Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
We just had our closing ceremony for Pamati: Let the River Rest tonight, and tomorrow, the Puerto Princesa Underground River reopens and this will be my first time to experience this natural wonder. This has been a satisfying work trip for UNACOM. Every time I get asked to speak, my ADHD brain always wallows in some form of impostor’s syndrome. Will my talk make sense? Will I impart usable knowledge? Do I have the right to talk about the things I am asked to talk about? Tonight, a huge part of that doubting got erased by the responses some of the participants gave. [One even quoted me!] So, yes, I’m happy. And I’m glad I took part in this pursuit of using art and creativity to do environmental conservation. Would love to do something like this for Lake Balinsasayao. Padayon!
They’re implementing a new online system for faculty loading. And I was like, yey. Then I find out they’re making it three times more difficult with all these roundabout way of approvals and signatures. And I was like, grrrr.
It was a marathon of workshops but I finally held the last of my classes today! A huge sigh of relief, really. Now, it’s just all about the waiting and the receiving of my students’ final requirements, and then the grading. Can’t wait for this semester to be over! It was extremely short, which created a lot of class management problems, but I’m glad it’s almost over.
I feel so emotionally bruised right now, but I really needed to be firm. What do you when a student who has not been submitting any requirements whatsoever throughout the entire semester [in a class that uses the process approach], someone who you keep reminding again and again about these requirements [eliciting only vague promises], someone whom you have told that they can approach you during consultation hours for any problems they need advise for [and never did], someone who has been absent constantly ... suddenly approaches you at the eve of the class’ big presentation day, equipped with a sob story? I had to say no. His classmates worked hard to submit things on flexible time, and bending to his sob story would be highly unfair to them. I think there’s a lesson to be learned here about work and accountability. To [mis]quote the film director Jun Robles Lana, “You can be the most talented person in the world, but if you cannot submit things on time, you’re useless.”
Tomorrow is the last day of the final exams week for graduating seniors at Silliman University, and the crunch is real. So many final requirements being wrapped up, my head is spinning, I have been working non-stop just to be on top of things academic since last week, but then so are my students. I try to just keep track of things, including my health, and hope for the best. But to echo everybody's complaint: this was an unusually short semester.
I’ve been in workshop mode for two [maybe three?] weeks now, and it has been exhausting, sometimes exhilarating. [I’m energized when a particular manuscript is unexpectedly well-wrought.] But there are deadlines and expectations to meet and this has to be done. Padayon.
Still recuperating, but I got up to attend my last full class of the semester. Slowly and surely ticking off my last classes before the semestral break. Critical Writing Workshop, done! Fiction Workshop, done! Playwriting Workshop, done! Asian Literature, done! And finally done with Literature and Cultural Studies [which I'm just subbing for]. Now to rest.
Things take time. Just came from my fiction workshop, where we tackled the second draft of their first short story required in class. Call me satisfied! Admittedly, my rhythm for teaching workshop was kinda off when I came back to teaching last year, because I had to relearn everything again, especially the process, after three pandemic years of not doing it. But it does come back, slowly. Today I’m satisfied.
After the ravages of the pandemic, I’ve now found myself back to teaching. It was a very long hiatus from that part of my life which had always defined me. When I took the leave without pay, it was essentially to take care of my spiraling mental health, but it was also to find my footing in a world that suddenly felt alien. And now that I have come to the end of that long tunnel, here are some thoughts and some confessions.
There was a huge part of me that felt the leave was going to be permanent. When 2020 came around and we were on the precipice of the coming pandemic, about to jump into the abyss, I was already feeling burned out—although I must admit I was trying my best to ignore the symptoms.
In 2010, I had come back from the United States after a fruitful fellowship at the International Writing Program with so much vigor and many ideas, and then in 2012, I finally earned the MA I had been postponing for about a decade, and then I was appointed founding coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Center, with the creative writing program now fully back on as an academic offering—after decades of it being a neglected part of departmental concerns. Everything was full of promise. The work was fulfilling.
It was a joy to teach creative writing. Even the fact that I was the only creative writing teacher on the roster—although with an esteemed and retired faculty filling in as adjunct professor for poetry—did not bother me at first. [I was told there was a freeze in hiring given the uncertainties of K12.] I did not mind for the most part, because I genuinely loved teaching. I loved having the opportunity to mold writers at the beginning of their creative prowess. I loved that the efforts of those years produced so many books by my students, with two of them winning the Palanca for plays workshopped in my classes. [For my teaching purposes, I considered the Palanca and similar platforms, like the Virgin Labfest, my equivalent of a board exam—which is just the kind of professional marker denied graduates of creative fields.]
But the toll of all that eventually got to me. Workshops are not easy classes to teach; they require blood and sweat from both student and teacher, and immense amounts of concentrated time—and part of that difficulty was my fault: I was a demanding teacher, meticulous to a fault, and I also allowed the work to swallow me, sometimes giving up my own free time just to be able to workshop all the stories and plays submitted for consideration, with all the attendant revisions that come with them. I was also ignoring the fact that in that immersion, I was letting go of my own practice of writing—and then, like a cancer metastasizing, I secretly began to begrudge all the time taken away from my own pursuit of crafting fiction. I would find myself feeling defeated when a work that had been previously workshopped did not bear any effort at revision, and I’d think: “We spent all those hours talking about this work so that it can be improved—and yet nothing? What a waste of time!”
