I suppose that this entry should be longer and might become a full blown essay, but it seems right to put something here and now. It's over.
After two years of teaching high school, I've resigned. With the myriad conflicts that I've faced, it's a wonder that I lasted this long. It wasn't a well-thought out thing to begin with, but then very few things that I do are. It was a good idea at the time. So I started teaching in an exclusive girls' school. I thought, hey I'm done with the crazy days of my life, I'm ready to settle down and become part of a system, to try and do something important by teaching.
Well, system wasn't ready for me. And no matter how much I tried to avoid trouble and keep my head down, I was always getting into trouble. One case after another, one even leading to "anger management" sessions while the actual students who perpetrated the whole shenanigan got away with nary a slap on the wrist. Complaints about my behavior which was irreverent led to many uncomfortable meetings. I don't know; it's like those cowboy movies (and please, kung pwede lang, if I make mention of cowboy movies can we not fall into that stupid too easy trap where one mentions brokeback mountain and winks as if he were a genius for injecting some homoerotic humor that is not there) where this guy just wants to go out to a quiet town and keep his head down and do honest work and disappear. But then, some way or another, something comes to haunt him, to bring out that thing that he's been trying to keep quiet. Think of Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence and you've got a similar idea.
I thought I could keep quiet and just do my work. But there are too many things that I could not stomach, and I just can't keep my big mouth shut. You can try to change yourself, you can try to change the system, and if both fail, well, you have to leave the system.
What kept me here last year was the way that I felt I was able to affect students, to influence them to do well using my own methods, my way of teaching. But this year, the students' reactions aren't as enthusiastic. In fact, though there are a number that have responded, I feel that I've been met more with resounding indifference. The big bosses in charge also seem to have clamped down, and I've just done too many bad things for this fiasco to go on.
The question is always, where will you go now? What do you plan to do? I don't know.
At the moment I really want to stand outside the school and scream *&%^ #*# all! It would be a moment of great catharsis. For all that I have endured, for everything that I went through while here, god i feel like I deserve to do something massive and memorable and big. But I think I'll leave with little more than a whimper, just to be gone.
Goodbye students. No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks. School's out for summer. School's out forever.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Sunday, February 10, 2008
God Rocks!/ Recessions EP
With my brother's arrival comes my guitar hero 3 and les paul controller. Woohoo. And hence the title God rocks. I've unlocked the God of Rock, and well, it's pretty awesome watching him churn out the riffs.
For the record, i'm not very good at guitar hero. I can pull off a few songs, sure, but i'm still workin on it, needing the practice. It's, funnily enough, got nothing to do with how you play real guitar, except for keeping in time. But nonetheless, it's a helluva lot of fun. and as always the songs you get to play to are killer, some from the ancient baul of rock. Sad thing is that the contemporary rock just doesn't measure up. Rock out to Metallica's "One" and "Welcome to the Jungle" or even "My Name is Jonas" or "Even Flow" and the stuff that's from the past coupe of years really fails to measure up. Here I go again bashing contemporary rock, but hey, it's just not happening like it used to.
Like a relationship, when it's not happening anymore either you find something to bring the passion back (which rock isn't doing) or you wind up looking elsewhere (like I look to hip-hop, or look nostalgically back at the time when rock knew how to, well, rock).
This discontent with contemporary music served as some of the fuel for playing with Chupacabras. OF course easy is an outstanding songwriter, and anyone would like to work with someone like him. But there was also our clear vision of rock and what we wanted to sound like. As I always mention, the band's still finishing the album, but angel radio has regular gigs. Two this week, tuesday at magnet katipinan, friday at magnet high street.
And as a side project to the side project, Cha and I did this EP thing for school. Faculty has to come up with artwork, so we did a garage recording with the help of student Justine Serrano who did all the tech recording and mixing and everything for us. We're calling it Recessions since we recorded almost all of it during the recess and lunch breaks. There are only about 30 copies, but we hope that we can sell them all. What we did was we just took some songs from the angel radio playlist and recorded them in a very raw way. It's so raw that you can hear the ambient sounds like electric fans in the neighboring room and the loud laughter of students from across the way. If we could, we would've come out with something studio sounding, but we made do with what we had, and it was a fun experience. I'd listen to it. But hey I made it.
Last new development is the fact that i'm typing this entry on my brand spanking new asus eee. I could never afford a laptop before, and this isn't much of one in terms of power, but then it's pretty functional and I can't complain at all as it's been serving me well the past couple of days and helping me get a lot of writing done.
For the record, i'm not very good at guitar hero. I can pull off a few songs, sure, but i'm still workin on it, needing the practice. It's, funnily enough, got nothing to do with how you play real guitar, except for keeping in time. But nonetheless, it's a helluva lot of fun. and as always the songs you get to play to are killer, some from the ancient baul of rock. Sad thing is that the contemporary rock just doesn't measure up. Rock out to Metallica's "One" and "Welcome to the Jungle" or even "My Name is Jonas" or "Even Flow" and the stuff that's from the past coupe of years really fails to measure up. Here I go again bashing contemporary rock, but hey, it's just not happening like it used to.
Like a relationship, when it's not happening anymore either you find something to bring the passion back (which rock isn't doing) or you wind up looking elsewhere (like I look to hip-hop, or look nostalgically back at the time when rock knew how to, well, rock).
This discontent with contemporary music served as some of the fuel for playing with Chupacabras. OF course easy is an outstanding songwriter, and anyone would like to work with someone like him. But there was also our clear vision of rock and what we wanted to sound like. As I always mention, the band's still finishing the album, but angel radio has regular gigs. Two this week, tuesday at magnet katipinan, friday at magnet high street.
And as a side project to the side project, Cha and I did this EP thing for school. Faculty has to come up with artwork, so we did a garage recording with the help of student Justine Serrano who did all the tech recording and mixing and everything for us. We're calling it Recessions since we recorded almost all of it during the recess and lunch breaks. There are only about 30 copies, but we hope that we can sell them all. What we did was we just took some songs from the angel radio playlist and recorded them in a very raw way. It's so raw that you can hear the ambient sounds like electric fans in the neighboring room and the loud laughter of students from across the way. If we could, we would've come out with something studio sounding, but we made do with what we had, and it was a fun experience. I'd listen to it. But hey I made it.
Last new development is the fact that i'm typing this entry on my brand spanking new asus eee. I could never afford a laptop before, and this isn't much of one in terms of power, but then it's pretty functional and I can't complain at all as it's been serving me well the past couple of days and helping me get a lot of writing done.
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