This is food for thought for parents whose five- or six-year-olds are quicker than their elders to swipe and activate their personal tablets as soon as they are seated.

At the very least, it’s an argument favoring eateries with paper placemats that challenge adults to unscramble letters and their children to doodle while waiting for pizza.

The scientific link between penmanship and communication is even more significant for public school students. Reportage about the first day of classes this week has generally been dismal and frustrating: cramped classrooms, “alternative” classes where learning is dubious, even chairless classrooms.

In one TV report, primary students were sprawled on their sides or tummies, writing in notebooks. Chairs had yet to be delivered.

While the situation sorely tests the students’ endurance, not to mention legibility, the exercise with paper and pencil prepares them for a principle proven in laboratories and classrooms: writing by hand helps a person process a lecture and reframe it in his or her words.

According to The New York Times article, perfecting the art of penmanship in childhood benefits the adult’s skills in comprehension, encoding, reflection and memory. A Yale psychologist who is unconvinced by the link between handwriting and learning did admit that “(handwriting) maybe… helps you think better”.

I remember comparing research skills then and now with a college librarian. She said the Internet may have helped students come up with more pages in their theses. Yet, she observed that teachers have to work harder to review manuscripts for plagiarism.

I said the copy-and-paste garden variety of plagiarism must save a lot of library books from losing their pages. She retorted: still doesn’t mean there’s a lot of reading going on. Aye, that’s the rub.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 8, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”