The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) said that teachers share the same problems with students under the new learning modality. The group said on Sunday that the online class setup now being tried by schools pose various concerns that need to be threshed out.
The teachers aired this comment in reaction to a short film posted by the Facebook page Vincentiments which tackled the subject of online classes.
The short film has garnered 8.1 million views on Facebook since it was posted on Friday, and was met with much criticism from both students and teachers alike. Many viewers criticized the video for portraying teachers as responsible for the students' sad plight.
In the statement, ACT said that the video, while exposing the many problems of online learning and expressed the frustrations of the youth over the modality, "was done in bad taste—peppered with expletives and put teachers in a bad light."
The nine-minute clip shows a student and her difficulties in doing an online report due to the many factors that affect it such as house chores and noise coming from different sources. It later highlighted some more concerns on the online classes through a series of rants by the student directed at the teacher.
Some who claim to be teachers, commented on the video apologizing for these predicaments explaining that they are doing the best that they can do in order to teach the students. There were also students who defended their teachers.
There were others however who said that the video pointed out relevant issues but was done in an ill-mannered way.
"Isa ang malinaw—sinsero tayong matuto at magturo sa gitna ng kinakaharap nating krisis (One thing is clear, we are sincere in learning and teaching amid this crisis)," ACT said.
"We can’t say the same about the government whose botched response to COVID-19 forced us to employ remote learning modalities," it added.
ACT also said that the Department of Education (DepEd) is not even prepared to open classes but pushed through with it. With this, teachers are doing all they could so that they can to work out the shortcomings brought by the new learning modality and yet they are still the ones blamed for its flaws.