IN DEPENDENCE

Independence is a big word, most especially from a former captive that has still a lot to deal with, internally—even after its sovereignty of more than a century. Happy Philippine Independence Day!

Inspiration, Testified!

The failure in education like teachers failing to educate is not on their end. The curriculum is good, the teacher also is, but the memory of a student can only contain particular space like one in a flash drive. The tendency, the knowledge stays deep in the recessive part of the student’s mind.

The point is that the best teachers are those who can’t only teach well, but are those who can hammer the lessons in their students’ minds and lives for possibly a lifetime.

Ms Virginia Bautista, or Ma’am Virgie as we call her, is one example of those teachers who really nailed most, if not all, lessons she taught. I remember reading in her blog that a good teacher need not to be a walking dictionary, but one who teaches the lesson the easiest way a student can get it, and that’s the way she teach.

In our Communication Theory class, every time she let us do advance reading of the theory to be discussed for the next meeting, I instantly refer to my online sources but I only end up being confused about the topic. But when she explains it in her “give example first, before explaining theory” strategy the complicated becomes simple, it makes me, together with my classmates, think at the end of the class “Ah, ganoon pala yun”.

For example, she talked to our classmates Kring ang Rj to sit beside those students whom they are not well-acquainted with before the class starts. The whole class wondered why Kring didn’t sit beside Pam (her best friend and usual seatmate in the class) and the same with Rj not sitting beside Handra. After that, she revealed the lesson for that day which was Expectancy Violation Theory that explains proxemics.

In that sense, up to now, I am still knowledgeable about every theory she taught us back then and the strategies she used for us to understand the lesson better. In fact, I’ve applied the same strategies when I’m still teaching General Sociology a year ago and it was also effective in my class back then.

Ma’am Virgie is also stimulating as a teacher, she presents innovative activities where we learn, and enjoy at the same time. Also, I read in her blog that learning will always be personal, the teacher’s task is to give the students a reason to learn, it’s called motivation.

She cultivated me to be a responsible student leader when I served as the secretary of our course organization. She bravely delegates tasks to me and my co-officers which gave us the opportunity to work as a team and deliver-out the tasks on our own.

My dreams and aspirations as of the moment, to become a teacher that hammers every lesson to my future students, my urge to change lives like what she did to mine—I owe most of it to her.