Still, I worked myself to the bones. I did not take any sabbatical in a decade, nor did it occur to me I should. I was constantly told to pursue my Ph.D., but every year I was also given heavier loads to teach—and with the creative writing program still in the process of being fully formed, I felt the need to stay. During one schoolyear, enrollees to the creative writing program actually topped all the other programs being offered by the department—and I felt a sense of pride in that. But unbeknownst to me I was also slowly cracking.
The pandemic, with all its Zoom classes, broke me. In 2020, I thought making lecture videos for all the classes given to me would be the best way to go. As usual, I went about it with unsustainable effort that sprang from my undiagnosed ADHD: I was crafting meticulous scripts for every lecture, designing meticulous graphics to go with them, and waking up at 2 AM every day to record my spiel without the distraction of outside traffic to mess with my sound design. I wanted my videos to be topnotch, information-wise and design-wise. And I was making at least three lecture videos a day. It was a heavy burden that I was somehow able to “sustain”—until I contracted COVID-19 and was so sick, I could barely continue.
When I recovered from COVID two weeks later, I found I could not regain my footing—my anxiety was a deep maw I could not overcome; my brain was forever distracted like glass shards in perpetual limbo; my physical capability was limited and I could not move properly; my hair was falling out in clumps, I thought I was going bald; and my every day was defined by waking nightmares I could not begin to comprehend. Which was when my boyfriend finally forced me to seek psychiatric help.
I was diagnosed with adult ADHD—and it made perfect sense. It gave me an idea why over the years I was often forgetful, why I was often feeling overwhelmed and panicky, why I needed specific boosters to carry me through even tasks I could usually finish in an hour, why I hated answering text messages and emails, why it took so much to muster motivation for things that were quite easy for me to accomplish—but also why I also had a thousand brilliant ideas, and why, when the condition is properly managed, people with ADHD also say their mental singularity is a superpower. It was all that, and then multiplied to a greater degree because of the pandemic. [My therapist told me she was beset with so many mental health cases when the pandemic happened. “It is unprecedented,” she said. It was often difficult to set up therapy appointments with her, given the high demand on her time.]
For a while the psychotropic drugs I was prescribed to take helped. I cannot even begin to describe the perfect feeling of being on Ritalin. The way it massaged my brain. The way it made me feel secure. The way it made everything so clear. This is the thing: every single day for a person with ADHD is like having a brain that’s constantly full of static—but most of us learn to live with that kind of chaotic brain chemistry it feels almost normal. Ritalin, on the other hand, was all about calm, steadiness, and focus. Taking it was like being a person with bad eyesight finally putting on a pair of prescription glasses and seeing the world perfectly for the first time: you notice the outline of the green leaves of the trees, you notice the subtleties in the shadows, you can read signs from far away. The sky is bluer, the sea greener. Ritalin gave my brain breathing space, and its gift was concentration. I could remember things now; I could follow through tasks; I was no longer nervous about messaging anyone. [In fact, my first act on Ritalin was to respond to and purge all the unanswered emails on my inbox.]
And so the drugs helped, until they didn’t—because, truth to tell, I was feeling their efficacy waning out with every passing month, even as I slowly became physically dependent on the drugs. There were times, when my prescription was running low at the end of each month where I’d panic because I was running out of medicine to take—because the withdrawal was often severe. And the medicine was also very expensive.
Eventually, because of this and other circumstances, I made the decision to manage my condition without medicine. It felt unsustainable. When I made that decision, it was the month I was due to receive an award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, which was recognizing me for my work as a writer and as a cultural worker. I remember giving a speech in a televised ceremony at the Luce Auditorium—but feeling like my brain was flying elsewhere, especially in the panicky clouds that was secretly smothering me. But there I was on stage, acting as if I was perfectly fine; inside me though there was a dervish threatening to spin out of control.
Around this time, I made peace with myself about no longer teaching, because going back gripped me with so much despair. There were also circumstances that made my heart harden, like my department hiring the worst possible person in the world to be my replacement—and also finding out that in my gravest hours when I could not function, they could actually hire more people to teach and share the creative writing load. It was a dark time, and I admit my mental condition made many of my actions irresponsible—but never once did I feel my former colleagues reach out to me. [Some did, privately—but not the ones who mattered.] I had no plans of going back. A dear friend, Karl Villarmea, advised me however not to entertain thoughts of retirement or resignation: “Take a leave of absence instead, and then find out later if this is something you truly want to do.” I was at that time completely incapable of making definite decisions, and I am grateful that he went beyond himself to facilitate things for me as a representative of my teacher’s union. [In moments like this, you find out who your truest friends are.]
That was also the time I decided to focus on finding myself, and on pursuing writing without baggage. That was also the time I made the choice to step away from things that felt superfluous. I remember Renz reminding me: “You have done so much already, Ian. You don’t have to prove yourself anymore. You can just be yourself.”
