Learning then and now

Some people or organizations do not give much thought to names and, more importantly, acronyms. When I was first researching in the National Library in the early 1980s, I came to know of the publications of the Cultural Research Association of the Philippines. When the association was established, didn’t they realize what their acronym would be? When I was involved with government cultural agencies there were so many acronyms: NHI (National Historical Institute), TNL (The National Library), NM (National Museum), PCCA (Presidential Commission for Culture and the Arts) that ended up as the NCCA, not the basketball association (NCAA) but the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. One of the acronyms that always made me smile was the National Artist Awards that was known internally as “NAAWA” (to have pity).

The tertiary-level Rizal course is known under different course names and acronyms. In De La Salle University, it was once known as JPR100 or Jose P. Rizal 100. In the Ateneo, I took it as Hi 180 (History 180), taught it as Hi 165, until its recent iteration as Histo 11 (History 11) whose course description is very grand: “Rizal and the emergence of the Filipino Nation.” At the University of the Philippines, the course is described in more generic terms as Philippine Institutions 100. Naturally, students forced to take the course utter the famous Filipino expletive when they see the course number “P.I. 100.”

When Rizal was a high school student in the Jesuit-run Ateneo Municipal de Manila, he carved out from a piece of “batikuling,” a soft Philippine wood, a rather crude image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He was a boy, inclined to religion at the time, and took to this Jesuit devotion. When I was in Ateneo Grade School, we heard Mass on First Fridays of the month. I heard that when the Jesuits put up their theology school, their first choice of name was Sacred Heart Institute of Theology. When someone pointed out what the acronym would be, they settled for LST or Loyola School of Theology.

All these thoughts and acronyms came up as I looked back on over 30 years of classroom teaching. When I began my teaching journey, my tools were simply the course material in my head, a voice to articulate it, and a piece of chalk to write on the board with. Chalk dust was bothersome, so someone invented dustless chalk, today we use white boards and a marking pen. From the beginning, I knew that one of the best ways to teach history was to use pictures. I invested in my own Kodak carousel, a round plastic container where I arranged my lecture slides in order of presentation during a lecture. I felt cutting edge long before slide projectors were replaced by LCD projectors, and we had more sleek presentations on PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, and whatever else is new these days. In between the Kodak slide projector and LCD projectors, there was the overhead projector where teachers presented their images and notes to the class from acetate. One could have book pages photocopied on acetate for class use, and some teachers adapted by writing their notes with Pentel pen on sheets cut from plastic bags instead of acetate. Remembering any or all of these teaching “technologies” dates a person.

Doing my first research or term paper, our citations had to follow “Turabian” from Kate Turabian, author of our pirated textbook, “A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.” Turabian is the kiddie-version of the Chicago Manual of Style, and the citation format is different from American Psychological Association or Modern Language Association that many of my current students prefer.

In my time, citations were half the battle, the real challenge was typing these on a manual typewriter. Today, it is so simple to insert a footnote into a document, so easy to cut and paste. With a typewriter, we had to use a guide or a piece of bond paper, with margins drawn out with Pentel pen, behind the page we were typing on. One had to know how many twists to give the cylinder knob or carriage return to install footnotes. When we made a mistake and didn’t want to type out a whole page, the remedy was typing out the bad letter (s) or symbol (s) with erasing type. Then there was a white paint the color of bond paper called “Snopake” used to cover up all erasures. If you wanted to move a whole chunk of text, you would literally “cut” it out of the paper with scissors and “paste” it on another sheet. Today, it is just a matter of clicks to highlight, cut, and paste on a screen.

Students of my generation used heavy dictionaries to look up words, today students have spellcheck and grammar check. They even have artificial intelligence that can write their papers! My generation had to search through physical books in a library, today almost everything is on Google or Google Scholar. YouTube can teach you anything from frying an egg to knowing the ingredients required to build a nuclear bomb. With all these advances in technology, the real question is—why is Philippine education in such dire straits?

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