037 In Suspense (1)
As a newly minted civics teacher in the late 80s, I knew that it would be quite a challenge to help my young students, Grades 4-6, make sense of the world around them.
The Edsa People’s Power Revolution was just a couple of years earlier, and along with the newly installed government, there was much public interest in good governance.
The spirit of Edsa made a lot of people interested in becoming more actively involved in nation building.
For the young, however, this may certainly be quite confusing. They might have had a notion of what was going on at that time—all that talk of freedom and unity and nationhood—but perhaps not to the point that everything really made sense to them.
Mind you, this was in the pre-internet days wherein most information was acquired from traditional media. Television and radio, and yes, print (Fun times!).
To be fair to my young wards, perhaps it was asking too much from them at that age. This was after all a whole generation ago. And it’s hard to compare how “involved” today’s youth are with everything under the sun, thanks to FB and Insta, of course.
Just the same, I saw it fit to get my students to be up to date with the times. I wanted them to relish the new world order even, which meant making them appreciate current events, something that’s alien to most kids at that age (at that time).
I was of course up to the challenge (teaching current events was after all part of the job). So without warning, I opened my class with the question, “What’s in the news?”(Note: This works better in the Filipino—Anong balita?—which I used for this exercise). It was, to me, a simple pre-test.
And true enough, I got mostly blank stares from my students, except for a couple of well-read ones—those who I refer to affectionately as “the usual suspects” for being the ones always vying to be at the top of the class—who had some appreciation of the news (to the disgust of their classmates).
One cheeky student of mine, Cedric replied by giving the latest gossip in the local entertainment industry (to the delight of his classmates, of course… I laughed too).
It was then that I knew that I was in over my head.
I persisted, of course (Do I have a choice?). Standing in the middle of the room, I explained the importance of being aware of what’s going on around them… (and all that nonsense)… that they should be aware of current events… and that I’d be asking them about the news at the beginning of each class for the next two weeks. Oh, and it was to be what we Filipinos refer to as “graded recitation” (moans and groans).
The next day, I made it a point to be late for class, opting instead to observe from a distance what my students were doing while they waited. And just as I suspected, I saw a lot of them holding newspapers, scanning for something they can talk on in the event that they’re called.
There were kids walking about, frantically exchanging newspapers and browsing through the pages like they’re checking stock prices after a crash.
I did see a lot of them peer through the classroom window, obviously to see if I was on my way. It felt like an ambush.
They were ready for me.
(To be continued)