So I exiled myself to the proverbial desert for three years, turned my back on almost everything I used to hold dear, and leaned only on my creative endeavors for sustenance. It wasn’t utopia. Like I said, there were often psychotropic meds involved. And there were a lot of failures and disappointments, as well as unexpected successes.
I learned discernment.
I now know how to map the ebbs and flows of my mental challenges, and to recognize the whole thing as being not a flaw of character but as a health condition that can be managed. [Still working on this.]
I now know how recognize the honest promptings of my heart, and to obey it. [In other words, to trust your instincts. Because they’re often right.]
I know now how to calibrate expectations. [To under-promise, but over-deliver. Still working on this.]
I now know to disregard the entrenched worship of the institutional.
I also now know who friends truly are.
I have learned that I’m at my happiest when I write and create. [The exile was an extraordinarily productive time, creative-wise.]
I have also learned gratefulness, forgiveness, and the delicate balance of the adventurous yes and the self-preserving no. [Always saying yes burns you out; always saying no makes you lazy and uncreative.]
I do still need to work on replying to people in a timely manner [I get overwhelmed so easily by the volume I get, compounded by debilitating ADHD], but I’ve set up a structure that will help manage the flow.
Above all, I hope I don’t have to go back to the desert again. It wasn’t bad, but life I’ve found is more than just a metaphorical abundance of sand.
In the first faculty meeting I attended after being away for three years, my fellow teacher Rina Hill led a short reflection before we tackled the formal business of getting ready for a new schoolyear. She gave us a piece of paper with a question on it, which she asked us to ponder on. The question read: “What motivates me to work and work ‘with all [my] might’?”
It felt like the perfect question for my first day back as a teacher. What motivates me indeed? I found out that I’ve never lost my passion to teach—all the lectures and seminars and cultural tours I’ve given while in the “desert” prove that—but I just needed rest, and a new way of looking at things. My resolution now is to teach the best that I can without losing sight of myself, and my time, and my health.
Around June this year, while I was counting down the days before my official leave of absence was set to expire and I needed to decide once and for all what I wanted to do by the time August came, two friends approached me, each on their own, which motivated me to teach again.
The theatre artist Dessa Quesada-Palm, who teaches theatre directing, came to me and said: “Ian, my students need you as their playwriting teacher”—and explained why I needed to come back. Alana Narciso, a fellow literature teacher who was sitting in as chair of the department, also made an effort to meet with me, and told me over coffee: “Ian, you have so much to give our students as a creative writing teacher. Please come back.” She explained why I needed to come back. I thought of their implorations, and my heart began to melt. Sometimes the reassurances of friends are enough to make you reconsider things.
So here I am, back again. Scarred, but think wiser. The desert taught me well.
I celebrated my 48th birthday soon after the current schoolyear started. Birthdays are usually fraught with the blues for me. My dark days usually start right around the end of July and only lets up at the end of August, a monthlong commiseration about disappointments and growing older.
This year, I decided to let go, to let others in, to swim with the flow, and to reconsider once again my life’s work—and for all that, this turned out to be the happiest birthday I’ve celebrated since forever. Understated, but so full of meaning. May we all have this kind of birthday revelations.
12:51 PM |
A Grand Finale to the 2022 CCP Arts Academy
Have you ever had that feeling that you've done your best, and now it's up to the fates for that one last go to end up at least satisfactorily? We — the mentors for literature, dance, theatre, visual arts, music, and film — workshopped and workshopped and workshopped for five days straight, and now it came to this: a recital involving all the participants for the closing ceremony.
With barely half-a-day of rehearsals to iron out the kinks and to determine what needed to be done [choreography, choice of pieces, etc.], we were in it because everyone wanted it. In fact, we started the week thinking a final performance was going to be optional for each workshop. By Wednesday, all the mentors were keen to do at least something. By Thursday afternoon, we had some idea about what to do. By Friday morning, the rehearsals began. By Friday afternoon, the performances were on the slot.
AND IT WAS TREMENDOUS. It was like watching a concert of all the arts coming together in a spectacular and unexpected grand finale, with everybody doing their best to make everything work. You couldn't tell that most of the dances — sometimes paired with poets or with theatre artists — were improvised on the spot. It was just all seamless, certainly not without its flaws [a missing cue, a missing mic, etc.], but altogether fantastic. This is why in this video, as the last performers took a bow, we are all so generous with our applause, because we recognized that we just did something magical — and that all that hard work actually went to something tangible.
I think I echo my other co-mentors when I repeat what I said to myself at the end of the program: "Oh my God, they all actually learned something from us." We actually observed that our participants — 188 teachers from all over the Philippines — were hungry to learn, were willing to absorb something new and challenging, and most of all were generous to share their [sometimes newfound] talent in front of everyone. We made them dance, write, act, direct, make music, make art — and in the end, we were all very happy.
Thank you, Cultural Center of the Philippines Arts Academy [Chris Millado / Ron B. Mirabuena] and Silliman University Culture and Arts Council [Diomar Abrio] for making this possible. And congratulations to all my co-mentors [Dessa Quesada-Palm, Cheenee Vasquez Limuaco, Angelo Sayson, Aiken Quipot, Elvert Bañares, Juni Jay Tinambacan, Joseph Albert Perez Basa, W Don Flores, Ramon del Prado, and AK Ocol] for forming such a formidable group of resource speakers.
