What freshman Philippine history should be
Looking back on the 40th anniversary of the Edsa People Power Revolution, I see one event seen from different points of view. Divergence of stories and opinions are the staple of historians who have to sift through it all to get as close to the past as possible.
In my freshman history class, I introduce students to primary sources. Their first assignment is to write a short essay on food from their childhood. They can write about food they liked. Food they disliked. In the process of remembering, they use their senses: sight, smell, touch, and taste. Even hearing, as in the sound of biting into a crunchy lechon skin. Looking back they realize that dishes prepared by a lola, a parent, a yaya are the best. These cannot be replicated because it is seasoned by time and nostalgia. Childhood food is more about memories than the actual dishes.
Students read an excerpt from Marcel Proust’s “In search of lost time” and see how the taste of a madeleine, dipped in tea, reminds the narrator of his childhood. It is a taste that unleashed a flood of memories that filled a novel in seven volumes. My students have their own “madeleines” and these range from fast-food favorites like Jollibee Chicken Joy, or Pinoy classics like adobo, sinigang, and kare-kare. Some remember regional dishes like “gatas kalabaw” on freshly cooked rice. Reading their papers makes my mouth water. It looks simple, but in these papers I learn a lot more from my students than I teach them. In this paper, I see the world through their eyes.
Their second assignment, involves more than just sitting down and remembering. They need to dig up the newspaper on the day they were born. Using this primary source, they should write a short essay on what the Philippines was like on the day they were born. While the Inquirer is available online, they are required to visit the Rizal Library Microfilm Section to read another newspaper on the same day, for comparison and contrast, before they finalize their essay. For many students, the exercise proves that parents can be a most unreliable source of information. They get names of presidents wrong, remember events differently.
Gen Z get their current events from their social media feeds, so the newspaper, more so a physical copy, is beyond their experience or even their imagination. The students find the advertisements engaging. Why were cell phones so big? Why do cars look different? Why were things so cheap then? Why do newspapers have horoscopes? When they read the headlines that scream: murder, calamity, corruption in government, celebrity scandals, etc. they realize the news sounds contemporary. Some of the politicians or their surnames remain current, and are going strong two decades hence. Processing their papers, I remind them that History does not repeat itself, it is we who repeat it.
This assignment is depressing for some, who see that the world does not seem to have changed much since the day they were born. On the bright side, their generation has the opportunity to break the cycle. They should make sure that in the future, the present will stop reading like the past. The next assignment, will be poring through the 55-volume compilation of documents known to historians as “BR” or “Blair and Robertson” in search of something their professor does not know. From a 20-year old newspaper, students are introduced to translated Spanish documents that are 200 to 400 years old.
Their first group assignment requires the class to: transcribe a late 19th century document, translate it from the original (archaic) Tagalog to English, analyze and contextualize its contents. Gen Z have difficulty reading cursive, because many of them are not taught cursive handwriting in K-12. They type on their devices and when forced to write manually, do so in block letters.
They learn that old Tagalog is not read with the eyes because the orthography is different. Old Tagalog is read with the ear. One person tries to read out the text while the group mates transcribe. Listening in to one group, someone read out: “Si Antonio at si Catalina ay nag-isang katawan…” while someone translated “Antonio and Catalina became one body.” Another asked, “how can they become one body?” One student crossed her fingers and asked, “are they an item?” Then one student’s eyes light up and she exclaims: “they are married!” It is this exchange that makes a teacher’s time so worth it.
In the remainder of the semester we will read an excerpt from Pigafetta’s account of the Magellan Expedition for an eyewitness account of the 1521 Battle of Mactan that is not how they imagined it to be. They compare the handwriting of Emilio Aguinaldo, Andres Bonifacio, and Jose Rizal and wonder what their penmanship says about their personalities. A course on primary sources teaches the student that history does not always pan out the way we want it to be. My history class is not so much about learning facts they can harvest from Google (who, what, when, where, and how?) but how to validate, analyze, and use facts to find truth and the continuing relevance of the past.
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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net
Cartographic amnesia