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THIS YOUNG TEACHER SPREADS HOPE ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS
GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc
(The Philippine Star) | Updated April 8, 2013 - 12:00am
Ateneo grad Sabrina Ongkiko, 27, teaches at a public school in a lower-class district of Quezon City. From her students she learns of return on investments in them. Before leaving for a study grant in Melbourne, she gave a talk at her alma mater, organized by TEDx last Feb. Translated excerpts:
* * *
While drafting this talk, I hoped it would find its way to my students, so I requested to give it in Filipino. I pondered what message I wish to send them. It came in the form of this letter:
“My Dear Students,
“Studying is fun; learning is joy. Even when you tell me you don’t want to go on, that it’s too hard, you can’t do it, I still see that spark in your eyes when we marveled at the beauty of the solar system, when you inquired why typhoons come to be, when you found out how plants ‘eat’.
“I don’t think you really wish to stop learning. That spark in your eyes tells me you enjoy it. I’m sure you see the same spark in my eyes, for at that moment I learned something new about you too.
“Do not own the words of those who say you can’t, that you’re worthless. Those words are not yours; don’t repeat them to yourself. You are young and will learn more about yourself. You’d be amazed at what you can be. Don’t stand in the way of your greatness.
“Look into my eyes. I believe in you. You are good. You can do it. You can be anything: a doctor, a lawyer, an astronaut a hero. I will help you, as long as you help yourself.
“Take hold of your hopes. Don’t give up. Don’t break. Fulfilling your dreams do not begin when you’re grownup. It starts now. I have yet to hear of a person who one day woke up and suddenly he’s a doctor. Work hard; let’s work on it together. The future is uncertain, but let’s do our best now and we will get where we want to be.
“Thank you, my dear students. I’m grateful for that one year you were part of my life. You may not know it, but even though I am the teacher, I learned a lot from you. You give meaning to why I teach.”
I am in our Dep-Ed national uniform today, the one we wear every Monday. I wore it so you would recognize what a public school teacher looks like. Next time you bump into someone in this, greet him or her.
In my first year as a public school teacher, I always got reactions of surprise, amazement, disappointment. Like, “What? Why are you teaching there?” Or, “You graduated from a very good university, and you’re in a public school?” And, “What a waste!”
My dad, an economist, asked me about return on investment. What returns does he get from my being a public school teacher, after all the work he put in for my expensive Ateneo education? During my job interview at the Dep-Ed, even the interviewer remarked, “You have the credentials, why don’t you teach in a private school or become a doctor as you planned?” My co-teachers were saying I eventually would see how hard it is to teach at the Culiat Elementary School, and so move to a private one. Everyone was saying I made the wrong choice.
Then I realized, it’s not about my decision to be a public school teacher. It’s about what people think of our public schools. If our public schools were well run, people won’t be telling me those things.
Let’s play Top-of-Mind. I give a word and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind. Here goes: (1) “public school,” (2) “public school teacher,” (3) “public school students.”
Now, let’s reflect why you thought those things... My top-of-mind for “public school” is “hope”. “Public school teacher” is “companion”. “Public school student”, “excellent.”
The person who “ruined” my life is also a teacher, my mentor from Ateneo. She was the first to ask if I wanted to become a teacher. She then proceeded to describe the kind of teacher our country needs. I asked her why she was encouraging me to be so, when she knew I wanted to be a doctor. I was preparing then to apply for med school. She just looked into my eyes and said, “I believe you can be an excellent teacher.”
Many of what you hear about teachers in the public schools is true. There really are those who sell ice candy in class, who hurt students, who don’t truly teach. But they’re not the only ones you’ll see.
I hope you get to meet Sir Edmon he’s here right now who has 80 students per class in Payatas-B Elementary School. When it rains he goes on teaching, even if his socks and shoes are drenched from the leaky roof of his cramped classroom.
There’s Ma’am Linda, in Culion Island, Palawan. Here’s her photo. She is a senior teacher, with hair greyed. Still she asks colleagues how to Google-search so she can join her students in doing online research.
There’s Ma’am Rodriguez, who’d always kid me, “Haven’t you given up on your students yet, because I have!” Yet you’d see her teaching non-readers every single day until they learn how.
