Pride evokes yearning

Here’s a gift of good news at the end of a most difficult year: A Filipino-American, Lovelyn Marquez Prueher, was named one of California’s Teachers of the Year. The 34-year-old English teacher at Los Angeles’ Dodson Middle School is the first Filipino to earn such a distinction.

Originally from Cavite, Prueher moved to the United States at the age of nine only to find that she had to hurdle many challenges just to fit in. Among them: as primary as language. Classmates bullied her because they thought she possessed a learning disability. Her own teacher thought likewise. “Those challenges have made me a strong advocate for immigrant students who are English learners,” she recalled.

In her teens, Prueher was hired to tutor in English a neighbor who had just arrived from the Philippines. She proved very good at it, and soon the neighbor was reading more easily. “At that moment, I felt an inexplicable joy—I knew then I wanted to become a teacher.”

She became a teacher with a difference: She pays particular attention to non-native English speakers like herself, making sure they get the proper tutoring. “This shows how I have come full circle from being an English learner who was suspected of having a learning disability… to becoming an educator who can make a positive difference in the lives of immigrant students,” she said.

One could say Prueher’s story is a success story of an immigrant who made it in a foreign country she has claimed as her own. And a most Filipino story as well: Her father worked as a seaman and had to leave their home for long periods of time. Her lolo and lola helped raise her, and Prueher says the Filipino values she imbibed made her who she is today, particularly as a teacher. “My parents, who are very religious, taught me to be honest, so I’m very sincere and open with my students. I tell them heartfelt stories about the challenges I faced as a child, how I was bullied because I didn’t speak English well.”

Her fluency in the language of her adopted country—English—and her eventual recognition as a “model teacher” who connects effectively with her students prove that she has assimilated well. Her success displays the virtues of perseverance, patience and industry, particularly among immigrants in the United States, a “melting pot,” to be sure, but—as even US President Barack Obama has noted in so many words in his long and bitter fight to bring about immigration reforms—hostile to “other people” who do not conform to the norm.

This is an important point because Filipinos play an important part in current American education. In Prueher’s state of California, over 150,000 youth of Filipino origin, or 2.43 percent of the total student population, represented the fourth most common ethnicity in public schools in the school year 2013-2014, more than the Hispanics or Caucasians. And so were teachers of Filipino descent, some 4,000 of them; they are also the fourth biggest ethnic group among the teachers in the California public school system in 2012-2013. More than at any other point in time, these teachers are making a powerful impact on American society through education.

“This is not just an award but an opportunity to talk to students, parents and fellow teachers all over California about what it’s like to be an immigrant—and to be suspected of having a learning disability because of language needs,” she said of the honor. “This is about overcoming obstacles by working really hard and not settling for being average.”

Prueher’s story is a pleasant development in the Philippine diaspora, but one notes wistfully that someone as dedicated as she, as industrious, and as acknowledging of her Filipino roots, is needed most, not elsewhere, but here in the motherland.