Even and especially in graduate school, we teachers complain about the poor preparation many students manifest, a little too late; their grammar is faulty, they can’t write logically argued and responsibly documented essays, and they haven’t read a good book since high school. Well then, I add quickly, who’s to blame but we teachers ourselves? Why didn’t one of us teach them these basic academic skills, and inspire them to undertake daring adventures – like read a book by someone they’d never heard of, or write a poem to someone who’s been dead a hundred years? (This isn’t to absolve parents, who often leave all the responsibility of educating their kids to poorly paid, poorly motivated teachers, and expect their darlings to come home geniuses.)
I got my first shock of the semester when I asked my class – most of them juniors and seniors – if they remembered the names of their literature teachers in their freshman year. In a class of almost 20, only one or two did. My Lord, I thought – do we teach so immemorably that we cross these students’ paths like soft-footed ghosts?
If there was someone I never forgot from high school, it was my English teacher – Mrs. Agnes Banzon Vea – who fired up my imagination, gave more importance to my words than I myself did, and made me understand that writing was as much discipline as delight. In college, uncompromisingly demanding professors like Sylvia Ventura and Wilhelmina Ramas taught us to read Shakespearean texts so closely that we could almost sniff the perfumed sails of Cleopatra’s barge – and to read first before mouthing an opinion.
While working for my PhD in the US many years later, one of my proudest moments came when my professor Tom Bontly took a sentence of mine and held it up for the scrutiny of the class – not for any unusual loftiness of idea or wizardry of technique. "Look," Tom said, "at how perfectly this sentence is punctuated." Credit that to my teachers, who knew that whatever it was you had to say, mastery of the sentence and its elements was the key to saying it well.
All these were on my mind as I plunged into my first week of renewed teaching in the trenches. I would mind their language; I would tell them things and ask them questions they’d never heard; I would make them remember my name, even if all I do is walk them through the maze of the compound-complex sentence.
The sorriest case I was personally concerned with involved a student who was graduating and running for honors; she submitted a story to my fiction writing class that I found more than competently written, with an old-fashioned charm that caused me to remark, "They don’t write stories like this anymore," and to give her a correspondingly high grade. The story proved good enough to qualify her for the UP Writers Workshop – which proved her undoing. Unfortunately for her, another panelist with an elephant’s memory recalled a story with a similar plot, published in Tagalog in the 1940s. We went to the library over lunch and located the story in question, and true enough, the workshop story turned out to be a line-by-line translation of the source material.
The student denied the charge when confronted with the evidence, but some scenes in both versions were so unique that there was absolutely no possibility that two brilliant minds could have independently come up with them, in the same context and sequence, half a century apart. The sad outcome of this episode was that she was forced to leave the university in disgrace, in what would have been her last joyous semester. (Wherever she is, I hope she’s learned and recovered from that mistake, and moved on to more positive pursuits.)
Experience tells me that it’s either the very dumb or the very smart who plagiarize – the very dumb, because they feel it’s their only option, and the very smart, because they think they can outwit the teacher. In my writing student’s case, I’d have to say she did; I can’t possibly read and know everything, and that one got past me. If it hadn’t been for a hawk-eyed colleague, she might even have gone on to a respectable writing career, which ironically was in her grasp, anyway, given her obvious talents outside of that story. And had she presented the work as a translation rather than her own invention, I might’ve given her credit for it. (Alex Haley, author of the celebrated Roots, admitted lifting whole chunks of the book from a 1968 novel, whose author he had to pay $650,000 out of court; worse, he was found to have fabricated the source of the family history that he may have been "fictionalizing" but which he also claimed was based on facts.)
And then again sometimes we teachers are at fault, for neglecting to explain just what plagiarism means, why intellectual honesty is important, and what the consequences might be. We let what seem to be minor cases of copying go by, too fatigued or too lazy to give the student a proper talking-to.
In this age of the Internet, plagiarism is easier and more inviting than ever to commit, with the information we need just a Google search away (I use Google often enough for this column, but I tell you when I’m willfully using borrowed material). Conversely, of course, the Internet also makes it easy for a Web-savvy teacher to track down the source of surprisingly lucid and amazingly well-informed paragraphs. I remind my students that if they can find a paper on the Internet, so can I. (My own solution is to assign them a topic of my own choice, about which I can be sure next to nothing has been written.)
Of course, a UP student wouldn’t be a UP student if he or she didn’t feel aggrieved for one reason or other, but let’s put our griping in context. Thanks to an antiquated tuition fee structure, a typical UP freshman or sophomore pays only about P6,500 a semester at full tuition; many pay nothing. For that low price, our people and politicians expect UP to provide an education that will guarantee high passing marks in the national professional licensure exams and respect from our international academic peers. (The actual cost of maintaining and educating a UP student in Diliman is about P45,000 a year, so beyond the token tuition, a UP education is really paid for by the sweat of ordinary taxpayers.)
The government gives UP money to the tune of about P4.5 billion a year, which looks like a lot, but which isn’t, when you figure that the UP System now comprises seven universities spread out across the country (plus, at least P1 billion of that budget goes straight to the Philippine General Hospital, which falls under UP). Even with that money, our professors can’t get paid more than P30,000 a month. We’ve been pushing for a bill that would allow us to generate and fund our own salary increases, but some politicians have interposed all kinds of silly demands and preconditions that they’ve been unwilling or unable to apply to the government agencies with real money to make and to misuse.
To get back to my students: I hope their four or five years with us will be as much fun as it will certainly be taxing, but I also hope they never forget who really paid for their tuition, and more. It isn’t even the government, which just collects and keeps our money for us (and gives some back, after skimming its due) – it’s the working stiff whose own kids, ironically, might not even make it to UP.
As trenches go, you can do far worse than to teach in UP. I may dislike some of the people, but I enjoy the leafy glades of Diliman, where we don’t have to slog through 40 or 44 units of teaching every semester, like our breathless colleagues have to do in some downtown universities. And here I can teach literature with no priest or politician looking over my shoulder, telling me what to think. That’s worth almost any aggravation they can throw my way.