5:58 AM |
An Arts Academy for the Nation’s Teachers
One of the most dynamic, and humbling, things I do in my vocation as both writer and cultural worker has been moderating writing workshops for teachers. I cannot recall when this exactly began for me, but it has been a while. And my general takeaway has always been that of supreme fulfilment, a matter of giving back, so to speak.
In one of the most recent workshops I’ve given, I was asked by a participant how I knew I was a writer. My answer was immediately forthcoming: I had no idea I could write well until my teachers told me I could, paving the way to a career devoted mostly to creative writing.
In grade school, I remember enjoying doing the themed compositions my teacher, Ms. Bennie Vic Concepcion, made us do on an annual rotation—and missives devoted to “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” or “My Best Friend” became ripe ground to explore, in a creative manner, my childhood rumination on those themes. Ms. Concepcion, who was my English teacher from Grade III to Grade IV, also equipped me with the fundamentals of the English language, making my facility in it adept enough to be able to tell stories well. I was later appointed to become editor-in-chief of the school organ, The Western Star, although I had no idea I could do journalism as well. The same thing happened in high school, with teachers like Ms. Tessie Sedigo, Ms. Gina Fontejon, and Prof. Alejandra Bañas validating my writing, that I could also be tasked with editing the school paper. In college, Prof. Ceres Pioquinto took me under her wings, and under her I learned the nuances of literary criticism. When I was a freshman, Prof. Timothy Montes approached me after his BC 11 class one day, and essentially “ordered” me to apply for The Weekly Sillimanian [which I did, and years later, I would become its editor-in-chief]. It was also Tim who “ordered” me to apply for the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in 2020, where I rubbed elbows for the first time with many of the luminaries in Philippine literary circles. That essentially began my writing career.
My teachers were the ones who recognized something in me I did not even see in myself. They inspired me, they goaded me, they made me believe in a talent I never even knew I had. Thus, in giving these writing workshops for teachers, I am only coming full circle. These workshops have been a privilege and a pleasure.
The Arts Academy of the Cultural Center of the Philippines has been an annual tour-of-duty for me—vacated only by the pandemic in recent years. In past editions of this academic outreach by the CCP, I’ve taught regular writing workshops in poetry and fiction, but when I was invited to teach again in 2022, I decided that I wanted to pursue something I’ve been an advocate of in recent years: writing in Binisaya—in other words, mamugnaong katitikan sa Binisaya.
I felt it was necessary. I felt I could make a difference if I use Binisaya as the lens with which to do a workshop in creative writing, and succeed not only introducing obscure texts to a new audience of teachers [who might go on to teach these very works to their classes] but also in rekindling in them the often-ignored truth that when you write in your own mother tongue, you will discover a different kind of depth you can never really fathom when you use a borrowed language.
And frankly speaking, it also helps jumpstart a curiosity in learning the grammar and orthography of the native tongue—something we don’t learn at all in school. I always find it heartening when people who have been speaking Binasaya most of their lives eventually find out that there is actually a difference between “og” and “ug,” between “putli” and “ulay,” or between “ni” and “kang”; that you are actually using a Tagalog-corrupted lexicon when you say “nilugaw” [correct usage: “linugaw”] or “nilabhan” [correct usage: “linabhan”], “niluto” [correct usage: “linuto”], or “nilung-ag” [correct usage: “linung-ag”]; or you’re basically entertaining bad grammar when you say “taga-i” [correct usage: “hatagi”], or “tuho-i” [correct usage: “tuohi”], or “palikero” [correct usage: “palakero”], or “dalunggan” [correct usage: “dulunggan”]. What accounts for the mistakes we regularly make of our own language is the fact that for most of us, it has remained largely oral—thus, when we mishear something, we automatically use the spelling of that misheard word—and we are not used to reading the words or the “pulong” on the page. It’s about time we take seriously our own language, which also means using it correctly as much as possible.
While creative writing in both English and Tagalog continue to flourish—and helped by the fact that these are taught in schools and published widely—regional language literature always seem to be neglected in the larger scheme of things. Our writings in Binisaya, Bikolano, Waray, Hiligayon, Kiniray-a, Akeanon, Ilocano, Chavacano, and others are certainly not dead—of late, they have actually seen a resurgence [if limited] in popularity and in scholarship. But the fact remains that in terms of development it has lagged behind English and Tagalog. I’ve written in English most of my life, and I’ll probably continue doing so, since this is the language that I am most comfortable with—but I’ve become cognizant of this sense of responsibility of becoming an advocate of the literature of my own language because, to borrow the wisdom of two my mentors, this specific kind of literature is a valid building block in our continuing effort to build, and understand, the nation, which we should do city by city, province by province, language by language [something I learned from Tim Montes]; and learning the language as part of the culture of the place where we’re from helps us distance away from using outside models [e.g., Manila culture, Western culture] to understand ourselves [something I learned from Rosario Cruz Lucero].
