Afterthoughts

I have returned to Chicago. From the time I left Manila to the time I touched down in Chicago was 25 hours. I have never been able to sleep for more than a few minutes on a plane, and the flight over the Pacific was a little bumpy so I am quite tired. I did get an e-mail from Gloria Niez in Bontoc saying that a comment that I put in by an American named Johnny was causing a stir among some of her friends in education.

Johnny is an American who came to the Philippines thirty years ago as a member of the Peace Corps. He got married to a Filipina and has lived in the Philippines for thirty years. He has two teenage daughters who have gone to school in the Philippines and in the United States. He spends time in the Philippines and in the US as does the rest of his family.

The comment that he made to me was that he was having his daughters finish their high school in the US because he thought that schools in the Philippines relied too much on memorization rather than critical thinking. I should mention that his daughters went to school in Tagbilaran in Bohol.

I should state that this was HIS OPINION. I have visited classrooms and talked with students in Bontoc and Dalaguete in the past three years, and I have tutored students in Payatas, but I have not done any observations of class instructions and certainly can not make such a blanket statement. However, people in the general public do make blanket statements, and they do have impacts. People in America are convinced that Asian students are way above Americans in math skills. My friend James Kang who was born in Korea can tell you how he has lived with this stereotype. He will be the first to tell you that he was not one of these way above average Asians. Another instance of opinion was that of one of my co-teacher Bill Singerman's acquaintances who was from the Philippines. He was indignant that I could actually have taught English in the Philippines. All Filipinos he said knew English, and why would anyone have to teach them the language? OPINIONS DO HAVE IMPACTS.

Do Filipino schools stress memorization as opposed to critical thinking? There is no way to answer this question because schools differ. However, these opinions do matter. Johnny made decisions because of his opinions. Teachers differ widely in the way they teach. Bontoc National High School has an English teacher, Joseph Anavesa, whose classroom I visited this year and last year. One of the activities he had students do was analyze a song from the Disney movie Pocohantas. I thought it was a wonderful lesson. It combined the love for songs that I saw in the Philippines with the opportunity to think about what was being said in the song. It was definitely an assignment that involved critical thinking. Mrs. Caday's classes in food preparation gave plenty of opportunities to combine these assignments with chemistry. Pastor Lando Ceniza who lives in Payatas and grew up in Bontoc, is always experimenting with agriculture in his work and Payatas, and he remembers how his classes in Bontoc integrated chemistry and biology with farming and fisheries.

So can I go back and tell Johnny that he is wrong about the schools in the Philippines? Well, he is wrong to assume that all schools are stressing memorization over critical thinking. The example that he gave me to justify his opinion was that his daughters who were quite fluent in English and had spent a good deal of time in New York had done poorly on an English test which required them to identify the meanings of 150 jargon phrases. This assignment could easily become an example of sheer memorization I admit. But there are assignments like this in US classes too.

Every parent makes decisions for their children, and Johnny and his wife made a decision for their two girls. The decision on what school to send your children to should involve researching the school and the teachers.

As a teacher, I must say, however, that my decisions would be influenced by some other factors too.

Class size, I am convinced, does make a difference in how teaching goes on.
I regularly see in frontof me twelve to eighteen students at a time. I think my lessons would be quite different if I saw forty to fifty students at a time.
Class size in the Philippines is considerably larger those I am used to.

Class days in the provinces seemed much longer, but in Payatas they were much shorter.
Inday regularly leaves for school around 7:30 each day and finishes after 4. So she has at least an hour more of school each day than my students do.

I do think that longer school days do help teaching instruction. (My students will probably kill me if they see this in print!!)

In Payatas, students would tell me about going to school from 6 a.m. to noon while others would go from noon to 6 p.m.

In spite of what I just said, I went to a high school where we had classes from 7 to noon, and I think I benefited because I read close to three books a week with the extra time.


Access to books, the internet, and multi-media does impact teaching, and the schools in the Philippines really could benefit from more of these.

Bontoc has a high school where students can do hands on projects in agriculture. This is something that I think is a great asset, and I saw a number of kids in other schools working on gardens. Very few American schools have something similar.

Kids in the provinces have much more freedom than American kids in big cities. American kids are much more likely to be confined to classrooms
or their homes than kids in the provinces of the Philippines. My opinion is that American kids can really miss a lot because of this. Television becomes a baby sitter.