I can still clearly remember, it was sometime in April 2013, when my former Advertising professor texted me to ask if I would be interested to teach in Colegio de San Juan de Letran, my alma mater. I said yes right away albeit I felt a bit nervous. Would I be able to teach? I did not have proper and academic training to be an educator.
Letran, specifically its Institute of Communication, prides itself in hiring the media practitioners like me. We are actual people on the field, working in the industry. The school believes that the best teachers for the Communication students are the communication professionals themselves, and it so happened that at that time, I already had a 5-year experience in ABS-CBN Foundation.
As a young teacher, I relied on the all – time safe pedagogy that was behaviorist. I prepared my lectures ahead of time and gave my students seat works, home works, quizzes and exams. Letran is a school of tradition, requiring us to give the standard 5 scores for class standing, at least 3 scores for quizzes, 2 long quizzes and 2 major exams. As an amateur educator, I chose to learn the ropes first, trust the given process, and be a typical teacher.
Semesters and school years came and went. I started understanding the students on a deeper level and learning from them, in the same manner that I began understanding who I am and what kind of a teacher I truly am.
I am the kind that the students can approach along the hallways or via Facebook Messenger. I do not mind informal conversations unlike professors who are older than I am. It is during this process when I realized that students are more than their performance inside the classroom. They are more than their grades. It is just one portion of their total being.
This is the time when I started to look beyond the suggested and given syllabi, readings and references. I began studying about my students, or their generation in general. I learned their language, their triggers. What makes them happy? Or, are they even happy? Why are they depressed all the time?
So, what used to be just a random career choice for me has become my purpose. I slowly let go of the tradition no matter how safe and convenient it was. I tried different approaches and made mistakes in the process. It was a scary moment, but an enlightening one.
I stopped teaching to finish my Master’s. But I definitely would want to go back in the future. And by that time, I will have these things in mind:
1. Based on what they would learn, students must create something that is useful for the society.
2. Students must acknowledge that they can be wrong. In this world where anyone is so obsessed to be right, it is refreshing to have a bunch of children to teach the adults to acknowledge that it is okay to be wrong, because we are simply, human beings.
3. Students should ask MORE questions – to be critical of the world and not be just mere recipients of learning.
4. Ultimately, students should discover who they are or who they want to become, and it is okay if they do not know it, yet.
My goal is to be in the background, to facilitate their inward journey to know themselves better, to have internal interrogation.
Because in the society screaming too many ideologies, I still choose to follow the Eastern way of mentorship, of going in full solitude and knowing the self.
Because this is exactly the kind of mentor I was looking for when I was young, someone to help me navigate through life, someone to tell me that it is okay to be different. It is okay if you do not conform. It is okay to question the world.
References
What is Pedagogy?. (2018). Electronic Reference. Retrieved from https://www.tes.com/news/what-is-pedagogy-definition
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