In the past five days, I’ve been immersed in learning the nuances of Binisaya, and in crafting the balak, the siday, the binalaybay—all contemporary forms of poetry in Binisaya, Waray, and Hiligaynon—with an assortment of teachers from all over the Philippines, counting among them Bernardino P. Magno Jr. [Digos City], Beverly L. Deque [Bais City], Edwin Garcia [Baybay, Leyte], Eloisa Jane Ramos [Las Piñas City], Guia May D. Flordemarlin [Tagum City], Jeepee Magallanes [Bonifacio CIty, Misamis Occidental], Joseph O. Montajes [Baybay City, Leyte], Katybeth P. Sumalinab [Caraga, Davao Oriental], Kezia Keren L. Cagalawan [Tudela, Misamis Occidental], Leizel C. Quiatchon [Bacolod City], Marliel P. Castillejos [Pasig City], Maryjean T. Susaya [Jaro, Leyte], May D. Castino [Catbalogan City, Samar], Narciso Ogaya Jr. [Pasig City], Niña Rose D. Inoferio [Dumaguete City], Ninfa Jael Hopilos [Iloilo City], Patricia Villanueva [Iligan City], Rene Puson [Baybay City, Leyte], Rey D. Calo [Valencia City, Bukidnon], Rolinda Judith Carlobos [Butuan City], Roma Medina [Masbate City], Shelamar C. Garrucha [Bais City], and Tess Sedigo-Bernal [Siquijor], who was actually my freshman English teacher in Silliman High School way back in the early 1990s.
They are only a part of a bigger contingent of teachers [about 180 of them] who have been in Dumaguete the past few days, and here to sharpen more their classroom know-how in the teaching of Theatre Arts [under Dessa Quesada-Palm], dance and dance production [under Ronnie Mirabuena, Cheenee Limuaco, Angelo Sayson, and Aiken Quipot], film [under Elvert Bañares], band conducting and music production [under Joseph Albert Basa and Juni Jay Tinambacan], and visual arts [under W Don Flores and AK Ocol]. I’m sure I’m not the only one among the mentors who are gratified in the heartening response of our participants—I love my workshoppers’ hunger to learn, and I love their capacity for absorption and reflection, for their humor even in challenging activities, and for their willingness to also teach me in things that I lack.
A confession: I teach because I want to know. This springs from the adage: “If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.” Hopefully, in doing a creative writing workshop in Binisaya, I am on the way to that last of lofty goals.
7:00 PM |
Teaching Binisaya Literature for the CCP Arts Academy
From Day 2 of the CCP Arts Academy, where I'm teaching a workshop on Binisaya literature, using regional language as the lens to teach creative writing. [I think it's needed.]
My workshop is being held at the Silliman Library, and I have about 30 participants — all teachers from all over the Philippines, from Davao to Iligan, from Bacolod to Baybay, Leyte, from the NCR to Masbate, from Bais to Iloilo. This is most interesting, and I'm also learning along the way.
Yesterday, I lectured on a sense of place in literature, and today we touched on Binisaya orthography and the various literary forms [from traditional to contemporary] in Katitikang Binisaya. This afternoon, we began our writing workshop, where I asked them to write a balak/siday/binalaybay. We also did an exercise on crafting the sambingay [metaphor]. Can't wait for Friday, where we will see the fruition of all these efforts.
With some of the resource speakers for the workshops on the various arts ranging from theatre to dance, visual arts to film, music to literature.
Had to block a beloved former teacher on FB today. They once taught me the value of asking questions, delving deep, and trying to be comprehensive in our reportage — but perhaps in their anger at current issues, they’ve asked me to abandon the journalistic principles they’d once espoused in my effort to do narrative reportage. I don’t blame them, but incivility in comments [accusing me of being “bayaran” for interviewing the principal figure in the issue] is something I can only take so much. For their sake and mine, unfriending is perhaps the only recourse.
1:51 PM |
Video Essays on Philippine Art and Culture
My YouTube channel is just something I’m trying out for several reasons:
[1] I was surprised to know I already have more than 2K subscribers with hardly any content, which made me feel like this was an untapped platform for me;
[2] I’ve been looking for a YouTube video essayist [parang Vox] on Philippine arts and culture, and there’s none, so I felt there is an unfilled niche;
[3] I need to somehow have an outlet for my teaching persona since I’m not teaching anymore;
[4] I had to find a way to learn to love my video voice [I hate it!]; and
[5] my recording and editing skills are very elementary [I’m only using my Photo Booth camera and my iMovie editing app], but I know all good things start small and that's how you learn anyway: jump off into the deep end.
I have two video essays up on my channel so far—and a bunch of older videos and Eddie Romero movies. Comments welcome, but please be gentle. Subscribe and hit the notification bell if you're so inclined.
The year has been very dark and unexpected in its tumult, but also ironically generous with its apportioning of much-needed reckoning and hindsight. I cannot allow myself to celebrate today with full heartedness. In my estimation, I have been both a success and also a failure as a teacher, and the sum that comes out of that is an average fool only trying to make sense of his day and what must be done, trying to do his best, sometimes failing to do so, and often heartened by the discovery that I have done something worthwhile in my teaching to someone. It is not easy being a teacher. I have many students who appreciate what I do, but also just as many who call me a “terror teacher” who demand too much for a minor subject. [Sometimes that gets to me, and I ask, what for all these?] But I am proud of the students who took that as a challenge, and also bothered that for many others I do not—cannot—do enough. It’s World Teachers’ Day, and I can only wish I live up to what is celebrated. I never feel I do.
