WE ALWAYS aspire for something ideal in everything we do. In education, teaching-learning activities can always be achieved in an ideal school, in an ideal classroom with ideal teachers and ideal students. What is ideal can be something objective or subjective.
What is ideal for your way not be ideal for me? Most parents are sending their children to public schools. Students in public schools are scholars... government scholars. Only very few have realized that. Students in public schools do not pay for their entrance and tuition fees. Any amount for contribution is always decided in a parents’ meeting.
This may not be true in all public schools, but there are really public schools having no comfortable comfort rooms for teachers and students. Many public schools have only one or two toilets. Those toilets cannot humanly accommodate the biological needs of the children. Male students can do it under the bananas. Female students have to suffer. Many of the cubicles are like gas chambers... loaded with foul odors.
We would like to question the integrity and the efficiency of public school janitors. Our principals should see to it that our CRs should not affect the physical and mental health of our students. The toilets are sometimes the most neglected facilities of the school.
Are our teachers enjoying the faculty toilets? In some schools yes but in many schools toilets are “rare commodities” for teachers. If the campus is wide, they have to walk up to a certain area where they can ‘hitch-a-ride’ for their personal necessity. If every classroom has a toilet, consider it a bonus.
There are teachers and students who are occupying “refugee type” of classrooms because the construction of buildings for junior and senior high schools have been delayed for very complicated reasons.
To prepare for the anticipated call of nature, teachers have to bring their ‘urinals’ in the classrooms. Female students have to be content with empty floor wax cans. Boys have to go back under the bananas.
Many of our classrooms are overloaded. Some students do not have chairs. They have to squat somewhere or share-a-chair with a friend. This is “sitting in tandem.” We heard the news that in the town of Salvador Benedicto overcrowded classrooms caused students to suffer difficulty in breathing, chest pain, and panic attacks. This is alarming... not funny.
Are students eating in school have a mess hall? There is none in most of the schools. If the teachers allow them to eat in the classroom, then the classroom is the mess hall. If the teacher closes the classroom during lunch break for many reasons, then the students have to eat somewhere in ‘refugee style’. Some boys can always go back under the bananas.
For one thing, we know also that some teachers in some public schools do not have faculty room. They cannot stay always in their classrooms because other teachers are also holding classes there.
The best thing they can do is to look for vacant chairs in the principal’s office or library, or just stay at the back table of the classroom.
If some teachers are away attending seminars, the teachers who are ‘left behind’ are made to take over two or three classes.
When you are teaching, you have to use your throat. If you have more than 50 students in the classroom, you have to double the effort... talking, disciplining, acting, walking, and thinking. All these would make a teacher very, very tired at the end of the day.
After class hours, a teacher has to go to the market, cook food at home, tutor his own children, and the wife or the husband is also waiting for what comes next. The last event is... the teacher has to do an emergency landing on the bed. The teacher has no choice but to rub his body with any liniment for all kinds of aches.
The end of the day is for him (or her) to think of another adventure for the next day hoping that salary comes on time after all deductions have been made. Teachers are not policemen, not soldiers who have a higher salary but still, they are fighting to liberate the children from mental poverty. Mabuhay ang teachers!