On teachers and quality time

These days, it is so easy to forget that people are complicated beings. It is so easy to reduce a person into a single element: a badminton match, a television show, an online username, an e-mail address.

This is even more true for teachers, who possess such power over children who are always vulnerable and susceptible to the idiosyncrasies of their mentors.

Add the pressures of academic life, and the adolescent spirit that desires nothing more than to break free of it, and you begin to see why it is so easy for both teachers and students to be so judgmental.

This guy is the class clown, that girl is the biggest nerd, those guys are jocks, and so on. This leads to favoritism and stereotypes, the worst of which is when a teacher’s judgment comes before a student’s words or actions.

Teachers, then, have the burden of needing to understand their students as much as possible, to the extent of being surrogate parents during the school year, and sometimes beyond.

One joke I have been hearing a lot lately is, being a class adviser means I will be a good father someday. True, there is a particular irony in the more “parental” aspects of a teacher’s job: for a year in a child’s life, the teacher sometimes has to be more of a parent to him/her than even the biological parents.

Our school director never fails to remind us that students spend more hours a week with teachers than with both their parents.

Learning moments

It is ironic, too, that the times when teachers can learn most about their students are the times when the teachers are not teachers, and the students are not students.

Random discussions about everything from pop music to Internet jokes to local show biz, field trips, other official school activities, etc. This, perhaps, is why varied extracurricular activities are essential to any student’s formation of character. It is also why I would rather hang around the classroom and talk with students than do paperwork during free periods.

I guess this is a double-edged sword: the students, too, get to learn more about their teachers. Students regularly come to me with questions about toy collecting, books and Internet jokes. Every now and then, a graduate sends me a message on Facebook, asking about Star Wars, 1990s computer games and graphic novels. Students appreciate and value multidimensionality. Teachers should be able to spot it in students as well.

Take my student Dindin (not his real name): typical class clown, has a random bad pun for every line in a lecture, consequently, a student who is hard to take seriously.

That changed, however, when he sat right behind me during a class field trip. Imagine my surprise to find out that he is one of the few students who know why there are so many news teams outside the Veteran’s Hospital, about cockfighting and local show biz (things which I, an English teacher, do not touch upon often).

He enthusiastically talked about these during the long bus ride. One trip and one long conversation was all it took to change my entire opinion of a student.

You do not have to be the school’s guidance counselor to know how students are when they are not in your class. Stay and chat for a few minutes during recess and/or lunch. Watch them for a few minutes after dismissal. Compliment those who make it a habit to clean up before leaving. Give them a chance to behave like the children they are, not as the students they are supposed to be. Give them the opportunity to be who they are, unburdened by school work.

Opportunity. It is what every student needs, especially in this age when people are hardly given the chance to express themselves outside their blogs and Facebook accounts.

During our last Christmas party, I requested for a small talent show before we said goodbye for the holidays. I said anything counted as a talent, and if they thought they did not have any to show, it was perfectly OK.

True, there were some duds (a.k.a. students who would not participate) but, in the end, students played the piano, violin and the guitar, showing their own acoustic creations (which could, to tell you the truth, rival those of bar bands).

Some even did impromptu modeling and magic tricks (I still have no idea how a burning piece of tissue turned into a P20 bill). And I think everybody was all the better for it.

Sure, knowing who among your students can use a hula hoop, who spends half his free time on Facebook, who does not turn his head when slaughtering a chicken, who likes anime more than 3-D movies, and who is a closet fan of Justin Bieber does not matter when you are figuring out their grades. But it helps to appreciate them as human beings in their own right. In the end, it is what matters more.

Franco Antonio Regalado, 24, is an English and music teacher in HEDCen, a progressive learning center in the Antipolo-Taytay border.