I wonder what it must be like to say goodbye to this city as hundreds do every March. To say goodbye while your plane taxis down Sibulan’s runway and finally flies from the familiar greens of Dumaguete; or while your boat eases off those familiar moorings you call the Rizal Boulevard, the city’s streetlamps edging slowly away until they become pinpricks of light soon to be swallowed by the darkness of sea and sky.
And then you behold the certainty that Dumaguete is finally gone, that life finally ended.
How does that feel like?
I wonder what it must be like to say goodbye, that is, with the tacit knowledge that one might not ever return.
Or maybe to return, some day, but with the knowledge, buried deep in the denial of the sly turning of days, that one never comes back to the same place again. All places are rivers in time, you see, and like how the popular saying goes, you can never step into the same spot of water twice.
I wonder what that must be like, to say goodbye.
Every year, in the middle of March, I become witness to a ritual they call a “beginning of things.” A commencement. I teach. I have been teaching for more than a decade now. And what has become constant in this life of the classroom is the fact that I have been allowed to bear witness to the growth of young men and women, to see their various comings and goings. I always remember how they first come in, perhaps four or five years ago (perhaps more), stout with the innocence and gullibility and the cocky self-assurance of youth. You see soon how they fare with the succeeding years, most of them increasingly cognizant of the one certainty of growing up: that the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know anything. College can be such a humbling experience. And for those who know how to navigate it well—learning, for example, that grades are not all that matter, and that having a life that takes in the vast promises of experience is equal to a good mark—they will come off the whole experience of tertiary learning becoming better human beings. If they allow it to, of course.
And when all is said and done, here comes one final March day where all that scrambling for grades, and all that experimenting with life, comes to some form of an end. The celebration comes complete with the uniforms of ritual—black robes, black caps, golden tassels—and the occasion is taken to a solemnity that commemorates those who have weathered the academic rigors. With that, of coure, comes a feathery hope that some future opens up, perhaps concretized by the diploma. There’s also relief, of course, because the weeks past have been backbreaking, the nights sleepless, the running around to complete things brutal. This day—this commencement—tells you you have reached the finish line, that it was worth all that pain and all that heartache.
But also this day soon becomes, tentatively at first, an occasion for farewells. College has been the grand experiment in becoming who one could possibly be, and graduation is the time for goodbyes to those who have helped shape that possibility. Goodbyes are heartbreaking things.
For this year, I know many who have been my students, and many who have become my friends. I can only hope that I have helped shape the course of their lives for the better—the way I know that they have shaped mine in places they had no idea made sizable impacts. There’s Andrew Alvarez, there’s Ron Jacob Calumpang, there’s Arvin Tarroza, there’s Kim Cabahug. There’s Jocille Morito, there’s Zara Dy, there’s Bethel Abigail Almirol, there’s Natalie Curran. Bright young kids, and good friends, too. There are more, of course. What makes me happy is how, with them, I have managed to extend the limiting experience of the classroom to other adventures that called for the creative. I’ve made plays with these people, I’ve made books with these people, I’ve done an assortment of projects with these people. They weren’t just names in my record book; they became colleagues as well. And I have learned a lot from them. And they are not the only ones. Every year, I say goodbye to a similar batch I have also come to know as friends. And if you ask me, I may be glad that they are graduating—for all that commencement stands for—but a part of me begrudges the farewells. But you learn to live with these things. In Dumaguete, a university town, goodbyes are the dynamics with which we have learned to breathe by.
I wonder what it must be like to say goodbye, with finality, to all that.
I have also left before—and often for long stretches of time, too—but it has always been with the knowledge that my departure is temporary. I have enjoyed long spells in other places where there is snow, in places where skyscrapers dwarfed you in canyons of concrete and traffic, in places where they know the colors of autumn, in places where the vastness of the land—stretching like a brown empire of soil and spice—imperil your idea of green dots of islands as home. But I have always somehow come back to Dumaguete, to its familiar small streets, and little shops, and a seaside boulevard that overlooks a horizon that seems to promise both the spokes of a golden cage and a passport to the lands unseen beyond dip of that blue line where sky and sea meet. Many of my friends will venture out to those borderlands, and some I will never see again.
After graduation, summer time begins, and with it a new beginning. I like that time in the summer day at dusk when I’m in some outdoor café near the Rizal Boulevard drinking coffee, and the sky outside does its ballet of changing light. For a moment, there are swaths of purple and red and traces of yellow—but often it is just an overwhelming blue, various shades of it. I like how the horizon becomes all shades of blue at dusk, and then, right before evening comes with its velvet darkness, just a deep deep blue that recalls the purest of sadness.
All sunsets are distillations of the goodbyes I have known. Watching one such sunset, with a cup of coffee on hand, while I stare out at the horizon from my little café, I think I have learned to say goodbye fully to the light. But it comes with knowing full well that another summer day comes again soon.
For now, what I see waning is the remains of a good light, wavering goodbye, and I will always be glad to have known it.
