“Mommy, please bring Kleenex—knowing you, you’re going to laugh and cry a lot,” warned my daughter, Gia, as she handed me two tickets to a special showing of “The Learning,” a documentary by Ramona “Monina” Diaz (remembered for the compelling, controversial “Imelda”).
The premiere was sponsored by Monina and Gia’s high-school class (1979) in Assumption, and was intended to raise funds for its alumni-supported Mission Schools. The film resonates particularly with Gia, being herself a preschool teacher.
An acclaimed filmmaker, Monina Diaz was chosen by a number of public high schools in the inner cities of Baltimore, Maryland, USA, to document their recruitment of Filipino teachers, a wide and rigorous process that took the recruiters from Metro Manila to the southern corners of Bukidnon. Four teachers—three for Math and Science, one in Special Education—make the grade in the end. “The Learning” is essentially their story.
Their Baltimore jobs hike their total earnings, in dollars, to the equivalent of about P3 million for the 10-month school year, from P180,000, something they had not been aware of until they saw, to their childlike jubilation, their actual first paychecks. They are not, definitely, your typical Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), who have to beg and borrow to pay for the costs of just preparing to get to their foreign workplace—documents, fare, pocket money—and take a cut in their salaries to pay loans, including hefty recruiters’ fees.
The four teachers get all the protection they deserve as chosen ones, and are thus able to keep their self-respect and sense of self-worth: They’re good teachers, anywhere. And they quickly show it.
To be sure, the prospect of a First World life for their families, realized once they become tenured in four years, is not lost on them. For the moment, anyway, they have to leave them behind. In the meantime, they have a job to do.
As happens, it’s a hugely challenging one: They are dealing with students bred in a rough and long-marginalized culture—blacks. But, with creative approaches developed in their own native origins, they manage to break through the barriers of color and culture and inspire and motivate their wards.
Good fortune
They draw their own strengths in turn from their professional ambition and sense of mission. No doubt the generous compensation helps in the most basic way—it makes a difference in the lives of their families, although it’s the sort of good fortune that also lays itself open to exploitation by extended members, as typical in the Philippine culture.
But it’s also from the same native culture that they take solace—mutual solace among the four of them as well as a number of other compatriots bound by culture and faith. They karaoke together, Zumba together, picnic together and worship together.
Within this larger picture, a portrait of the Filipina as a teacher is highlighted, and Dorotea Godinez, the oldest of the four, endears herself most to my daughter.
“The other, younger, teachers are competent and gentle as well, but they seem to me distracted by other things in their lives,” she points out. “When they come home to the Philippines during the summer break of the Baltimore school year, they go about doing things other than anything having at all to do with their mission. Only Dorotea—whose family happens to be more settled—goes to visit her old school, her old students, her old fellow teachers. That shows a true teacher’s heart.”
In a classroom scene, on the last day of class in Baltimore, a large girl lingers to chat with her teacher Dorotea. The girl, who has all year shown the attitude of a rebelliously reluctant learner, now comes over and tells Dorotea, “I love you, Mrs. Godinez.”
“Oh,” Dorotea snorts, “you’re just saying that because I’m leaving.”
“No, it’s true, I love you.”
“You are so word [weird]. Why are you so word?” Dorotea says, not in an accusatory way; she in fact sounds as if she’s thinking out a problem aloud. “Will you really miss me when I go?”
“Yes, I will miss you.”
Dorotea looks at her tenderly, and smiles, “I love you, too.”
And the two hug.
Gia tells me, “Children are like that: They can feel the love in a teacher’s heart and are drawn to it and give it back.”
Monina updates the audience with an epilogue: All four teachers have ended up gaining their tenure and bringing their families with them.
And me—I feel indeed both happy and sad and use nearly all my Kleenex.
Sometimes, when I’m out with Gia, who now owns and runs her own preschool in partnership with a like-hearted teacher, Ciara, a young man or a budding miss, about the ages of her own children, two in college now, comes up to her and gives her a hug: It’s one of her former preschoolers.