Read Part 1: Only in RP: 10-year basic school cycle (06/09/08)

Read Part 2: It’s back to school, error-filled books (06/10/08)

(Third of a series)

MANILA, Philippines—For three days last month, about 50 public school teachers in Science and Math attended a workshop that introduced them to microscopes and showed them how to illustrate space using graphing paper because they had no rulers in their classrooms.

It was an exercise in improvisation and a common-sense approach to teaching in the face of a dearth of learning materials that seemed ironic amid moves by the Arroyo administration to spend tons of money and pursue “open and distance learning” via cyberspace.

The event was sponsored by Marikina City, University of the Philippines-National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development (NISMED) and the Department of Education as part of a program to lift the quality of basic education for which the administration allocates P500 million annually.

The teachers collected specimens from the nearby Marikina River, put them under the microscopes made available free of charge by a local distributor, Omnibus Bio-medical Systems Inc., for the workshop at the Philippine Science Centrum at Riverbanks in Marikina.

From what they found under the lenses, the teachers were then asked to make a presentation—oral and graphic using clay moldings or drawings—of their subject in a guessing game, giving three to five clues and drawing a lively interaction.

Aware that rulers are not provided in public schools and that teachers are left to their own devices, organizers brought graphing paper to demonstrate what a millimeter looks like and thus illustrate the concept of space and linear measurements.

Participants were judged according to creativity, attractiveness of presentation, the ability to stimulate curiosity and teamwork.

It was heart-rending to watch teachers gleefully peering at the microscope that enlarged 400 times the specimens they had picked up along the riverbank.

Ideas from nature

Marina Balce, science education specialist of NISMED, says it was the first time that participating teachers from public elementary schools were able to use a compound microscope.

“Science gets ideas from nature,” Balce says, explaining what the workshop was all about. In the impoverished Marikina schools where the teachers come from, only blackboard and chalk were being utilized and kids were simply encouraged to memorize lessons.

Balce says teachers—and pupils—need to know the sight, smell, sound of things around them and be able to translate them to practical use.

She says, for example, that the color scheme used by Japanese car manufacturers was inspired by the mix of crystals in the wings of a butterfly and that the idea for the Velcro strap came from the hooks on the blade of a grass.

“If you stimulate the senses, you stimulate the brain,” Balce says. The workshop, she says, stresses observing and communicating skills. She admits that time allotted for teacher training is not enough and the other problem is seeing to it that harassed teachers use in their classes what they have learned in the workshop.

Underpaid, overworked

“They are underpaid and overworked,” Balce says. “You have to pity them.”

Balce, 59, who has a Ph.D. in science education, knows. She was a teacher once, just after she earned her bachelor’s degree in education. She didn’t like the monthly salary of P300 back in the 1960s, so she quit and joined the public works department as ecology researcher.

She did the field work on the environmental impact of the then proposed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, a requirement for getting loans. She nixed the project, pointing out that it was standing on a dormant volcano, but the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship still went ahead with it. She decided to go back to teaching.

Because of the heavy workload, Balce says, teachers normally are unable to impart “hands-on” learning. She monitors the performance of teachers who had attended NISMED workshops, but has no way of telling if what she sees in classrooms is all for show.

“Classrooms are crowded. Teachers have to buy the materials for teaching because the school cannot supply them. It is a tough job,” Balce says.

She talks about a teacher who she says got fed up of the low pay and long hours spent even after classes and decided to go to Hong Kong instead and become a house maid.

Cyber education project

One solution offered to improve the quality of education is the “open and distance learning,” or the Cyber Education Project (CEP) made popular in the wake of the aborted $329-million National Broadband Network (NBN) project with China’s ZTE Corp to wire the bureaucracy electronically via the Internet.

The $460-million CEP deal with Chinese firm Tshinghua Tongfang Nuctech Co. and Tsinghua University—signed together with the NBN deal in April 2007—was a casualty of the scrapped broadband project.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo suspended implementation of the CEP, along with other projects funded under official development assistance in a move to streamline ground rules because some donors required a supply contract before a loan could be hammered out while in other cases it was the other way around.

Unsaid was the question of whether the public education system was up to the cyberspace challenge.

Last week, the Commission on Audit (COA) released a report of an investigation conducted last year that information and communications packages worth P667.95 million remained unused six years after they were delivered in public high schools and had become defective.

Among the reasons cited for the deteriorating state of the equipment were the lack of computer literate teachers, absence of computer rooms and no electricity in many areas.

‘It multiplies excellence’

Alice A. Pañares, executive director of the National Council for Children’s Television, believes that in spite of the concerns voiced about the country’s preparedness for the digital age, the CEP in fact could provide the solution to the multifaceted problems of teacher training and raising the quality of education.

“As a concept, it is good,” she says. “It multiplies excellence.”

Ms Arroyo has tasked a group headed by Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, president of Ateneo de Manila University, with looking into the CEP.

Education Secretary Jesli Lapus says that in all likelihood, Nebres will recommend that the program be implemented in stages, beginning with a pilot project to test the readiness of schools.

Lapus says the integration of information technology in basic education has been a continuing program. He calls it a “work in progress,” pointing to some public high schools that have been wired to the Internet.

Just do it

“It is going to facilitate basic teaching, teacher training and governance of 40,000 schools. Now you do a survey, it takes you forever. You don’t have feedback. You don’t have real time. You cannot even disseminate your memos on time,” Lapus says.

He says the basic needs in schools, such as rulers and microscopes, will be supplied while the IT project is being undertaken step by step.

“The thing is, we just have to do it,” Lapus says. With reports from Jocelyn R. Uy and Eliza Victoria, Inquirer Research