MEDIUM RARE
Jullie Y. Daza
Every blessed year, the recitation of so-called challenges faced by teachers, parents, and students is what marks the first day of school; it’s a ritual, really. After generations of teaching and learning, the faster those problems age the more unchanging they remain, same-same.
What makes the exercise so beyond the reach of our corrective tools? Is it rocket science, is it anywhere like summarizing Gray’s Anatomy in five pages? Shouldn’t it be as simple as expecting the sun to rise in the east and the apple to fall from the tree? Not enough classrooms, not enough desks, books, teachers? Nothing new there.
Lesson No. 1: How to count the kids enrolled for the current schoolyear. It’s not as if an increase in the number of enrollees is totally unexpected (it’s an annual occurrence). To predict the unpredictable may not be a science but surely there’s an art to anticipating transferees from private schools, migration from the provinces, and the usual foreseen/unforeseen factors.
The first day of classes last Monday was a jaw-dropping moment for me to see and hear TV reporters counting heads in the biggest public elementary and high schools. One had 6,000 enrollees, another was bursting at the seams with 20,000. Numbers numb my brain, so how about Polytechnic University of the Philippines with 70,000 students, the largest state university in Manila, bar none.
When I attended college in Manila (not PUP) one century ago, the university population was 20,000, including high school, college, and graduate students: 20,000 on a tree-lined campus of 20 ha – that’s 1,000 persons per hectare -- was no big deal, not even when the figures boomed to 42,000 decades later.
The point is, how do you now accommodate 20,000 frisky young learners on one hectare (a generous calculation) in the middle of a typical urban neighborhood? The fact that our public school teachers and principals have courageously and with aplomb overcome this elementary problem in physics – no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time – says they are wizards, if not geniuses.
Still, crowding is uncomfortable for humans anytime anywhere, so while living with it, let’s find out if it’s conducive to learning and studying. Make that Lesson No. 2.