This is interesting because I grew up believing I was never a Math person. In grade school, I somehow refused to memorize the multiplication table, for example, because I kept finding myself asking things like, "Why is 2 x 2 = 4?" Always the why.
So every time we'd get these competition quizzes in class, like pitting two classmates together in a two-lane race -- where every correct answer to flashcard mathematical problems gave you a chance to step forward where the teacher (and the finish line) was -- I'd lose. The winner got to sit down, and the loser had to go over the race once more. One time in Grade III, I lost to the ENTIRE class.
(But, whatever, I graduated valedictorian anyway, ha.)
I was always bad in Math, except when they gave us those "window" exams, and for some reason, I'd always rate high. Not until junior high in Silliman University did I learn to love Math. I loved the intense concentration every exam demanded. I loved it, and all because of Prof. Alice Mamhot. She was a patient teacher. She knew the value of listening, and so she refused to have us write down notes while she was lecturing, always intoning to us a sentence in mock Spanish: "No puede calabang en grande de baha." And after we were done understanding everything she'd written on the board, she'd throw up her hands and say, "Copy break!" And then we'd write everything down. I learned to love Math with her. And during one periodical exam, I astounded everybody by getting a 99/100. I got a grade in the 90s that year.
So yes, we all have good Math in us. We just need good teachers.
It's almost the end of another semester here in Silliman University, and I have to say I enjoyed most, if not all, of my classes this term. The kids in my classes have been quite responsive, to some degree; and I think I have somehow managed to give them all the full range of my dream syllabus -- miracle of miracles -- with some creative manipulation of time in my part. (Given the busy semester I have, this was a feat.) In the end, it boils down to this: I think equal to the knowledge we impart as teachers is the enthusiasm we teach our students over the things we teach about. A bored teacher is an ineffective teacher. I had fun this term, and thank God for that.
I don’t remember much of the past two or three weeks, except that it was a busy time, and I was under much stress trying to crunch out the grades for my classes in the college term that just ended. It is always a time shrouded in conjectures, missed connections, sweat, and desperate silences; one comes out of it like a patient from a coma would. Of course, many teachers will tell you that they love their job with the passion of a martyr but that the only thing excruciating about it is the grading period.
What can I say? It is a kind of hell no sane person will wish on anyone. The lack of sleep, the endless punching of the calculator keys, the attention to detail demanded, the will to withstand (with humor, if that can be conjured) the student papers that swim in muddled thinking, and even more muddled grammar. (That is, if one does not die seething from the obvious and clumsy borrowings from the Internet. The blatant display of intellectual dishonesty can shrivel the hardiest spirit. Copy-pasting 101, and all that.)
All I remember now of that recent time is feeling like a disembodied thing, a specter almost. I felt myself outside my own body, although I also felt, at the same time, the compounded pains of stress that afflict the physical—the aching back, the bloodshot eyes, the headachy brain, the acidic stomach from too much coffee ingested.
Which is why I still cannot understand how I was able to finish Albert Camus’ The Stranger in one go at the height of one stressful morning. I was already grinding away for close to twelve hours overnight, and outside my window I could see the daylight hours seeping into the quiet of my apartment. I was tired. The work was still unfinished.
And on my way to bed hoping to catch some shut-eye, I felt my hands going over my bookshelves and I felt myself taking out Camus’ book. I felt myself noting that it was a slim book. Something fell out of its pages. I found myself looking at an old boat ticket—transit from Tagbilaran to Dumaguete—from 1999. I found myself sleepily musing over the fact that the last time I tried reading this book was more than a decade ago.
Tired, narcoleptic, I climbed into bed with that volume in hand, and proceeded to read the strange story of a curiously detached man in French Algeria, who fails to feel anything for a newly dead mother, and finally fails to comprehend the justice meted him for what seems like a senseless act of a murder that he has committed. He goes through each day like one dispossessed of care would: detached from all sort of emotional wrangling except the logic of the action required of him at the present. This is supposed to be our hero—an existential one, of course, someone who finally rails against a world who misunderstands him.
Which was also a kind of uncanny serendipity because there were two other instances last week where the word “existential” suddenly just sprang up around me: first, during dinner with an older friend, who took to rationalizing facts in his personal life to his embrace of “existentialism”; and second, during accidental coffee time with a former student who started off with a philosophical rant about how existentialism and relativism are virtually meaningless.
(Was it also serendipity that I would also be reading another book at the same time—The Fundamentals of Play, Caitlin Macy’s Generation X/ Whit Stillman-ish retread of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—where the existential hero proclaims an affinity with Camus’ detached protagonist? Was it also serendipity that I would also be reading still another book at the same time, which is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, his first novel, where the young protagonist is an egoist much in the same vein as the hero of the two other books, only more dapper, a bright young thing from the gilded 1920s? Why am I reading several books at the same time that seem to inform each other in ways I did not foresee? What is the universe telling me? And the universe answered right back: “You are reading too many books when you should be asleep.”)
It was around noontime when I finally put Camus’ tome down, finished. I don’t know how I managed it, or why I even did it. I was quite dog-tired by then, and spent the rest of the day sleeping like the very spectacle of anesthesia. I didn’t dream. Not even of Algerian sands and sensational murders and French prisons and detached young men of strange persuasions. Perhaps, and only perhaps, I only managed to think of one man in my life of similar detachment as Camus’s protagonist. And how sad it all suddenly seemed, but also how heroic in ways only a few can understand.
