Tuesday, April 08, 2008 Obenieta: La vida local and being vocal By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
KIDS say the darndest thing, concedes an eponymous American television series several years ago. But what comes out of the mouths of babes does not always disarm adults with amusement. Bile drips and foams as well from their milk-smacking lips.
Look, for instance, at a clique of child rockers called the Naked Brothers Band. It might as well be a bomb’s detonation, what they revealed at the recent 2008 Kids’ Choice Awards over the cable channel Nickelodeon. Simply piercing like shrapnel in bare skin, the lyrics of their latest hit: “And I’m really tired of being treated/ Like a fool./ I don’t want to go to school…You always tell me to stop/ To stop comin’ around/ I can’t even make/Make make no sound….”
That struck a cringe-worthy chord, indeed, with the alleged conspiracy of third-grade classmates out “to harm or kill their teacher with a serrated steak knife.” Nine pupils at Carter Elementary School in Georgia could be facing “unruly child” charges after they reportedly plotted revenge against their teacher who disciplined a girl for “standing on a chair.” Did she say something that reeked of impudence, the tactless assertion of innocence?
As a parent, whittling down the tongues of my two boys into timidity would be no better than bearing my neck down the chopboard. Mince no words, and mean it with due respect. Like, well, saying I look like a hobgoblin and hugging me anyway.
May they grow up to be outspoken but neither intimidating nor insincere. And, yes, to stay true and rooted—even if their vocabulary branches out to the lush forest of other languages—to their mother tongue.
So far, it warms the cockles inside my chest to hear my eldest son Gabriel Ollivan, a minority among his white classmates in preschool, asking ardently, “Unsa’y Binisaya…?” for some things he absorbs from his teacher and his books utterly awash with information and expressions of all things American. Rest assured I do as well when Golli’s younger brother Raphael Gandalf, scared of “agta” and “ungo” lurking in the thicket of his two-year-old imagination, easily takes comfort with a bedtime browsing of Mother Goose rhymes no more than the lull of lisping into a medley of native memory about, among others, the “alimango sa suba, gibantog nga dili makuha” and “balay ko sa langit nagasidlak-sidlak luyo sa panganod….” Or the wisdom of “bugsay, bugsay, kiling-kiling dyutay...sa barotong gamay.”
Rock and bring it on, Bisdak! Thus I have only the best wishes for the brainchild of Cebu Provincial Board (PB) member Victor Maambong who recently sponsored a resolution for the Department of Education to prescribe “Sugbuanong Binisaya as the indispensable bridge language in teaching English and Filipino” in grade and high schools.
Noting the dismal results of the national achievement tests and taking the cue of scientific studies, Maambong’s resolution avers: “The use of the first language to bridge English and Filipino will facilitate a more efficient cognitive process in the language development of our students…,” who, certainly, will find it easier to sway along the tune of Naked Brothers Band’s “I Don’t Want To Go To School,” if they fall in the gap or in the shadow between the idea and the act.
Getting a failing grade deserves better, indeed, than the silence of the dumb. Or the stench of cliché while invoking, “Shit,” if not the four-letter word. As a matter of fact, they can be more emphatic by exclaiming, “Hinampak!”
