teacherly crises

October 6, 2008

sigh.

sometimes, as a teacher, you try your best to help them do well, but it just doesn’t work. 

Lightyears

September 8, 2008

Do not go gentle into that good night,Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas


The first time I heard an Eraserheads song was in 1995. I was in 6th grade, and a minor controversy had erupted about the song “Alapaap.” Even senators were being interviewed during the evening newscasts about the song and its alleged references to using illegal drugs. I wanted to judge the song for myself, so I listened intently to the lyrics when it was on the radio—and from then on, there was no turning back.

I was eleven.


To my eleven-year old (and twelve, thirteen, fourteen and  fifteen-year old) self, the Eraserheads were more than just another band—there were a dime a dozen of Pinoy bands in the early 1990s—they were the soundtrack of my life. They put into words the thoughts and feelings that I had and couldn’t express for myself. I’m sure everyone who was in high school and college at the Eraserheads’ peak would agree that Ely, Marcus, Buddy, and Raimund were the mouthpieces through which a generation’s thoughts were expressed.

My biggest regret in the years after they had disbanded was that I had never seen them live. The closest I had gotten was when, in my third year of high school (I was fourteen, then) the band was set to play at the UPLB Fair—unfortunately on a Saturday that I had to spend at home with my parents. (At the time, PHSA was pretty strict about staying over on weekends—you had to have some official school stuff to do to be able to stay. The then-seniors were staying for their college entrance test review, and I was insanely jealous when they told me that you could hear the Eraserheads playing from the street outside the dorms.)

So when the reunion concert was announced, I knew that I couldn’t pass up this chance, despite all the rumours about how much they had each been paid, and all the crazy last minute glitches. This was my one chance of fulfilling my high school self’s dream, and I wanted to do it—even when, looking back, that high school self is now a virtual stranger.

(Did I really have a long-running crush on an upperclassman who, when he cut his hair short for the half-assed PHSA CAT classes, had a very vague resemblance to Ely Buendia? Oh gawd. The memory makes me laugh.)    


Nothing would have prepared me for the concert itself.

When the opening bars of Alapaap started playing–a green laser light blasting beam into the crowd, and the band emerging from the bowels of the stage—an energy came over the audience—I could do and say nothing aside from scream along with everyone else, still half-disbelieving that I was actually there.

I was half-dazed, to be honest, taken up in a pseudo-religious experience, one with a community of strangers who shared in the same feeling. I don’t remember almost half the songs of that first set, and was surprised when I read in news reports that it was a 15-song set. I only remember singing and dancing along with practically all of the songs. (As far as titles go, I remember Alapaap, Ligaya, Kaliwete, With a Smile, Harana, Fruitcake, Kailan, and Lightyears.)

After Lightyears, it was the break, and what happened everyone now knows—Ely Buendia being rushed to the hospital after collapsing backstage. I imagine that the physical stress from rehearsals for the concert and the emotional strain over the death of his mother last Thursday had much to do with it.

And even though it was a sad ending to the fulfillment of a dream, I don’t think it was anticlimactic—which was the sentiment of many, overheard as we slowly made our way towards the exit. I actually preferred this ending, than the way the Eraserheads died a long, lingering death in the early part of 2002. The American poet T.S. Eliot once wrote as a scathing criticism of our time: “this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.” And that was the way the Eraserheads ended then.

But this 2008 concert is a different story. This is the way it should end, and there was no better song to end it with than Lightyears: the recognition that we’ve all grown and changed and have become different people from the way were then—that Ely, Raimund, Marcus, and Buddy are no longer the same people they were. Who we were in those beautiful, turbulent years—light years away from who we are now. Yet we can still hold on to the memory of what once was, and still hear its spirit move in the music of the Eraserheads.

 

Big dipper north of nowhere
Outside the room inside my mind
Look forward to tomorrow
But can I leave yesterday behind
 
Now it feels so strange
To have grown and changed
Now it’s not the same

Because time slips and slides into another place
And try as we might to understand each other
It doesn’t really matter where you are
It always seems so very far
’cause you’re light years away, you’re light years away from me.

suicide

September 1, 2008

One month after L. departed this life, my former student G. B> took his own life yesterday.

I don’t understand, and I never will.

I regret never watching G. in his play last May.

well, what do you have to say for yourself?

May 9, 2008

When I first started blogging in 2002, I did it for the heck of it–it was another opportunity to write, and it was a good way to keep in touch with friends. It was easier, in my mind, to read people’s blogs and post to my own blog, rather than flood people’s inboxes with emails.

Flash forward to 2008. It only occurred to me that I’ve been blogging, on and off, for six years. That is the amount of time that it takes for a baby to reach school age. That is the amount of time a twelve year-old has to wait before she can legally drink alcohol. 

In those six years, my blog(s) have chronicled–at least in my estimation–most major milestones in my life. One of my earliest posts in my pitas.com account was about my ambivalent feelings for Kapi when he first began courting me. The little dramas in the Heights edboard. My political advocacies. My long-running dislike of George W. Bush. College graduation is there, too. Many rants about my mother.

