Classroom 3

The article’s title refers not to school room number three, but to “Classroom Tree” – classes held under the tree.

Public school teachers are warning that the country will see “Classroom 3” again as face-to-face classes resume on Aug. 22, the start of the new school year, with full F2F classes mandated by Nov. 2.

Previous administrations had significantly eased the classroom backlog in public schools, with help from the private sector. It’s been years since classes held under trees were a common sight.

The economic super typhoon unleashed by the pandemic, however, and the challenges posed by remote learning forced many students to leave private schools and opt for free public education.

In the school year just ended, of the 27.2 million students enrolled in basic education, 23.9 million were in public schools.

The pandemic challenges led to the shutdown of a number of private schools, some of which may never reopen.

Vladimer Quetua, chairman of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT), told us the other night on One News’ “The Chiefs” that class sizes even in Metro Manila in the past two years have ballooned to 60, 70, even 100.

How did they fit 100 or even 60 students on a Zoom screen? Quetua explained that class participation was divided into clusters. Still, you can understand why students and teachers alike complained that education deteriorated during the two years of blended learning.

Because of the continuing threat posed by the COVID virus, which seems to have mutated into an altogether different vaccine-evading pathogen (with the latest scary variant called Centaurus), physical distancing will still be needed when the school year 2022-2023 opens. Failing in this, some form of clustering may also be required in F2F classes.

The Department of Education has denied requiring a class size of 30.

As we have seen in news images, the big private schools with small class sizes can easily implement distanced classroom seating. But how do you do this in cramped public schools?

Quetua’s answer: you turn to “Classroom 3.”

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Inadequate facilities aren’t the only problem. ACT has described the Aug. 22 start of school year 2022-2023, so close to the end of SY 2021-2022 on June 24, as “a recipe for disaster.” Teachers are just finishing remedial classes, investitures and preparations for enrollment, and are working even during their vacation break, without proportional pay.

“We’re not machines, we’re not robots, we also need to rest,” Quetua told us.

Teachers also want a COVID-safe school opening – with adequate classroom ventilation, sufficient hand washing facilities, at least one nurse on duty per school and enough sanitation workers.

The idea behind blended learning was continuity of formal education even during the public health emergency, with no learner left behind.

But even among certain educators, there is a sense that the two years of the pandemic may have to be written off as lost years for learners.

Because of the challenges posed by blended learning, schools were discouraged from flunking students regardless of academic performance. Now, as the country eases back to in-person learning, there are students who will be lacking the knowledge and skills sets required for their new grade level.

During the lockdowns, more kids became familiar with the use of gadgets. But their generation of digital natives probably immersed themselves in online games and TikTok rather than fully absorbing lessons taught by educators (a number of whom are tech-challenged) handling unwieldy class sizes.

Education advocates believe there is a need to assess what students absorbed in the past two years, and to correspondingly redesign school lessons to fill in the learning gaps.

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COVID disrupted formal education worldwide, but most countries resumed face-to-face classes in the first year of the pandemic, and some simply suspended classes for a few weeks.

In our case, pandemic response officials had to consider the situation in millions of Filipino households that can’t afford to send children to private schools where tuition is not free.

The average Pinoy household includes the parents, three children and grandparents. Children can stay with their parents forever, so the household may include four generations of the extended family – aunts, uncles, cousins all living together under one roof, from infants to grandparents in their 80s or 90s.

In informal settlements, the extended family may live in cramped condominium-style shanties, with dwellings per family divided only by plywood and GI sheets.

Their neighbors will have the same cramped accommodations in a densely packed community.

In the early days of the pandemic, just one COVID-positive grade schooler could easily spread the virus across the entire neighborhood, with a high risk of death for the vulnerable sectors.

Pre-pandemic, the typical public school was already overcrowded, with class sizes of 50 to 60 not unusual.

So when COVID struck, the government stuck to blended learning, kept children at home, crossed its fingers and hoped for the best.

Exclusive private schools, whose students play with cell phones and computers at home as soon as they are able in early childhood, eased into blended learning with minimal pain.

For those with modest means and of course for the poor, distance learning required special effort, although children found gadgets fun to use for other purposes.

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Educators themselves needed more training for the blended learning mode. A student I know in a middle-income private school, who was a consistent honor student until third grade, was frustrated with 100 percent distance learning, and saw his academic performance deteriorate in the past two years. Surely the teaching was partly to blame.

The boy is eager to resume face-to-face classes next month. Fortunately for him, his parents didn’t lose their jobs in the pandemic, and can afford the P21,000 needed for his first semester tuition and textbook expenses this school year.

Several of his classmates, however, were forced to transfer to public schools because their parents, facing financial challenges spawned by the pandemic, could no longer afford the children’s tuition plus the expenses for the gadgets and monthly WiFi needed for blended learning.

No one must be left behind; public schools can’t turn away additional students. Education officials say the government hired additional teachers from private schools that were forced to shut down or suspend operations due to the pandemic.

Still, the fact that class sizes ballooned up to 100 in some areas shows that the additional teachers were not enough.

Also, there was no corresponding expansion in school rooms and buildings. We will be seeing the consequences when schools open next month, with Classroom 3 becoming a common sight again.