My Teaching Diary

By: Angielyn B. Delos Reyes

It’s been almost 3 years since I have worked at Can-ayan Integrated School, the first

integrated school in Malaybalay City, Bukidnon. Recently, the school has 116 senior high school

students from diverse cultural backgrounds; majority of them comes from low-income homes.

Indeed, teaching in public school is really very different from private schools based on my

experience. It is different in a sense that in a public school, you are handling lots of students in a

classroom with different attitudes, behaviour, learning styles plus tons of paper works we are facing

every day. Whereas, in private school that I was teaching before there were only a maximum of 10

students in a classroom. Since the number of students in a private school is less, I can easily manage

and monitor them one by one.

Although, I am already teaching in a private school for 3 years but when I started teaching in

public school I was culture-shocked. I was surprised of the bundles of work to do by the teacher. I

realized that our job as a teacher is not only limited to teaching the students alone but also to do

many paper works. The demand of work given to the teachers is so heavy. It seems that most of the

jobs to do by the teachers are paper-works – reports, evaluations, etc. There were times I asked

myself, where is now the quality of education that the DepEd envisioned to be achieved by the

learners? It seems like the quality of education that the Deped envisioned is only evident to the

reports submitted by the teachers and not to the learners themselves.

I teach four 1-hour classes of Earth and Life Science, Media & Information Literacy, and

Entrepreneurship during the 1st semester, while in the 2nd Semester are Physical Science, and

Disaster Readiness and Risk Reduction to two sections of the eleventh and twelfth grade students. I

also have additional subject loads in Junior High School which is Araling Panlipunan and Mathematics

during my early years.

 At first, I find these loads of subjects to be very heavy since some of the subjects are not in

line with my concentration. So, I really need to read a lot of references & study well before coming in

to class to ensure that I am teaching the learners a quality and reliable information. I even bought

my own books/references for the reason that DepEd teaching resources/books in the Senior High

School is still incomplete. The unavailability of most of the teaching references is an additional

burden to the teachers.

Unfavourably, the school is situated in an area where there is no cellular site, thus no

internet connections. It would be very difficult for me teaching the subject Media and Information

literacy since in most lessons there is a continuous flow of discussions and activities from the

Lecture to Laboratory. The Lecture class could be delivered inside a traditional classroom although

some topics would require a computer with presentation software. The Laboratory class is highly

recommended to be conducted inside a computer laboratory with Internet connection.

In order for the students to comply the requirements to be done or submitted online they

still have to travel 15 minutes to reach the city proper riding on a “habal-habal”. This is undeniably a

risky one. Some students find it really hard to comply online activities since not all of them have

favorable allowance. As a result, only a few of them can submit their output. To help these students,

I let them do their outputs offline and have them submit their outputs through flash drives for

checking.

On the other hand, we are still lucky in our school because we have functional computer

laboratories, digital light processing projectors, and HDMI-Ready television sets in most of the

classrooms. These equipment are great aids in the teaching and learning process.

Indeed, the experiences I had in public school greatly moulded me to become an effective

teacher. Teaching young minds is a task that cannot be taken lightly. It is full of challenges,

frustrations, and responsibilities. However, it is a task that is also full of excitement, wonder, and joy.