OF BOOK BLUNDERS AND NAT WONDERS

Some Good Teachers Never Last

Yesterday I was able to talk with one of our book agents. His is the company who has been in the limelight too often lately because of reports that their books contain significant factual and even conceptual errors. He was all in the defensive stance. I cannot blame him. I was wondering though why this person who keeps on critiquing book mistakes always comes out with reports on national TV almost always at the end of the school year. Why not produce the report at the beginning of the school year, or better, before the next school year commences?

I am now more inclined to think that this lawyer who reviews books works for another book company. At the end of the school year, the Dept. of Education obviously reviews everything for the next academic year. Books with mistakes irk parents who think the government owes them more than free basic education. Erroneous books should be changed is their clamor or our dear children will not learn anything more than Gagambino or Santino. I hope this lawyer-book critique reviews all books and really works for the excellence of our dear country’s deteriorating basic education system. (Sob…sob…sob!)

Because current books now used by our dear students have mistakes, unfortunately this will affect their stellar performance in the Sophomore National Achievement Test (NAT). This is according to teachers who are idiots and should not have been teaching. Anyway what they are only after is the monthly difference of their salaries minus all the loans that equal in number to the erroneous book entries. Poor NAT performance equates with less satisfactory performance rating – another wrong notion that encourages cheating among teachers (not students) during nationally administered tests.

Substandard books, less student understanding, poor NAT performance, less satisfactory performance rating, less salary makes Miss Tapia even poorer because she still has to pay for the monthly installment of her new motorbike she rides to school, then back home. She is left with nothing to eat, so she decides to sell ukay-ukay bras, fake Avon jewelries and ice candies to augment her income. These and everything without regard of all the personal, moral and social incentives just because of a publisher who publishes publications with wrong publishments(?) Yucks!

A teacher should understand that she is not supposed to teach the book. She is supposed to teach knowledge, skills and attitudes. Hers is a work not just confined to asking the students to read for facts in the book but rather teaching the students to think and explore beyond the facts that they have read. A teacher is not supposed to even be guided by the book or the book manual because she is supposed to contextualize her lessons. Book authors and what they have written are way up the ivory towers when our students and the lives they live everyday is way down.

Do not blame the book companies for less student understanding. Do not blame the erroneous book entries for poor NAT performances. Do not blame the book publishers why teacher performance rating is less satisfactory. Do not blame anyone, anything and on anywhere why we teachers wallow in poverty. In the very first place, we were not taught that teachers earn well in this country. That is why when we go back and visit the prestigious university or the state college where we graduated from all the instructors now are as bobo as we are because the intelligent professors have left us and the country for good. (Another sob…sob…sob!)

In both pictures are some of our best teachers that have just to leave school for reasons they themselves only knew.