A SHORT film published in the Facebook account VinCentiments shows a caricature of an online class that ended up with the lead student character fuming mad, if not at her teacher, at the whole conduct of the new learning setup. The hyperbolical ranting earned a backlash from netizens and not a few academic sectors, which asked that the video be taken down. The message was misplaced, many said. “The efforts and struggles of teachers should never be undermined in any way,” the University of the Philippines College of Education Student Council said in a statement.
The video’s director promptly responded on social media, saying the film wasn’t at all meant to strike at teachers. It was intended to stir discussion on just how ideal is it to push for online classes at this time.
The Department of Education (DepEd) had earlier reported a dismal enrollment turnout in both private and public schools. The agency had estimated a turnout of 28 million students in the K-12 curriculum to be enrolled this school year, but only 15.9 million had enlisted. We are left with 12 million pupils with interrupted schooling in the time of the health crisis.
Amid calls for academic freeze, however, DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones said classes, as approved by the President, will start on Aug. 24, 2020. Teachers at the frontlines will have to determine how they will customize the students’ learning experiences according to individual capacities.
The education secretary noted that in Southeast Asia, only the Philippines and Cambodia have not resumed their classes yet. Singapore opened in June, and Vietnam even much earlier in May. While she said that, the Philippines logged 129,913 Covid-19 cases, while Vietnam had only 841 and Singapore 55,104.
Still and all, on the ground, teachers are now in the thick of preparations for multimodal teaching methods—setting up their computers in their homes and printing reference kits that students who have no access to the internet can take home to read.
In the middle of all the anxieties among stakeholders, we’re suddenly thrown back to 2015. We remember Daniel Cabrera, the boy whose photograph of him studying on the sidewalk, under the light of a fastfood restaurant, became viral on social media. There was that most moving image of the young dreamer who knew just how exactly where to place himself in the big arch to success.
We remember Daniel now and we think of the likes of him in the wake of the new normal that the DepEd had set up. Everyone gets a share in the difficulties and challenges. Some lose their temper, some in quiet desperation, and still some produce viral videos.
Public school classrooms are normally packed with a roomful of students, and that’s the kind of setup that every teacher gets to upload into a different platform. As with physical classes, there is expectedly going to be a lot of misses as far as learning is concerned in multimodal setups. Not to mention that we’re rolling out despite insufficient retooling among teachers, especially among those who are exclusively versed in the traditional mode.