Montano 1

Jiara Laine Montano

8 September 2016

The bell rings and a rush of students went running to the grass courtyard with crinkled
eyes and grins. The dirt of the ground was staining their slippers and the others white sock
but they ran without care. They were too busy stealing the other teams base in the game of
Sekyu or more commonly known as Agawan base. Such a contrast to their faces during the
opening ceremony of the outreach program I was a part of. They were standing on the same
field they played on but they looked grim. Bored. Tired. They yawned, wrinkled their
foreheads, scratched their heads or talked to their neighbors in line. Others looked at us
volunteers with a curious eye but after some time went back to scratching their heads. The
students of Balabago Elementary School were organized into lines per section. One line for
the girls and one line for the boys. Their homeroom teachers would monitor them holding a
folding fan that would occasionally snap close and pat a student who was making noise.
Balabago Elementary school is a 755 student school located in the slums area of Jaro,
Iloilo City. The student population has one of the highest female to male ratio in the city
public schools having a ratio of 1 male: 1 female. This school is surrounded by illegal settlers
and dilapidated house whose roofs were made out of discarded tarpaulins and improperly
discarded trash that was the source of the bad odor you can smell as you enter through the
school gate. Outside the gate was a line of tricycles and traysikad1 waiting for students to ride
on them. The school gate was just a close walk from school that we would tend to have
outreach programs their four times a year. From first year high school up until I was a senior I
would volunteer to join the project. In my first year I was assigned to the 6th graders, then 5th
graders on my second year, 3rd graders on my third and lastly 1st graders for my last year.
At the beginning of each year, the students would walk on eggshells around us. We would shy
away from each other. We were foreigners in each others radar. We were the unfamiliar to
1 Hiligaynon for a pedicab

Montano 2
them the unchartered territory. We had to figure out how to get closer to them. That was
when we noticed their eagerness to get outside, get dirty and have fun. We would join them in
games like hide and seek, tag and patintero. The closer we were to them, the more we
familiarized ourselves with their quirks. While these kids would innocently play around in the
yard they would frequently say Yuta mo eh! Linti! Gago! Yudiputa ka!2 when things do not
go their way or when somebody pissed them off. Mind you these words are not only being
said by 6th grade students but also 1st grade students. Furthermore, most of the time it is not
the boys that uses these words, it is the girls. When against a guy they curse them and smack
them in the head. Against a girl they use harsher curses like Alput ka, Alput nanay mo, alput
tatay mo, alput kamo tanan!3 When the teachers hear this, they smack the student on their
shoulders with their folding fans and say Di na maayo bala. Liwaton mo pa na liwat?4 The
offender shooks his/her but once out of the hearing range of the teacher would curse once
again.
As we got closer to the kids, we also discovered a lot about their backgrounds. A lot of the
kids families were really poor. These children of these families sometimes did not even have
a pencil, not to mention even notebooks. A lot of them depended on the donations of my high
school when it comes to basic school supplies. Majority of these students families were also
reluctant to send them to school. They would rather, their kids, help out with the familys
financial situation by becoming traysikad drivers or help out their mothers in their
carinderias or sari-sari store. More students asked advices about this kind of situation the
older they got. Many wanted to graduate high school or at least have elementary diploma.
One student in particular, was delayed multiple times because he could not meet the
2 Hiligaynon curse words coming from the words dirt (yuta), lintik (linti) and ijo de puta (son of a b*tch).
3 Hiligaynon for Youre a whore, your moms a whore, your dads a whore, youre all whores!
4 Hiligaynon for You know that is bad right? Would you still do it again?

Montano 3
attendance requirements. He would always cut classes and work to help bring food to their
tables. But he really wanted to graduate. Kids, like him, would usually graduate delayed as
they would drop out for a year or two to work when their family is in the red and comeback
to school again once their family was in the black.
By taking the social-conflict approach, one can see that there is a power play between
the teachers and students. The teachers have the authority and the students do not. The way
the teachers display and maintain their authority can physically be seen through the way they
lecture around their students and the way they brandish their fans. They try to maintain their
authority through the use of fear, not respect. If you do not follow the rules, you get smacked.
If you do something inappropriate you get smacked. However, the kids shut their lips tight in
front of these teachers and stab them behind their backs and sometimes implicitly roll their
eyes when they get lectured. Using this perspective, we can also see that these students are
financially disadvantaged. However, they try to fight their social class by earning a education.
They can use education as a ladder to go up from their social class and ultimately bring their
family out of poverty. Although there are setbacks, such as their familys discouragement and
financial status, many of them still persevere in their aim to graduate no matter how much
time it would take them to do so.
Using the structural-functionalist perspective, one can say that the power-play
between the studentsthe authority of the teacher over the student actually works so as to
help in the children; albeit one cannot really say that the method they are using is the best
kind. In this school structure the student should learn from the teacher and vice versa. The
authority the teacher owns is used as a tool to be able to correct the students and make them
listen. The student in turn gets education from the teacher to be able to get a diploma, get to
the next level of education, and get a job. The teacher is able to benefit from this relationship
by not only earning money but also gaining experience to further their career.

Montano 4
In the symbolic-interaction approach, one can say that the students are like actors with
different facades. The first would be the faade they have in front of their teachers, the next
would be the one in front of their friends and the third would be the one in front of strangers.
In front of their teacher, they grit their teeth towards the smacks of their folding fans, shut
their mouth against the lectures and let the words in from one ear and out on the other.
However, the moment they are out of the radius of the danger, they curse that particular
teacher together with their friends. They become more vocal about their problems. They also
become more liberated as seen by their upturned mouths when they are with their friends. In
front of strangers however, they become inhibited. They do not know how to act in front of
people whom they do not know so they try to know them first before deciding what side of
their personality they should show.
Looking back on how the social class of the family restricts the childs future, then
yes, we can definitely say that there is an interplay between agency and freewill. Each
students own financial circumstance may each be different but across several students, it can
be seen that there is a trend of students dropping out of school to help their families, uncertain
whether they would be able to continue studying in the future or not. However, in the case
that they do stop studying and start working they would still take occupations that do not
require them a diploma like working as a saleslady or being a tricycle driver. However, while
working with minimum wage jobs can help with the financial situation it does not help the
individual rise from his/her social class. That individual may also have a family someday
with a person in the same social and may have children who will the same path. This
becomes a never ending cycle of poverty. Education on the other hand can act as levelling
tool that can help the individual get a better social standing however due to the disadvantages
of these kind of families in society it becomes more difficult for them to be able to rise from a
poverty-stricken environment.