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All Saints' and All Souls' Days this year gave us a prayerful and unifying respite in the wake of the triple-typhoon disaster that struck the country in Central and Northern Luzon. The disaster involved the rest of us, including sympathetic nations in the international community, in an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy and generosity that assured us, particularly our affected suffering and bereaved brethren, that we are not alone.
Traditionally, All Saints' and All Souls' Days bring together families, relatives and friends in various churches and cemeteries to share prayers and cherished memories of our dear departed.
In earlier years, my family used to go on a pilgrimage of sorts to various cemeteries to see who of those we knew had gone, and to pray for them. But when my father died, followed much later by my mother, crowds made it easier to just visit their graves to pray for them, offering flowers and lighted candles for them. Then when my husband died very much later, we decided to include their remains in my husband's grave, so that now, we can be together in prayer and presence, not only on All Saints' and All Souls' Days, but also on customary weekends.
Speaking of the young, classes reopened last Tuesday after the brief semestral break. The tragedy in the typhoon stricken areas is that school buildings and rooms are either gone or unuseable, and even worse, books and teaching materials have mostly been ruined or destroyed.
Finally, “sick books” crusader Antonio Calipjo Go may at last be taken seriously by the Department of Education, that here now is the opportunity to correct errors in the destroyed books before they are reprinted. He said that the “band aid” solution of issuing “Teaching Notes” by DepEd to correct errors in English textbooks from Grade 1 to Grade was not enough, since many more errors remain.
As a former grade school teacher for some years after graduation from the Cebu Normal School, and teaching in college after that, I find the situation shocking. Looking back over some of my old grade school textbooks (yes, I still have some of them for sentimental reasons!), I am hard put to find errors in language structure and factual information available during those early years. Neither do I remember having been under any grade school teacher of whom I can say “They were incompetent”, God bless them.
But teaching in a first year class in Speech Improvement, where students had to read aloud, I was in again for shock and disappointment for what the reduction of primary education from seven years to the current six years, with less stress given to reading, speaking and writing, has done for the education of our youth. And sadly, too, how public school education has lowered its standards, compared to private school education which has kept up with the times.
Thank God, with this state of public school education, concerned community, civic and business, as well as religious groups and organizations are picking up the slack with Adopt-a-School projects.
Our Zonta Club of Cebu 1, for one, has been providing scholarship for deserving but financially unable high school graduates, that they may avail of free college education for careers in teaching and education. This long-standing scholarship program is made in cooperation with the Tan Chan Foundation through fellow Zontian Rufina Tan Chan, who is now president.
Now, Zonta 1 is deeply involved in the Adopt-a-School Program and other projects, for which we are presenting Glamour and Glitz 2, a fund-raising dinner fashion show on Sunday, November 8th at the Marco Polo Plaza to celebrate our Ruby Anniversary. Tickets are still available from Zonta 1 members and sold at the door on Sunday. Dinner will be at 6:30p.m. while the show begins at 8 p.m. We hope to see you there.
Next week, I shall share activities of the Cebu Girl Scout Council and our forthcoming Christmas celebrations.
In closing, please remember in you prayers the soul of Mercedes Jayme Rabaya, mother of media colleague Allan Jayme Rabaya. She passed away last October 31st and will be interred tomorrow, after a Mass at high noon at the ALU Chapel at Pier 1. God rest the soul of Mercedes. For now as always, may God continue to bless us all!
