"The Learning"

A couple weeks ago, my English professor, Mr. Aronson invited the class to watch a screening of a documentary, "The Learning". It is about Filipina teachers coming to the U.S. to teach public schools in Balitmore, Maryland and their transitions coming here and the struggles that they faced. Watching it, my first reaction was to the feelings of how hard it was for the four women to leave their families in the Philippines. I can relate to the feeling of leaving your family behind, I, personally haven't left any family but I've felt and seen the sadness of that through my aunts and uncles that have recently come to the U.S. to work. As it went on, I felt that I could relate to their struggles and the difficulties of transitioning into a new kind of culture. Because when my aunts and uncles were in the same situation as them, I was there with them trying to help with anything I could and in a way I felt their pain and struggle.

Another thing I noticed was that the teachers faced a culture shock of how different schools in the Philippines are from the schools in the United States. Even though, I don't think it was made such a huge thing in the film. In the Philippines, the teachers have the respect of the students almost immediately, versus the time it takes to gain students' respect, if at all, in schools in the U.S. Before even watching the film, I had a good idea about how students behaved in the Philippines and I was aware of little differences between schools there and schools here. I thank my cousins back in the Philippines for sharing that information with me and opening my eyes to just how different the two cultures are.

From what my cousins told me about their school life in the Philippines and what I told them about going to school here, I found a lot of different little things that were different. For one, they told me that every morning when the teacher arrived to the classroom, all the students would stand up and in unison say "Hello or Good Morning, Miss or Mister". Where here, we don't usually do anything like that. Another thing they told me was that the class stays quiet unless the teacher asks them something and they would rarely speak up or ask questions, and if they do have questions they would either wait till there was a time for it or after class. In my experience going to school here, students would, not intentionally, interrupt the teacher while they were talking to ask a question.


I think that that has to do with the different respect that students in the Philippines have for their teachers. Not to say that student here don't respect their teachers but students in the Philippines have a different kind of respect. The last difference I saw was how seriously students take school and their education. In the Philippines it is considered a "privilege" to go to school since even elementary school has to be paid for. So for student who go to school they feel the need to take it seriously and not mess around. While here, public school is well free. Not so much in college, but in high school I saw that a lot of students don't really take their education seriously. Watching the film also brang up a lot of other realizations and reactions, but I think what most caught me was the cultural differences in school systems between the Philippines and America. Even when the Philippines adapted a lot of American ways of learning to their educational systems.

Til next time .. Happy readings (: