Tag Archives: P-Noy

komentaryo

dear P-Noy, on Teachers Day 2010

which has just passed, this day that should be more momentous than most because you yourself spoke of your own teachers at this speech you delivered to commemorate it two days ago. there is no person who was not affected by a teacher in a good way, and that teacher need not be in the classroom.

in the ideal world though, in a world where education is all important in a real sort of way, that teacher would be in the classroom, inspiring students to become teachers too, if not become productive/honest/compassionate citizens of nation. but that is an ideal, and this is not the most ideal of situations we’re in as you yourself say.

but maybe we must start with agreeing on this: if we value education and learning, we must first and foremost value our teachers, and yes, even more so public school teachers. no government has done so in the longest time. no government has cared truthfully and sincerely enough.

why? because it isn’t an easy task to value teachers. because this isn’t about spending on infrastructure and giving students textbooks. to value teachers is to hear them out, to hear them out is to know that their lives within the halls of the public school system are really and truly the most horrid for any teacher across the world. the answer to the question of “why?” is so simple that i will, instead, take you up on all the things you said you are doing for teachers’ benefit and welfare.

(1) you said you were going to build infrastructure where it is needed, and yes it is needed as pictures of overfilled public school classrooms must be floating in your head, as we know of how 60 students fill up classrooms across this country.

BUT. won’t dividing this 60-student classroom just mean having the same teacher running across two rooms, repeating the same lesson? and then imagine doing that in those uniforms with horrible thick and hot tela, and the required heeled shoes, and tadah! a teacher who suffers because there are now more classrooms, but still the same number of teachers.

2) in aid of de-congesting our public schools, you say that there’s now the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education or GASTPE, which is suppose to “make our private school system better so that it can be a viable alternative for parents who want to put their kids to school.”

I translated this section of your speech from Filipino with a smirk. because you don’t need to change anything in the private school system: you need to talk to them owners of private schools to bring down their tuition fees. because in fact, parents who used to be able to afford private schools have been bringing their kids to public schools. the private school tuition fees have killed the middle class families, believe you me. so to think that you can use the private school to decongest the public school? HAH!

3) you say that to help teachers “develop their skills” you are for the National Competency-Based Teacher Standards or NCBTS which will give teachers a whole new set of rules to follow, and some guidelines on which they will be tested, through which they will learn the new ways of teaching.

my question is this: have you seen the NCBTS? the only way it will be used properly and effectively is if all public school teachers are made to go on leave for a full year, un-learning what they’ve practiced all these years, and learning these new ways of teaching and learning. give them a year off with pay, where they will learn to teach again using the NCBTS, during which they can go through real seminars for their areas of specialization, and for English skills as well. have the peace corps teach our public schools for a bit, get volunteers from the private school system (where teachers are paid infinitely better). or sige, compromise tayo: give public school teachers time off with pay, even if just twice a week, thrice if you include saturdays, and have them go through seminars for all the changes you want for a full year or two. it’s only though something like this that this NCBTS plan of yours will be fruitful.

otherwise, it will just be something that will be used by the tenured/regular faculty members in public schools to threaten the job security of the younger/contractual/casual faculty members. and just so you know, as a perfect example of how the NCBTS will just be another test that will not be a measure of teachers’ competencies, check out the fantastic grammar on this site that talks precisely about NCBTS.

your government has said that the “wrong identification of the problem leads to the wrong solution.” well, this is exactly what ails your decisions with regard to education in this country, no matter the kindness of Bro. Luistro’s heart.

you think our problem is the lack of two years in our curriculum: the real problem is that the current curriculum for 10 years isn’t being taught well and doesn’t have corresponding relevant/correct/ critical textbooks for the times. you think our problem is too much homework for kids: the real problem is that this homework is nothing but a reflection of the kind of (non-)teaching that goes on in most public schools, where copying off the board and memorizing without understanding is the point. you think our problem is that our teachers are incompetent: the bigger problem is that they aren’t given enough respect and value to be wanting to teach better and learn more in the process.

the bigger problem is that competent contractual faculty members are at the mercy of the tenured regularized faculty members in the public schools. and while this is not to generalize, you need to have a sense of this struggle, and with whom the change can lie: the teachers who are still excited about teaching are DepEd’s and CHED’s allies.

but protect them. protect our teachers. allow them an amount of job security even when they’ve only been teaching in for a year. don’t treat the academe like a government office where regularization takes forever: teaching is a highly skilled job. telling teachers they need years to gain tenure is to say that they’re nothing but workers. kill off that bundy clock: it’s the worst kind of oppression for teachers who work overtime every day, planning lessons and checking papers outside the classroom, researching and studying on their own outside of school. to require teachers to stay in school beyond their class time is only fair if the schools are equipped with the things that make studying and checking and planning lessons easy: an internet connection, a good school and teachers’ library, desks and tables for studying and writing versus desks that are attached to each other, assembly line style.

protect the teachers, P-Noy, by taking steps to pay them what’s due them from the GSIS and the SSS, where teachers are treated horribly, from which I personally got my benefits a full 22 months after I needed it. protect the teachers, P-Noy by paying them better when you require them to serve during elections.

and quite simply P-Noy, protect teachers by giving them a salary increase. and just in case you think they don’t deserve it, here’s the truth.

when I taught in a public school last year (SY 2009-2010) I was forced to bundy in for six hours a day, regardless of my hours in the classroom. six hours times 10 days (which is half the month that I’m required to be in school) equals 60 hours for the 7,000 pesos or so that I would get on the 15th and 30th of every month. subtract the amounts taken by Pag-Ibig and GSIS and PhilHealth (all of which I have yet to receive IDs for), and that goes down to about P6,500. that means I would get P108 pesos per hour.

yes you read that right: that’s P108.00 pesos per hour. sakto lang sa pamasahe at pagkain. kulang pa para sa pentel pen, manila paper at white board marker na ako pa ang bumibili dahil ang haba ng pila sa paghingi sa school.

if you want to value your teachers, P-Noy, start by telling your Congress to sign House Bill 2142 or the “Public School Teachers’ Salary Upgrade Act” which only has 48 signatures out of 277 house representatives. if you want to value your teachers P-Noy, do so by treating them a little better than you would your regular employee. you are telling your teacher that the future is in their hands, that you want them to mold minds and change this country’s children’s perspectives about the world. this is an infinitely bigger responsibility than that which falls on the shoulders of too many — if not most — government officials.

the public school teacher’s life is really quite difficult enough. it would do your government well to see that everything you’ve wanted to do thus far will not mean any concrete or tangible change in the educational system, and is only going to make things worse.

and yes, P-Noy, if you’re a teacher like me, who’s taught within the tragedies and travesties of the public school’s space(s), you would know that making things worse is the easiest thing to do.

komentaryo

month three of P-Noy: notes of a pinay*

and so it must be said, that September might have been the best month ever for P-Noy, at least compared to those first two months where things just weren’t going his way, or his way just seemed to be going wrong.

the past month, P-Noy conveniently left the country for a visit to the US at around the same time that the Incident Investigating and Review Committee (IIRC) submitted its report on the August 23 hostage tragedy to Malacanang. in the midst of questions on the report — on the fact that it was sent to China before it was revealed to us, on the fact that what we finally saw lacked the section on the IIRC’s recommendations — P-Noy left, with a 57-person delegation to go to the US and address a United Nations delegation.

and as they celebrated the 25 MILLION PESOS to be spent on that trip, it became clear that we were really just hungover from GMA and the kind of spending she did, that we are out to just draw these comparisons, forgetting that 25 MILLION PESOS is a fluggin’ huge amount for any trip. this amount, given the number of travel companions of P-Noy (which apparently includes his barber, baka nga naman humaba ang hair niya, baket ba), could be bigger than that of the Queen of England‘s (oh but maybe sister Kris would be proud?).

but let’s forget about that amount, why don’t we? after all, what should matter is that he has done well, he has done us proud. he delivered a speech at the UN General Assembly, where he promised justice and the fulfillment of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, where he enjoined the world to come up with its own people power (naks) towards balancing inequality and finding unity (naks ulit).

never mind that injustices continue in the country, ones that for some reason P-Noy doesn’t want to handle differently from his predecessor: there are the extrajudicial killings and the forced disappearances of activists, there remain political prisoners including the Morong 43.  maybe P-Noy needs to be reminded that the UN itself had sent Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to the country in 2007, and he promptly “convincingly attributed” these injustices to the armed forces. now i imagine that the P-Noy government thinks (1) that those armed forces aren’t his, which therefore absolves him of responsibility, and (2) that he has delegated this to CHR Head Etta Rosales who will promptly act on this.

if the former is true, then P-Noy has every reason to Free All Political Prisoners, yes? if the latter is true, then P-Noy has every reason to Free All Political Prisoners, yes.

but there’s more to that US trip than just that UN speech. P-Noy also brought home the bacon, the ham, some eggs to boot, all of which are extensions of or improvements on previous agreements with transnational American companies, none of which mean being freed from our foreign debt, something that was offered to Cory during her time, something that i wish P-Noy would ask for now, because i have to believe that it’s possible to repeal all debt.

more than anything else, versus how this US trip might have “saved” the Philippines in whatever way (including meeting Obama, naks, one more time!), the fact is that it was P-Noy who was saved by this trip from what was going on in Manila while he was away.

there was the question of jueteng, the ensuing debate, the truth that what’s needed is a creative alternative to it, versus its abolition which is downright impossible. make the government alternatives better than the illegal jueteng, and it will kill the latter. send me an email if you want a copy of this proposal, which really is premised on good ol’ common sense and a whole lot of living in a province where jueteng lords it over.

there was the attempted demolition of a squatter community in North Edsa QC, in favor of the Ayalas who are going to build (another!) mall on what was government property. now i don’t know about P-Noy, but conversations must be had with people from squatters’ communities because only then will he find that (1) they are squatters in Manila because they are victims of land grabbing and its contingent devaluation of rural livelihood in the provinces to big landowners (like the Cojuangcos) and developers (like the Ayalas); and (2) some of these individuals and households put out money to have the right to this space: there’s always money exchanged between squatters/vendors and local government officials and police. this is all under the table of course, and more than anything explains why Pinoys who live in squatters areas think they have a right to the space. the province-to-city migration meanwhile tells us what the government needs to develop for the squatter problem to be solved. (and pray tell, anti-squatter people, how it is productive that you are nothing but anti-squatter people who are ready to pounce on these people?)

ah, all these P-Noy left behind for his OICs to handle or mishandle. when he finally came home, he did so with a bang by saying that he was now for a birth control and family planning policy, which does tie in — though not completely — with the Reproductive Health Bill.

i can only cross all my fingers and toes that P-Noy doesn’t back down in the face of this Pinoy Church. that he doesn’t back down in the face of the devout Catholics in his life, which include his sisters.

that he doesn’t fear excommunication, reprimand, the loss of the Pinoy Church’s support. because in fact it’s about time that we see the separation of Church and State in this country. because only then will women cease to be sacrificial lambs to notion(s) of morality and correctness, the ones that maims and kills them every day.

come on P-Noy, you can do it!

*because the Aquino sisters are already counting down the months to their brother’s and family’s freedom from us all, seeing us as the burden in their lives as if their brother didn’t choose to run for office and didn’t want to win.

komentaryo

the travesty of the Pinoy Church 2: life and death in Quiapo

today, the Pinoy Catholic Church gathered people to pray away the President’s decision to educate all Filipinos about family planning and give them the right to choose what to do. they also gathered to pray away the RH Bill and the probability that it will be passed into law.

the Pinoy Church elders invoke the name of the President’s mother: she wouldn’t do this, they say, she was close to bishops, she was saintly, she listened to the Church. Archbishop Aniceto says: “the country must learn to embrace the gift of life and to defend it against the ‘culture of death’.”