One day we gathered these silent workers to set up a support group. We all wanted to transform our classrooms for the sake of our students, and for that we needed each other’s backing. We formed the “Kape’t Guro (Coffee ‘n Teachers)” story-sharing sessions during breaks. But it can also be called “Kapit Guro (Teachers’ Group Hug)” as an expression of the need to prop up each other.
Many of what you hear about public school students is also true. Some still can’t read in Grade 5. Others go to class with empty stomachs or exhausted from child labor. Many walk long kilometers to school. But those are not their only stories.
Darwin he’s also here today was in my first batch of students.
He’s so smart. Excellent in science, he’s even better than I am. I would always bring Darwin along when I gave talks in Ateneo because he was expert on public schools than I was. I was new in teaching then, while he was in Grade 5, so he already had five years’ experience in public school.
The first time I brought him to this university campus, he gazed at our huge playing field. There is no field at Culiat, so he ran and ran around the field until he was sweating and panting. Then he ambled up to me and whispered, “Ma’am, this is where I’ll study.”
You know what? He is now a high school sophomore here an honor student at that the first pupil from Culiat Elementary School to make it to Ateneo High School.
I told my father, “Dad, this is the return on your investment.”
Our dream is for our public schools to be as great as our private schools, that young people like Darwin won’t yearn to study in Ateneo because our public schools will be at par with Ateneo.
I handle five classes, from the middle to the lowest sections. I treat my students like they’re the top section. Everyone is excellent. When I ask my students what their goal is, they answer, “We will pass!” When I ask them what their score will be, they answer, “Perfect!” We repeated this every day of the school year. We just tried and tried, and although they didn’t always get a perfect score, I noticed their grades went up as their confidence in their Science and English proficiency grew.
There was one day my students and I consider the best ever, because we were able to achieve our goal. It was the second lowest section, with about 60 students. We had a quiz about conductors and insulators. As with every quiz, I tallied the scores to see how many of them got 10, 9, 8...so the class would know if we hit the goal. When I asked how many got 10, many hands were raised. I asked for 9, and again got lots of hands. I asked for 8; no hands shot up. I got several more 7s. Then no one else raised hands for 6 and below. The class went silent. I told them that the passing score was 7. The students suddenly jumped from their seats cheering, clapping, laughing. Everyone was so happy! Little Fairodz even exclaimed, “Ma’am, my heart was beating so hard!” I told them never to forget how they felt that they were happy not just because they passed, but that everyone did. We achieved our goal: “we will pass.”
When I saw that in my class how they gradually came to believe in their capabilities, I knew that change was indeed happening.
(For the full video in the original Filipino, click: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Our-Return-on-Investment-Sabsy)
The Voice That Needs to be Heard
DIRECTLINE By Boy Abunda
(The Philippine Star) | Updated April 30, 2013 - 12:00am
It is said that Michael Eisner, the former chief executive officer of Disney, would include children during Disney’s “gong” (brainstorming) sessions. In one of these sessions emerged the concept of Lion King, an insight that supposedly came from a child. (I am not sure if this is a true story or an urban legend!)
The point I’m trying to make is that it is important that we listen to the voice of the “babes” because it is often raw, true and brilliant. I am a staunch supporter of children’s rights in the Philippines where their voices need to be heard by elders and leaders.
My friend Ellen Ongkeko Marfil directed and produced the movie Boses, which was a Cinemalaya entry in 2008. It was based on Froi Medina’s Tinig sa Dilim, a second-prize winner at the Cinemalaya 2007 scriptwriting competition.
Boses is a poignant story of a battered child Onyok (played by Julian Duque) who loses his ability to speak after being beaten by his abusive father (Ricky Davao). He is brought to a children’s shelter run by Amanda (Cherry Pie Picache) where he forges a friendship with Ariel (Coke Bolipata), a concert violinist who became reclusive after the death of his girlfriend (Meryll Soriano). After listening to the beautiful melody that emanates from Ariel’s violin, Onyok learns how to play the musical instrument and discovers his gift of music.
One of the memorable lines from the movie comes from the character of Cherry Pie: “May mga magulang na handang magbago at pilit na nagbabago. May mga ama na gustong humingi ng tawad at may mga anak na handang magpatawad.”
