Learning history from my English teacher
Growing up, English and history were my favorite subjects. But when classrooms were reduced to teachers’ parroted instructions and students were stuck in a rut mostly listening and taking down notes, I felt deprived of a serious head start to learn English and history. As I was about to give up, the watch-and-train regimen of our new nonstandard English teacher was a shot in the arm.
In his creative writing class, our eyes open wide and our jaws drop, as he declares that our textbook is bleeding the text, feeding an information overload and theories containing rote memory work rather than practical application. In place of textbooks, he reproduces “input floods” from scholarly books, journals, magazines, and newspapers stored in our library, where we come down to reading during our free time. He stirs us up to be deep readers or we cannot be good writers, he says.
He has proven that no amount of listening, reading, speaking, and writing is a waste in learning how to write and speak English. Writing essays has been a staple in his class because, according to him, he would know how far we’ve developed content, grammar, and intellect, and how we’ve trained ourselves to think analytically and organize thoughts.
Without any doubt, he can effectively deliver any topic without an open book or PowerPoint presentation that amuses us to no end. He really is an incredible teacher with a wealth of knowledge, unscripted wit, and a sense of humor. While we sit and write in a quiet room with the soft sound of pencil marks on worksheets in the air, he would break the silence with humor to punctuate it with sudden rumbles of laughter.
Though he can explore any topic under the sun, he favors history because most of us need a big dose of it, being in a generation that knows little history and what it stands for—causing us to be abused, cheated, robbed blindly time and again by elected public officials who claim kinship with the poor and give them better life but whose actions deny them.
Knowing how difficult it must be for us to sink into the facts of martial law, the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution, and Marcos excesses, he inspires us to be attentive as he presents the truth until we’ve learned to be on our toes, think objectively, and get ourselves on the right side of history. We don’t take it as an offense that his proverbial definition of an idiot is someone who does not know history, facts, and the truth.
Every now and then he reads along to us the current historical, political, and social issues while asking us to analyze, to know the right frame of argument, and to stand for it. He explains: “By stating the facts rather than arguing for passion or emotion will likely win for us any contentions, arguments, or debates.” For example, we won’t consciously let history be revised had we known that we could never twist history only to rescue Marcos from the massive corruption and the brutality of his martial law. We would not be taken for a ride by Rodrigo Duterte’s vested interest, shady deals, double speak, corruption, injustices, and disregard for the poor. “We must apply the highest form of argument using philosophy which has always been proven right even before the birth of Christ up to this day and age,” he concludes.
At work, he treats his fellow teachers professionally, empathizes with a bottomless amount of pure patience for some indolent hard-headed students, and applies various teaching styles that best suit them.
I could feel the burning passion within him as he sheds light on dishonesty, injustices, corruption, treason, and historical revisionism in government, and educates us on responsibility and maturity, academic excellence, and good character. I think many students deserve to experience learning under a teacher like him. That’s why I feel honored to have Sir Pit M. Maliksi, our best English teacher.
Herodatos LDSP ’23 (pen name), 17, is a Grade 12 senior student of Liceo de San Pablo, San Pablo City, Laguna, who admires English and history teachers who bring out the best in students.
