This is my second year teaching Civic Engagement and Leadership. This is a course for our Gr 12 students where they partner with a community or organization, make a needs assessment and create a project to address the needs identified. While this is very close to my degree, I remember shoving the invitation to teach it for years. I thought it required so much from the teacher and it is so taxing, unless maybe if I were in a college set-up.

My students had started their projects last month and we just finished first round of updating and consultation. I could not help but feel very very proud of my students. I feel like this subject is demanding a lot from them. I was initially adamant at the beginning of the school year if connecting with organizations and offices were possible. I was anxious on how I could contact organizations and institutions at this time of the pandemic. But my students proved me wrong. For a rather short time last December, they stepped up in leadership, connecting with organizations very professionally. Following my instructions every step of the way, always asking and clarifying, always making sure if things were done right, and they were.

As I listened to their updates for the past weeks, being on time with their plans, being so efficient in the implementation, sometimes, I get goosebumps. I challenge them, try to help where I can, try to guide where I can, but ultimately, I have been so impressed on how much they have grown in their spirit of service.

This course has taken me back to my first love: my love for Mindanao. A realization I had back in college after encounters with people who also felt very strongly serving our beloved land. This has shaped a lot of my decisions back then: my love for the arts and culture, shifting to a course to be closer in this advocacy, my career choices.

For a few years now, I make it to a point to invite inspiring people who can share to my students their advocacy for Mindanao. And last school year, the first year I taught this subject, I could not be any more happy to be able to invite some of the powerful movers in this field: Bro Karl Gaspar, the power couple Ms. Norma Javellana and Arnold Vandenbroek, and Sir Rik Obenza. They have been honored the highest award in Davao City, the Bagu Datu Award. But more than the recognition is the foundation they have laid for many people who have become passionate movers of Mindanao, helping out especially the people in the peripheries. There was also Mr. David Kullman who was helping out with Gawad Kalinga. I cringed at the thought to muster the courage to invite them, but it was an opportunity I could not pass. I remember, seeing all these people I greatly looked up to gathered in one place, I felt like crying seeing my students listen to them in the auditorium.

Pondering upon it, I know the projects of my students are part of an academic requirement. But I always see it as an opportunity for them to have a taste of how it is to serve and go out and reach out to other people outside the walls of our academic institution. The government has spent a lot for the education of my students, them being scholars; but more than that, more than the return of investment, is that prayer that they will love connecting to people, to bring out that kind of humanity and sense of purpose in them. I have brilliant kids, and I mean more than intellect. I often feel happy if I see the sparks in their eyes to things they love doing, apart from our usual encounters in the classroom. And I remember seeing this kind of spark among many of my students from our projects last school year, even if unfinished due to the pandemic. I don’t see my present students in this new set up now, but I wish well that they have this experience too.

Come March, most projects will be finished. But even so, I am so glad for how much my students have poured out their heart, time and effort in their advocacies. I have even learned a lot of them are doing volunteer works already!

I often have a lot of doubts if I have given my students what’s due them. I am not a perfect teacher. Nor are my students perfect. But I just feel so proud of them and am very grateful for this opportunity to have been their teacher.

Maybe I seem too dramatic, but it’s a beautiful feeling to keep. Maybe reconnecting with former students Faizah and Wilh who’s been doing so well serving in their respective fields have rekindled this fire. And remembering so many more of my former students who are doing well in their respective careers, and are movers in their own ways. I’m just glad to be given this opportunity to witness my students step up to their potential more especially in serving other people.

I feel cringey posting this because its too personal and I feel like bringing myself to the open, but here goes. Too important to pass. Fingers crossed.