I remember bumping into Ellen after the movie’s screening at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). She introduced me to the child actor. I suddenly knelt before the boy and Ellen and gushed shamelessly on how brilliant Julian was in his portrayal of the boy, Onyok.
According to Ellen, the Department of Education recently gave an advisory on the film as a possible advocacy tool on child protection.
Onyok’s story happens in real life. It can be the story of your relative, your friend, your next-door neighbor and of countless abused children who suffer violence in silence because of fear. Everyday we come across this kind of story. We hear it on radio, watch it on television and read about it in newspapers and on social media.
Boses won top awards from the Golden Screen Awards, Gawad Tanglaw Awards, Star Awards in 2008. It was screened across the country in schools, communities, and parishes in partnership with different organizations like UP, Ateneo, Assumption, FEU, TUP, Pasay Children’s Network, CBCP, Couples for Christ and Aksyon Para sa Kapayapaan.
The movie also competed and was exhibited in various festivals, schools and communities abroad including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Hawaii, Vancouver, India, Korea, Hong Kong, Geneva, Zurich, Madrid, Yale University and University of Alberta.
Boses received rave reviews from critics, child welfare advocates and international programmers. “An extraordinary film from the Philippines. It is my personal choice. My favorite and a must-see,” enthused Church Boller, executive director of Hawaii International Film Festival. “Boses takes a grim situation (child abuse), matches it with high-art therapy (classical music), and unfolds the narrative with a strong dose of pleasure, as startling in its effectiveness as it is unexpected… betokens not just some of the best moments of the local industry, but also that of classical Hollywood,” remarked Joel David, a professor and critic.
Indeed, watching this heartwarming tale about friendship between an abused boy and a reclusive violinist is life-changing. It can change the way one views people. It can change the way one looks at himself.Boses changed me in a way that I look at pain now with hope and courage.
Listening to ‘Boses’
by Rica Bolipata-Santos
Philippine Star
July 28, 2008
By the time you read this, the winners for the Cinemalaya Film Competition will have been announced. There have been rumors about the quality of this year’s competition including chismis that someone important has declared “this is the best crop of films so far!” In the past, my only experience of being a participant of the festival was the desire to find the time to actually watch one of the movies. Happily, this year, I finally had the chance to watch.
I’ll tell you from the get-go it was not for purely unselfish reasons. My brother, Coke Bolipata, was acting in one of the movies. Entitled Boses and directed by Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, Coke also took care of the musical direction of the film. More importantly, it was shot in CASA San Miguel in Zambales, an Art Center our family had put up in the mid-’90s. Coke is also both its founder (having dreamed of this whole thing in an actual dream, believe it or not, while working in the mountains of Indiana) and its president. (There was another movie shot in CASA, Paul Morales’ Concerto.)
The plot of Boses is simple. Coke plays Ariel, a down-and-out violinist escaping from a troubled past (and a permanent broken heart courtesy of Bianca, played by the luminous Meryll Soriano) into a hut in the province. Near his hut, his sister, played by the amazing Cherry Pie Picache, runs a shelter for children who have been abused by their parents called Kanlungan. Into the shelter’s care comes a young boy named Onyok, played by Julian Duque, a seven-year-old unknown who, in truth, is Coke’s real violin student. Abandoned by his mother, he has been brutalized by his father, played by the incomparable Ricky Davao, for years, causing him to injure his larynx and rendering him mute.
The story arc is easy to predict. Ariel and Onyok, both battered and bruised, will find in each other a twin, or a foil. The irony, really, is that communication between two people who cannot communicate in words (which one presumes to be one of the easiest ways, hinted at by the constant use of the line “ba’t hindi mo na lang sinabi sa akin?”) and have failed to communicate with people around them, can somehow communicate wordlessly. The first time Onyok hears Ariel playing through his bedroom window, the music brings him back to the memory of being in his mother’s arms. It is a precious memory that music is able to call forth and he begins to find solace in Ariel’s hut — beckoned both by music and the unarticulated feeling that Ariel is a kindred soul.
This is only fiction, of course, and film uses different elements to tell the story. Beneath the plot, conceived and rendered by veterans Froilan Medina and Rody Vera, are other artistic elements and this is really where the movie sets itself apart. Coke constantly plays throughout the entire film and you are given a concert without being really aware of it. Most of the film was shot using live sound so one can truly hear Coke playing. In other movies where actors play roles that require them to do something that requires a physical skill they lack, like playing golf or cooking, the acting often becomes so superficial it’s painful to watch.
