Making history ‘current’ to the young

It has been over three decades since I entered a classroom for the first time to stand on the teacher-side of the room, making people presume that lecturing comes easy for me. It is not. Stage fright is always lurking on the first day, and I am surprised none of my students have noticed. Every time I meet a new batch of students, I’m always nervous because I don’t know them and they know me, or have heard exaggerated stories about what goes on in what is often described in campus as “The Ambeth Ocampo Experience.” Living up to one’s reputation can be a difficult thing.

Some teachers use the rostrum, podium or teacher’s desk like a wall that separates and protects. I never use these and walk anxiously to and fro, feeling 80 pairs of eyes following me. Some teachers turn their back on the students to write on the board, or worse, read text on a screen that everyone else can. They may have their back to the students, but the gaze of 80 eyes can be felt burning on the small sensitive hairs behind their head. So I walk and talk and sense 80 pairs of ears clinging to every word that spills from my lips. Some are copying everything down in notebooks, others are typing on laptops; a few have their phones in the air to photograph the board.

First day of school is always difficult for me, but I don’t show it.

Three decades of teaching means I cannot be mistaken as a student anymore. When I was a young lecturer in Diliman, I would sit in the back of the classroom and wait for students to gather, and I would ask them what they heard of the professor and banter a bit. Fifteen minutes into the class, with the professor nowhere in sight someone tells everyone that the teacher is absent and heads out the door. I stand up and before the rest of the class can leave, I lock the door behind the instigator of the revolt, declare him absent, and introduce myself to the bewildered class as their professor.

Some of my students happen to be children of my college classmates; they come from a different world, and have been described over time as Generation X, Y, and Z. They are now millennials, tech-savvy with a limited attention span. They have no taste for the past, and feel no practical use for history. They should be enjoying the world, they should fall in love, they should revel in their youth, yet society forced them into a classroom to listen to a historian talk about a world that is no more. To learn about men and women who figure in the birth of the nation or a time that is as farfetched and irrelevant as dinosaurs. They are supposed to learn about the lives of heroes and heroines; but in their world, the young and beautiful are privileged over the old. Should they be old or old fashioned to be heroes? Should they be dead to become heroes in their time?

The past may very well be a foreign country, because to my students everything is done differently there. Rattling off the names of Jose Rizal’s brother and nine sisters a few years ago, I saw the eyes of the students glaze over and remembered teachers who made them memorize these names and the order of their birth. In my class it’s so easy to remember Rizal was the 7th of 11 children—7-11 is a convenience store. There was a time when almost every newborn girl in the Philippines was christened Maria, and boys became Jose or Jesus after any member of the Holy Family, thus giving us the term “Susmariosep” (from Jesus, Maria y Jose) or a politician called Jejomar for Jesus, Joseph and Mary.

The names of Rizal’s siblings have no resonance anymore. How many Joses do we find today? What child today would be given the names Trinidad, Narcisa, Olympia, Paciano or Saturnina? If history looks and sounds so foreign, how can it teach to 21st-century citizens love for, or even an appreciation of, the 19th-century beginnings of Filipino nationhood?

Over the years I have learned that the history that was once taught to me was seen as an informative subject. It was taught to sharpen the memory, and load up on facts—no wonder many students were traumatized by history. In my class I try to find the connections between the individual dates, names, places, and events because that is the only way to form a relevant narrative. Then this has to be delivered in the most engaging manner possible.

Informative history focused on who, what, where, and when? But then comes the important question—why?

As I matured as a teacher I began to teach history as a formative  rather than an informative subject. I learned that the magic of history was not in stray data but in connections that make the trivial relevant. I’m thinking aloud in this column, wondering how history can be interrogated, turned inside out, so that by asking critical questions and by tracing the story of how a diverse people tried and constantly failed to become the nation they want to be, students will become better citizens and love their country a bit more.

Many schools and universities are scaling down on the humanities and social science subjects in their core curriculums because these seem out of date in a modern and globalizing world. Why do I continue to teach Philippine history? Because it is one of the subjects together with literature, art, anthropology, psychology, foreign languages—subjects that inform and form young people into the humans they can be.

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Comments are welcome at aoacampo@ateneo.edu.