Jurassic teaching days

With the change in our academic calendar, the first semester, which traditionally opened days before or after Independence Day on June 12 and closed in October before All Saints Day, Nov. 1, now starts in August and ends in December before Christmas. The second semester, which used to begin after Nov. 2, All Souls Day, and closed in March, now starts in January and ends in May.

Graduates used to march in March, when narra trees shed their flowers to create a pretty orange carpet appreciated by everyone, save those afflicted with hay fever. In UP Diliman, graduation was associated with sunflowers abloom on University Avenue. But all that is a memory now, since the new academic calendar has reset our biological clocks.

Summer, the former “vacacion grande” (long vacation) from April to May, highlighted by Holy Week, is now no more for many who follow the new calendar. For the unfortunate ones studying in classrooms without air-conditioning, heat and humidity are the main complaints. Another issue is Semana Santa; while everyone enjoys the five-day break, all previous lessons and momentum evaporate by Easter Sunday, making the Monday return to the classroom a challenge.

“Intersession” has replaced “Summer,” to literally describe the term that runs in between regular semesters daily for six weeks, from June to July. The main problem with the Intersession is not the handful of days of intense heat and humidity, but the class suspensions resulting from typhoons or heavy monsoon rains that bring floods, traffic, colds and leptospirosis. Classes in a regular semester can cope with missed days, but in the Intersession, a day or two missed means cramming content to beat the end of term exams and grading.

Things have changed a lot since I was a student whose term paper was refused by a professor because it was not typewritten. It was composed on Word and generated on continuous sheets with a dot-matrix printer. Gone are the days when readings were photocopied and bought in packs from designated Xerox ladies on campus. I think I have saved enough trees for a little forest, since my readings are available online in pdf format and I have stopped accepting hard copies of requirements in favor of soft copies delivered to a classroom application.

Late papers are locked out of the app after the deadline, so excuses have changed from “I forgot my paper at home” to “there was a brownout and we had no internet access last night.” No more “the dog ate my paper” excuses these days, but some complain about viruses that affected their files.

My only problem with a wired and paperless classroom is that students can send their papers electronically any time of day or night, from any part of the world with an internet connection, and they demand that these be read and graded in real time. I often have to explain that there are 80 different submissions and just one teacher who needs to read and mark them all.

All these remind me of Rizal’s 19th-century classroom in Dapitan with a flat piece of molave as a blackboard. In the 21st century, these are still called blackboards when they are actually green. Chalk was the great pedagogical tool, until someone saved us from chalk dust by inventing the whiteboard that is actually white. The only problem? Careless professors who cannot distinguish between whiteboard and permanent Pentel pens.

Then, the next cutting-edge tool was the overhead projector for acetate or plastic notes. These contraptions are still displayed, some chained to the floor, as classroom antiques, obsolete in the age of LCD projectors that can run lecture notes, audio and video from a laptop or smartphone. When a teacher wrote on the board in the past, heads went down as text was copied manually with pen on paper. Today, heads and cell phones go up and the board is photographed.

A few years ago, a student came up to me with the syllabus to ask if the readings were available online. When I replied that not all things were online and sometimes one had to visit the library, he gave me a slightly belligerent look and sneered: “You want me to handle a physical book?”

I stared him down, of course, but realized later that maybe this Jurassic professor should consider retirement.

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