the Pinoy Church’s faithful carried placards with photos of aborted fetuses.

this connection between family planning/birth control/the RH Bill and aborted fetuses is a lie that the Pinoy Church has sold pretty well. they speak of contraceptives and abortifacients as one and the same, they speak of artificial family planning in the same vein as killing off babies. this is a lie.

any definition of contraception will tell you that Pinoy Church elders are wrong: contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, injectibles, condoms do not kill babies. they keep women from conceiving.

there is no baby, there is no abortion. in fact there is nothing in the woman’s uterus (which she solely owns by the way). there’s no nothing.

except 11 women who die during childbirth every day, women who get pregnant emotionally and physically unprepared for it, women who can barely survive the pregnancy, women who leave their babies because they don’t know what else to do. women who are unprotected by the State, are ill-informed if not uneducated about their rights to their bodies, their right to their lives.

and right there in Quiapo, where the CBCP wanted to pray away the RH Bill, women have found and bought bottles labelled pamparegla (to force menstruation) and pampalaglag (to force an abortion). right there in Quiapo, in front of that beautiful Church, countless Filipino women have gone to pray for forgiveness as they give the tablets and syrups and liquid in bottles a test drive. right there in Quiapo countless women have gone and disappeared for an hour or two or three, to risk their lives on beds and in rooms inhabited by women and girls like them, who don’t know what else to do. some or many of these women die, we don’t know for sure: they fall off the radar as they enter these spaces.

the CBCP prayed in Quiapo today, prayed against the RH Bill, family planning, birth control. prayed against the culture of death. prayed for the culture of life.

and right there in Quiapo, the travesty of the Pinoy Church could only be clearer than the bottles of pampalaglag that surrounded them. as they insist on valuing life, they have by their own refusal to give women the right to their bodies, been insisting on the culture of death all this time.

komentaryo

the travesty of the Pinoy Church 1

because on the one hand: it will tell its followers abortion is a sin, those women who do it, they are sinners, they are irresponsible. all you, who use contraception, you are committing abortion. you are sinners. you are immoral.

on the other: they will refuse any form of education that has the word sex in it. yes, even when in the same sentence as sex, is the word responsibility. oh no! this Pinoy Church would rather think that every Filipino is a Catholic (#1) and is therefore a follower of all the Church’s rules (#2). that because of these two things, they will not sin, and they will not need to be educated on sex. because they already know the rules of abstinence and the rule of sex only after and within marriage.

this is ideal, yes, but it is unrealistic. and this is at the core of my issues with the Catholic Church, Pinoy-style. it refuses to see anything other than what it wants to see: a bunch of sinners, all of us who don’t follow their rules, who question their insistence on abstinence, who go against what they believe about sex and libog.

common sense tells us this: how do we listen to priests who, as a matter of marrying God, don’t even (shouldn’t!) think about having sex, or libog, or anything related to it. that is of course when they aren’t to throwing a sermon or two — along with some threats! — at their brethren.

and they threaten us all with what? there’s hell, for one thing. and for another, the threat of a civil disobedience campaign, and some good ol’ (but denied on the late night news) excommunication for P-Noy. and every other person who says yes (finally!) to birth control, to couples exercising their right to plan their families, to women deciding on their bodies, because we are the only ones who have the right to it.

any woman who has a sense of the real conditions of women in this country would also know not to fear excommunication, not to fear hell. because in fact, we are already in a worst version of hell here, in this space where we aren’t protected in any way, where that finger of blame is easily and quickly pointed in our direction, where half the time we feel like witches being burned at the stake.

the saddest thing? because we have been told so often that our voices are the bane of the Pinoy Church’s existence, we have started to believe it too, and become uncertain about crucial laws that have yet to be passed, but which are ultimately the things we need. and deserve.

the Reproductive Health Bill is our right as women. as women who admit to having and/or wanting sex (within and outside of marriage), as women who want to keep safe and healthy and productive despite the label of sinner that the Pinoy Church has stamped on our foreheads.