But one could not care less anymore. One only cared for sleeping, for real, with what hours were left. And then one wakes up.
When I was in high school, I dreamed of becoming a medical doctor one day. It wasn't mainly because I was seized with the missionary fervor of being physician to the world's sick, and it wasn't because many of the doctors I knew were people of some standing -- and wealth -- in the community, although these were very good parts of the appeal.
It was because I read Erich Segal's Doctors one day, and the novel romanticized for me the almost heroic efforts of getting through medical school. In my head, I was Barney Livingston and Harvard Medical School was my Mecca. Later on, in old Ever Theater downtown, I watched Marisa Silver's medical school drama Vital Signs [1990], starring Diane Lane, Jimmy Smits, and Adrian Pasdar -- and my silly high school crush on Mr. Pasdar cemented more of my romanticism. Medical school looked so glamorous to me. By the time senior year came around, I was one of those who took the UPCAT in Silliman High, bent on applying for the University of the Philippines' notoriously hard INTARMED program. Of course, I didn't get in -- and the school guidance counselor later advised me that based on my aptitude scores, I was more suited for a degree in the humanities.
But did I listen to Dr. Aguilan's advice? No way.
And so in college, I made myself choose between two options, which I thought would lead me closer to my goals of becoming a doctor: it was either nursing or physical therapy. But the latter, in 1993, was all the rage and most of us incoming freshmen packed into the course attracted by our romance of the medical field -- and the green bucks Physical Therapy promised then. Much later, junior year found me despondent: my heart wasn't in the course. I hated it. My first hospital duty as a student physical therapist came, and I was told to get the vital signs of a patient assigned to me. I went in: I found an old woman on the obese side, and she was glaring at me while I fumbled with my stethoscope and my BP monitor. Her obesity made it impossible for me to get a good pulse -- but I pumped on, anyway, embarrassed and feeling spectacularly lost. When I got out of that patient's room, I remember standing for the longest time in that seemingly never-ending, fluorescent-lit corridor of the hospital, experiencing a sad -- but exhilarating -- epiphany. Can I actually see myself working in a place, like a hospital, forever? And the answer was clear: no.
In the middle of the semester, I told all my teachers I was quitting Physical Therapy, sold all my books, and waited for the term to end. I still went to my classes, still took the exams, still managed to go through the practical demonstrations in Kinesiology. But it was with a heady knowledge that I was through with the charade. I was happy.
But I never planned to be a teacher, either. I remember once telling my best friend in college to shoot me if she finds me grinding away at a classroom. But it was a profession that fell on my lap, and I couldn't say no. That I enjoy the best parts of it -- and I don't mean the paper checking and the grade crunching -- is also something I can't deny. But like my romanticization of a career in medicine, I also know that whatever has pushed me into teaching and whatever I do as a teacher have also been touched by the movies I've seen.
Watch me in the classroom, and you will see traces of what I do in the following clips.
This is Barbra Streisand's Prof. Rose Morgan in her film The Mirror Has Two Faces [1996], in a scene where she teaches a rather large literature class in Columbia University on archetypes and the place of sex and love in literature. This is my ideal: a conversation with an engaged classroom, talking about things I love...
This is Robin Williams' Prof. John Keating in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society [1989], in a scene where he teaches his high school literature class about constantly looking at things in a different way. My EL 33 student will find this scene quite familiar. This is my ideal: the classroom as a form of theater, with teachers as actors playing a part. Another ideal: the essence of what we do as essentially challenging our students to always try to think outside of the box they've grown up in. (You have no idea how many deeply-ingrained prejudices we have to challenge in our students -- biases and narrow thinking they've inherited from parents or friends. How do you exactly battle that?)
This is Julia Roberts' Katherine Anne Watson in Mike Newell's Mona Lisa Smile [2003], in a scene where, in her art class in Wellesly College, she confronts the expectations of women's roles prevalent in 1950s society. Again, like Williams' Keating, this is about challenging the students about the norms they -- we -- accept without thinking.
And finally, this is the very thesis of what the teaching profession is all about, found in Jerold Tarog's very powerful Faculty [2010]. In this acclaimed short film, two college teachers battle it out about what their vocation is really all about. What do we teach our kids? Where do you draw the line? Must lines be drawn?
There are other films that tackle the teacher in the classroom -- John N. Smith's Dangerous Minds [1995] or Ramón Menéndez's Stand and Deliver [1988] or John Singleton's Higher Learning [1995] -- but the four I've discussed above are the ones that have shaped me the most as a teacher. This is me at work teaching Manuel Arguilla's "Midsummer" a couple of years ago in summer school, captured on film by a former student:
10:18 PM |
Pamati, Done!
I don’t remember much of the past two or three weeks, except that it was a busy time, and I was under much stress trying to crunch out the grades for my classes in the college term that just ended. It is always a time shrouded in conjectures, missed connections, sweat, and desperate silences; one comes out of it like a patient from a coma would. Of course, many teachers will tell you that they love their job with the passion of a martyr but that the only thing excruciating about it is the grading period.