Teaching Filipino with no regrets

Christine L. Francisco

Public high school is where a number of good teachers find themselves “displaced.” That is, they handle subjects they never imagined teaching.

Only a few are able to meet the challenge and realize they have become all the better for it. Christine L. Francisco is one of them.

Francisco, a teacher at Barangka National High School, has a Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Marikina.

The horrors of making lesson plans every day and checking test papers, she said, “almost forced me to shift to another course in college.” But she pressed on, majoring in English in the hope of finding work abroad.

After graduation, she taught English to Koreans here. She said she looked at the job as a step toward finding greener pastures in other countries where English teachers were needed.

Dream on hold

Her employment in a public school seemed to bring her closer to her dream. She started by teaching English to fourth year students.

But the following year, she was assigned to teach values education instead of English. She also became acting registrar, another position she had not been trained for in college.

Later that year, when the school asked the English major to teach Filipino, she did not refuse. “The public needed my services so here I am,” she said.

Since Filipino is her lingua franca, Francisco had taken the subject for granted in school, just like most Filipino students.

“I thought I knew Filipino very well,” she said. But upon accepting the teaching assignment, the reality jolted her like “a slap in the face.” Filipino is not an easy subject at all to teach even for Filipinos.

Francisco felt challenged. She went on self-study to relearn the subject. She said she felt like a student again.

She talked to experts in the teaching of Filipino, collected books in Filipino and attended the K to 12 seminar on teaching Filipino to Grade 8.

She pored over her lessons before going to class and used the language most of the time. Having used a dictionary for big English words, she learned to appreciate the Filipino dictionary.

Francisco put her heart and soul into the job to be able teach her students the best way she could.

“The students’ habitual exposure to texting made them lazy readers, especially in Filipino,” she said. “They skip reading and give up on words they find difficult.”

Francisco observed that her students had become estranged from the mother tongue. She realized there was so much to do to convince students to love Filipino and to consider the subject as important as English.

“The students had a low regard for Filipino,” Francisco said. “That’s the major reason for their awkwardness in their own tongue.”

There is much to learn and to discover about the subject, she said. “Filipino is more than simply speaking or writing it.”

Filipino is the best medium for educating students on the importance of values in life, according to Francisco. She uses Filipino to talk to her students and give them advice when needed.

The challenges she had to overcome made Francisco learn to love teaching Filipino.

“A teacher must be flexible,” she said, adding with a giggle, “I’m willing to learn to teach any subject, except math because I’m sure my students will learn nothing from me in math.”

She laughed at the idea of pursuing a master’s degree in Filipino because the graduate school would probably be puzzled by an English major making such a decision.

A blessing

Francisco is a success story among “displaced” teachers. To her, teaching a subject she did not train for is no longer an issue that she loses sleep over.

Aside from doing quality work, she said, “every public school teacher is expected to be ready to perform public service.”

Francisco still has hopes of teaching English. “But as long as my services are needed to teach Filipino, I’m happy to do it,” she said.

The author teaches English and is the journalism coordinator at Barangka National High School. He wrote this feature story for the Inquirer writing workshop for teachers.