Back to school

Those images of kids asleep at their desks, another bawling away at being left by mommy in a strange place, still others smiling, happy to be with friends again and hopefully happy too and looking forward to new discoveries and new challenges of learning led me to dig deep into my baul of memories of those days oh so long ago when June for me meant not, as it does now, that the year is about half gone but that another year in school is starting.

Some things, even after all these years, haven’t changed all that much. New shoes – black, of course, with rubber soles so you won’t slip when playing patin-tero or touching ball (do kids these days still play such games? do they even know what these are?), white socks, new uniforms if you’ve grown enough so that the old ones no longer meet the required skirt length (especially if you go to one of those girls’ schools that equate skirt length with modesty and good moral values). I don’t know why girls’ uniforms always involve pleats – box pleats, accordion pleats – that require you to “sit properly” so you can maintain the straightness of the pleats all day (maybe this is another one of those modesty and moral values things). I think this is probably why to this day I refuse to wear skirts with pleats.

This time of year also meant new books and new notebooks. Then as now I love the smell of a new book, and the sound when the book’s spine cracks the first time you open it. When you start out with a clean notebook you always try to write legibly and neatly and try not to make a mistake so you don’t have erasures on the first page. The week before classes start all those new books have to be covered in plastic, which you buy from the bookstore in a long, thin roll, and when you get home you unroll and stretch out the big sheet of plastic on the floor and lay out the books, measuring carefully to maximize usage.

In this age of e-books (even in some high schools, I’m told) and a shortage still of books in many schools all this must sound downright neanderthal and/or alien, in the days long before smart is used as an adjective for a phone, those are the rituals of June, milestones that mark the passage of time and youth.

My colleague, looking at our first day of school photos last Monday, wondered if those kids sleeping at their desks realize how many more such mornings they have to go through before they’re done with school; it’s enough to make you want to drop out! Despite the government’s claim that it has built more than 66,000 classrooms to wipe out the previous shortage, overcrowding was still a problem is some schools last Monday, particularly in Metro Manila. With population growing at nearly two percent (1.89 percent to be exact, according to the Philippine National Statistics Office’s 2010 census; the next census is scheduled for 2015) and expected to breach 100 million this year, can we build additional classrooms fast enough and hire enough teachers and print enough textbooks to cope with the increase in the number of kids needing to go to school?