we believe all these and act on it, because truth to tell, we are also women who are about the things that this Pinoy Church teaches us: love and marriage and happy endings. yes, we dream of these things. but we can only be as liberated as our bodies are free. we can only be liberated when we cease to fear our bodies, when we stop thinking that all these things we feel and want to do are scary sinful things.

the travesty that is this Pinoy Church is that as it threatens us with hell, it creates this nation where women are without an RH Bill to protect them, where women die at childbirth and from sexually transmitted diseases, where women’s bodies are unprotected, as are their emotions.

if this isn’t hell, i don’t know what is.

komentaryo

month two of P-Noy: notes of a pinay or the honeymoon is over*

It seems fitting to write this now that Noynoy has finally taken responsibility for the August 23 hostage tragedy. And yes that is what it was, in fact it was a crisis, by 12 nn, if you were watching it from 9AM, like I was. In fact if you were watching it from the very beginning, when all it was was a minor news report, with no live footage yet, you’d know (1) to thank media, for once, and (2) that it was always Noynoy’s call, always Malacanang’s call, and it was obvious that here, the call was to NOT do anything other than watch local officials, who is now apparently only Isko Moreno for the City of Manila. in fact, we saw him so much during the hostage crisis, that I almost forgot Mayor Lim was, in fact, Mayor.

I also forgot we had a president. Pramis. Early in the day, the question was which action star cum senator would come to the rescue, my bet was Jejomar himself, though he ain’t action star or senator, but you get my drift. Over lunch, I wondered what was taking so long. By meryenda, my question was WTF?

But of course the past month also meant many things other than the hostage taking that was allowed to turn into a tragedy. At the end of month two there was sudden silence about Hacienda Luisita, after all that noise in the beginning of the month, with Christian Monsod calling the HL lawyer out on what it was they were actually doing to farmers, that is, making them believe that what they were getting was all they were due. There too, were press releases on the plan to reconfigure basic education into 12 years, which of course the Magsaysay Awardees have said is beside the point, and really seems to be a decision that’s without common sense. Any sane person can see that it isn’t quantity, it’s quality. This is even more true for the public school system, but how many of the higher Dep Ed officials have entered a public school in the past two years?  That is the question. An even better question? Why aren’t relevant organizations and partylists, teachers and parents, being consulted about, and listened to, in relation to this major change in a system off of which they live and have been created? And let’s not forget that fab moment when P-Noy said that at the end of the day, he is the commander in chief, and therefore Rear Admiral Feliciano Angue had no right to question the demotion he had been given. Well.

Ah, but then these things have been overshadowed yes? By the aftermath of the hostage crisis and the death of innocent foreigners. Suffice it to say that we deserve it all, everything the world has to say, and even more so after the bungled reaction(s) of government, including P-Noy’s post-crisis. And while I agree with de Quiros that it’s better late than never, goodness gracious, that can only be true if the late reaction is in fact the correct one. It is beyond me how a president with a communications group could be so messed up in, well, communicating.

But maybe it’s no surprise. After all, we have media that can barely survive the aftermath of the hostage tragedy, too. Yes, there should be a lot of shame here, flunking the test and all. At least GMA 7 turned upon itself and chose to be reflexive right away, though it’s difficult to forgive Mel Tiangco for asking about P-Noy’s love life at the presscon. ABS-CBN 2’s Maria Ressa was on a roll on Twitter the whole time the hostage taking was going on, and it was clear that she wasn’t going to be apologetic. Instead, she is going to burn bridges, and put salt in HK Chinese wounds. And now that Pia Hontiveros has written about her experience on the ground (we saw Pia on TV when there was talk that Mendoza wanted media people to go into the bus), and Patricia Evangelista too, on her take about P-Noy’s handling of it, this becomes the easy question: pray tell, ABS-CBN News and Public Affairs, was there a memo?

Are the Lopezes finally burning that Aquino bridge?

Abangan.

*because if the Aquino sisters are already counting down the months to their brother’s and family’s freedom from us all, seeing us as the burden in their lives as if their brother didn’t run for office, well, this honeymoon’s obviously over.