But Coke is a violinist and a violin teacher and the natural in him comes out onscreen. One of my favorite scenes is when he tries to coax Onyok out of his cabinet by showing him the violin can be a bee, a horse, a cow, a rat. Onyok is hidden in a cabinet and the camera peers in and catches a rare smile on his face. Nap Jamir, a painter, is the film’s cinematographer, and you begin to realize that every scene has been conceived as if it were on canvas. Ellen’s sure direction, honed by years of filmmaking, orchestrates the entire show. At the premiere night, the audience was not shy in proclaiming its feelings about the movie, both shouting, laughing and crying at various times. In one scene, Ariel attempts to elude Ricky’s character and the audience collectively cheered, some people even rising from their seats! At the back of the hall was a row of foreigners and I wondered what they all thought of this Filipino brand of audience participation.
At the end, a rousing ovation was given the movie (the foreigners had risen, too) and the crowd started to chant Onyok’s name and Julian stood with pride and went onstage. Like Pacquaio at the end of a well-fought match, he stood at the center, crossed his arms and looked straight into the lenses of the cameras that had flocked around him. Standing far away, I knew that the audience recognized genius and was giving it its proper recognition.
After all the crying, clapping, and Kodak moments (of course I insisted I have a picture with Ricky!), the family moved on to have dinner together and here was another story. In the midst of wolfing down our hard-earned dinner (it was already 10 p.m. by this time and we had all been both tense and nervous, collectively as a family, as is our wont), we started to ask ourselves what we would have changed about the movie. There were many suggestions, of course, such as my opinion that the beginning perhaps might have been too long. My brother-in-law wondered why Meryll Soriano’s character had to suffer such a fate and if that particular plot line was helpful to the rest of the movie. My husband wondered if the audience thought it believable for Coke to be a down-and-out violinist, considering his present stature. My sister thought the final scene funny and would have wanted it to end on some other scene. Coke himself knew of other scenes that he felt should have been part of the movie but ended on the cutting floor. This particular part interests me because art, after all, should spur conversation; it should make people not only feel, but also think.
Let me be a college teacher here and answer what many of you might be actually asking at the end of watching a movie: What is the lesson here? I can hear my college students making fun of me, as they know I hate this question but it is a valid one and one that I wish to answer. It is this: more than the movie being about how wounded people can be; more than how terrible it is that people who should love us hurt us and can somehow still miraculously redeem themselves; more than the movie being about the ability to heal and the heart to strengthen; more than the movie about being able to let go of people and trusting in what you have taught them; the movie is about how healing can come from art.
I think there was no other place last week that could best represent this lesson more than at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. For nine whole days, from July 11-20, the CCP was teeming with people watching independent Filipino films. That description brings with it certain connotations: filmmaking that respects and challenges audiences and filmmaking with conscience and filmmaking that is about making art and not always about making profit. The CCP has its own connotations and it was not lost on me and other cultural watchers how the act of Cinemalaya being held in CCP was a form of healing, too.
On the way back home, going down the stairs from the Nicanor Abelardo Hall to the Huseng Batute, dodging excited people, both young and old (sighted in the audience was National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera who was watching his second movie that night! His smile held such pride), realizing that the audience included everyone from matronas with the usual stiff hair, avant-garde artists in scarves and boots, artistas from mainstream cinema to colegialas on dates to students still in their uniforms, I stopped in the middle steps and enjoyed the energy abounding. Again and again, I am mesmerized by the Filipino brand of creativity and, more importantly, by the way we see art — as something communal, something shared and something celebrated together. Here, in our lovely country, the lines that divide fantasy and reality, art and Art, public and private, are messy. This is who we are, no apologies, no explanations needed. And that perhaps is Cinemalaya’s exquisite lesson for me.
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Boses also Recommends these Films
BOSES...Golden Screen Awards 2008 best film, direction, screenplay, actor,music Gawad Tanglaw Awards 2008 best film, direction, screenplay Star Awards 2008: best child actor, best music score; Urian Awards 2008: nominations in all major categories
SYNOPSIS
BOSES..."A moving tale of rebirth and the power of friendship between a battered child and a reclusive violinist."
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