Somewhere in the middle of my pitas archives are my sporadic entries from my JVP year. Towards the end, the morass that was the two years post-JVP that I struggled through. (Of course, those significant events were punctuated by a lot of angst-y drivel, a lot of memes [which weren’t yet called memes, come to think of it!], and the random internet quiz, done to while away the time.) 

 

a screenshot of my pitas blog

Over the course of those six years, many things have happened because of my blogging. I haven’t transformed humanity (yet) or reduced poverty, but I have helped spread the word about JVP. I’ve hurt many people, and have been hurt back. I’ve started fights, I’ve ended fights. Last year, my mom found my old blog, and read my angst-ridden, teenaged posts about how "unfair" she is, and about how much I "hate" her. Needless to say, that hurt her, and I could do nothing to stop her being hurt.

So why is it that I still blog, regardless of how sporadic?

Why is it that I still blog, especially with instances like that episode with my mother?

Napaisip talaga ako.

 

Postscript:

What brought this on was really my participation in an FGD (focus-group discussion) conducted by the people at dotPH–yes, the same people who host my blogs.

I was very apprehensive at first, because I felt that I’m not really a much-read blogger (unless you count the chipper cupcakes blog, but I guess they did take that into consideration). So, Kapi asked me, "Why did you say ‘yes’ in the first place?"

The first thing out of my mouth was: "Because I’ve never been in an FGD, and I wonder what it’s like."

Kapi and I shared a good, positive laugh about that, and I went to the FGD with a light heart. 

Great Expectations

March 22, 2008

(Written in response to my students’ reports at the end of the semester.)

Is it possible to enter into an experience without any expectations or objectives? I constantly asked myself this question when I was listening to all your reports over the past week. Where did this question come from?

In a lot of the reports, I heard a common comment—“there was no chance to talk with my co-workers.” I have to admit, I have no idea what the context for this comment is, or what were the underlying assumptions that led to this comment about your JEEP experience. The only educated guess I could make was that this comes from a certain expectation or assumed objective—something that you were supposed to have gotten or supposed to have done—from the experience of working, wherever it was that you worked. Thus I came to my own burning question, which I can’t help but repeat:

Is it possible to enter into an experience without any expectations or objectives?

For Edmund Husserl—the father of the philosophical movement called phenomenology—the answer is simple: No. Regardless of place, context, or what-have-you, Husserl tells us that we approach everything with an expectation, objective, or general category. Thus, he says it is necessary to “go back to the things themselves”—to catch ourselves having expectations, and trying to suspend these expectations (even if only for a little while) in order for us to truly get a glimpse of what it is that we are experiencing.

This whole year, I had to constantly catch myself having expectations—mostly unfounded—about teaching in the Ateneo. I have to admit, I have a tendency to be cynical, especially about Ateneans. Being an Atenean myself, and having so many good friends from Ateneo (and having graduated fairly recently) I had expectations about how the ordinary undergraduate would view the two required philosophy classes in junior year. He or she would see philosophy as merely a chore, something to survive and get the hell over with, in the same way that I grudgingly plodded through my math, psychology, economics, sociology-anthropology (and, truth to tell, two out of four from theology) core courses. I concluded, even before the first semester began, that philosophy wouldn’t matter to my students.

And, operating from that expectation, I was hell-bent on proving myself wrong. I literally worked myself to the ground the first few weeks of teaching, so intent on making philosophy “meaningful” and “relevant.” Sometime in the middle of the first semester, the thought of waking up in the morning to go to work—to go and teach—upset me so much, I would feel physically sick. I would dread having to make the commute to Ateneo, knowing that I would spend yet another day giving a lecture that didn’t really matter to the people listening to it.

It was only after the midterms had ended that it struck me that I had been operating on the basis of my expectations, and I hadn’t really been immersed in the actual experience of teaching my own class for the first time. Here I was, going through the motions of “teaching,” as if I knew it all already. Instead of really just experiencing teaching for what it was, I was just getting caught up in all my expectations and objectives.

Of course, it was not easy to suspend all my expectations all the time—many times I would catch myself reverting to the “default” way of looking at students. On other occasions, however, it would recede completely into the background, and I all I could do was marvel at the gift of the experience of teaching. On those days, it was no longer about “making philosophy matter to these students who don’t see the point,” it was just about the experience of being there—standing in front of the classroom, listening to your ideas, learning something new from you.

(Come to think of it, my expectations would still kick in even as recently as the JEEP reports. I would occasionally catch myself thinking: “Hay naku, they’re just paying lip-service to the whole ‘holistic Ateneo education’ deal; I know that they probably don’t care and will never care about this whole exercise.” A few moments later, I shake my head and chastise myself—who am I to make assumptions about you? It’s a humbling realization: No report will ever tell me whether or not the experience mattered to you, or if it will matter to you in the future.)

At the end of this exploration of the question “Is it possible to enter into an experience without any expectations or objectives?” I am still no closer to a definite answer, but something has certainly become clearer for me: although there is no other way for us to enter into an experience except with expectations, it is possible to let go of them—and letting go of expectations helps you experience fully whatever it is that you’re experiencing.

            And, in a roundabout way, this brings me back to your JEEP reports—despite the comments that “I couldn’t talk to my co-workers,” I’m hoping that most (if not all) of you found a way to let go of your expectations and just experience whatever it was that you were experiencing in those 12 hours.