TEACHERS OF SUBSTANCE:LESSONS FROM ELIZABETH KOSTOVA'S THE HISTORIAN

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I closed the book The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova over a year ago with a mixture of exhilaration (what a great book!) and disappointment (what an awful ending!). I won't review the book here, so please check out my FULL BOOK REVIEW BLOG of The Historian over at www.xanga.com/millette_espiritu. More than just another book about vampires--actually The Vampire of lore, Dracula/Vlad Tepes, the novel is a testament to the nobility of the teaching profession.

My favorite character is Professor Bartholomew Rossi, a brilliant historian and quite an intellectual academic superstar in his day. Paul (as narrator in this chapter, while his daughter is his rapt audience) is his dissertation advisee, and clearly, the young graduate student has nothing but admiration for the esteemed Rossi. He was part-English, part-Italian, but the Anglo part, at least in Paul's worshipping eyes, stood out:"His face was of crisp English mold, sharp-featured and intensely blue-eyed...to look into Rossi's face was to see a world as definite and orderly as the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace." It was Rossi's keen mind that made him the American Paul's Idol: "His mind is another thing altogether...his encyclopedic production had long since won him accolades..." But above all else, Rossi was "the kindest, warmest friend I'd ever had." I found the latter to be true in the succeeding chapters. Let me jump the gun here by saying that when Rossi mysteriously disappeared just minutes after his last visit, it was Paul who risked his life to find his mentor.

I can sympathize with Paul. I was the ultimate "sip-sip" in high school, perhaps without meaning to be one. As a student, I remember hanging onto the coattails of my teachers. To my mind, long before I drifted towards the academe myself, teachers were God's gift to humanity. To this day, I believe it to be true. After a quick rewind to my days as a fledgling learner, I've come up with my top 5 all-time favorite teachers:

1. Ms. Dulce Atienza (Grade 5 and 6 Math, Manresa School)-Ms. Atienza is a motherly, articulate teacher who made Math meaningful for me. It has since lost its meaning in high school, when the teachers resorted to terrorism to drill cosines and square roots into my system.I love Ms. Atienza for being kind but firm, and, as my section adviser in 5th grade, for being my second mother.

2. Mrs. Pearl Santos (Freshman English, Manresa School)-My Idol with a capital "I." I lived for her 12-page exams on diagraming sentences, and her stories about her days as a hard-hitting journalist. She was a perfectionist, all business at all times, and she played no favorites when my other teachers then had not-so-subtle "babies." I began to love the English language because of her.

3. Ms. Angie Ureta (Junior and Senior English & History, Manresa School)-She was 19 when she zoomed into our batch's humdrum existence in 1985, and we were enthralled by her youthful candor and world-wise sensibility. I thought back then that she picked on me out of unreasonable cruelty, but I began to realize that she was bulldozing me into finding my niche--writing. What I am now, a writer, I owe to her.

4. Prof. Emmanuel Torres (Shakespeare on Film, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-Firstly, I loved his class because we met every week in the Ateneo Art Gallery. Secondly, he was a non-threatening, soft-spoken, brilliant man who brought us to the Globe Theatre with just a few panoramic sentences, as well as his hard-to-find films. But I will never forget, most of all, his comments on my essays, most of which he would read aloud in class, to my utter embarrassment. For my paper on Mel Gibson's portrayal of Hamlet, he wrote: "With this paper, and others like it, you have demonstrated a potential for being a professional critic." OMG.

5.Prof. Danton Remoto (Survey of Philippine Literature, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School)-I will never again read NVM Gonzalez' The Bamboo Dancers without thinking of Prof. Remoto's acerbic comments on protagonist Ernie Rama's sexuality. Our class of 6 students was clearly in awe of this man's literary genius, and I for one, was motivated to churn out academic papers that would hopefully meet his standard, which I'm afraid I never did. But that's OK. Today, I see him fight for gay and lesbian rights on TV with much tact and poise, and I'm proud to tell one and all that Danton Remoto was my teacher.


To my delightful surprise, a former student, Maika Bernardo, wrote about me in Inquirer.net:
"Miss Millette encouraged me to write more and head the school paper staff. Her words of praise helped aspiring writers to come out of their shell. With her encouragement, I earned a leadership award on graduation day."


To view the full article, see:
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20091004-228351

I believe that teachers impart learning more effectively if they are MENTORS, not instructors. I've tried mentoring, and I can safely claim that I've done more for my students this way, rather than give them lectures thay can always download from some website. This is confirmed in The Historian, particularly in Paul and Rossi's warm, genuine friendship forged by a common love and respect for history, and for each other as human beings. And this is affirmed by the many teachers I've thanked along my life's journey, and the many students like Maika who have thanked me simply by being good, God-fearing, productive citizens of the world.

WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER READING CURRICULUM

For the second time in two years, Veritas Parochial School hosted The Gathering 2, an overnight celebration of discussing books, meeting fellow book lovers, and listening to music. The school's book clubs have decided to do this every first Friday night of December. Last year it was all about Twilight. This year, it was all about 10+ books--a veritable explosion of pages! Students discussed George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games,among others, to listeners in their PJs, lounging on sleeping bags.

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Podcasts of Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book were broadcast. Top discussants won prizes and enthusiastic applause.

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Unbeknownst to the sleeping book lovers, I spent the night/early morning poring over reader's journals submitted to me by senior high schoolers who opted out of the book talk. The journals were a revelation, for like most journals, they chronicle the reading process meticulously, but unlike most journals, they were bursting in color, favorite passages, even a movie stills collage. Creativity to the fullest!

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All this leads me to wonder why the Department of Education can't see what's right in front of them: young people thumbing across the pages of books, discussing plot and character, making book trailers, making scrapbooks--generally enjoying the reading process. If you were a parent perusing the pages of the English curriculum, with all the macro-skills blah and the Understanding By Design-BS, you'd be afraid for your child. Could he really master all 95 reading subskills? Will not spotting the main idea outright jeopardize his job-acceptance chances? Will his teacher penalize him for not buying 3 textbooks and 3 workbooks in Language, Reading and Speech, respectively?

In my 17 years as English teacher, I can now safely assure all worried parents that the Philippine English curriculum does not decide the fate of their children. Former DepEd Undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz, speaking to Diocese of Paranaque educators in June 2009, cites an international study claiming that a literacy-rich home environment is actually the BEST INDICATOR of student success:

100 books in the house
1 computer in the house
the child's own study desk in the house

(Source: TIMSS 1998, 2003)

And by student success, we don't just look at reading, but maths and sciences as well.

In Finland, a nation that consistently tops international examinations, the teachers are not boxed in by a national curriculum; they design their lessons with their students and make adjustments when necessary. Teachers and students practice equity in the learning process.

Bottomline: invest in books, a working personal computer, internet access, a study desk, and TIME with children as they read and ask questions.

As for me and the Veritas community, we just simply enjoy books, and make them available to all. We have future projects that will put 3 brand new non-academic books in every high schooler's hands for him to keep.

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I don't need an international study to tell me the overflowing benefits of reading for my students.

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I just listen to their book talks and browse their journals, and I'm happy.

ENTERTAIN OR DIE: THE HUNGER GAMES REVIEW

Imagine fighting to the death just so your loved ones could eat. We who have food on our table take it for granted, but not Katniss Everdeen, 16-year-old resident of District 12 in the country of Panem, a make-believe world where hunger, poverty and deprivation are everyday occurrences. The Capitol, Panem's Ruling District, has decreed that the 12 districts, as an indelible, chilling reminder of a quelled rebellion by District 13 against the Big C, should send one boy and one girl, aged 12-18, every year, to compete in The Hunger Games, a live action TV reality show broadcast throughout Panem. But The Hunger Games are no "Survivor", "Amazing Race", or "Wipeout." Competitors aren't just eliminated, they are murdered. The victor, the last man (or woman) standing, gets the ultimate prize: food for his/her district for one year.

I just described the Games. Wait till you meet the characters. Katniss, a coal miner's daughter, volunteered to compete in her 12-year-old sister's place. Her male counterpart is Peeta Mellark, a baker's son, who confesses on National TV that he's had a crush on Katniss since they were five. Media hype or true love? That's for the rabid televiewers to decide, and they seem to love the idea of star-crossed lovers with only one, or none, surviving in the finale. Katniss and Peeta, along with 22 other contenders, battle natural and artificial disasters, and each other, but in the end, the real enemy, The Capitol, becomes the target of social unrest once again. What happens next is in book 2 of the trilogy, Catching Fire.

As adventure stories go, this belongs to the family of "dystopian" literature where an alternate world is viewed as dark and depressing, where the characters are forced to compromise their very human nature due to their dire circumstances. William Golding's classic "Lord of the Flies" is an example, where boy scouts stranded in an island gradually lose their civility in the battle for jungle supremacy. Collins wrote a gem of a young adult novel, balancing bittersweet romance with often brutal cunning. Whether she intended it or not, The Hunger Games is a commentary on a materialistic society that preys on young people, making them crave, claw, and clamor, and in the process, lose their dignity and humanity.

Like the garden variety reality shows that smell suspiciously scripted,The Hunger Games has its contrived moments, beginning from the lottery that brought about Peeta and Prim's names, and Katniss' volunteerism. Put that aside, the book is a beautifully-written, character-intensive, techno-adventure novel teeming with love for family and simple joys of living. Older teens (15-19) will surely like it, and jump right into the sequel.