Recently City Hall has discontinued the granting of the cost-of-living allowance (COLA) to public school teachers in the City’s Schools Division of Naga City. Much brouhaha on this regard consumed the air waves and prints with the poor teachers, so-called second parents of equally poor souls neither getting the financial help nor the recognition and/or sympathy they deserve from their patrons and their supervisors, tirelessly attend to their pupils. Mind you, among the employees (this classification is not fitted to teachers), they are the earliest to go to their work stations and labor thereat even beyond office hours and non-work days.

How do I get to know them? Well, I am a teacher myself and like most of them I have been spending the best years of my life teaching. Except most probably that I have been blessed to guide foreigners and Filipinos alike, I am no different from them, a loco parentis, a surrogate parent. Besides, my wife is a teacher and so with my youngest daughter in the Daughters of Mary and my father, too, who started as an EGT and eventually becoming a supervisor, then an undersecretary of education, may God rest his soul.

Remember that early short story of the literature master writer Bienvenido N. Santos whose relations in the region had made him a Bicolano and whose works earned for himself the regard as one of the 10 best Filipino English writers in the world. It’s Old Favorites. The narrative tells of a retired teacher that a perfume vendor recalled as his mentor and she was overjoyed of the remembrance but never realized that the former student sold her 5 percent scent and 95 percent water. It is a naive account and sentimental according to Santos who learned later that it became the heart of his greatness and contained the very superficial happiness the tutors get in enduring reality. Teaching has the beautiful mind in lamentations.

Now, can you justify the teachers not getting the COLA in these times of hardships where many of them do not even own decent dwellings? They sell candies and other foodstuffs and slippers, shoes, and clothes to tide things over.
How can COLA be equated to excellent performance? COLA should have another meaning in that case in the eyes of Mayor Robredo and those armchair pretenders at the Naga DepEd. The allowance is subsistence in nature. It must relate to the inability of teachers’ salaries to cope with inflation and rising prices especially when the remunerations have not been upgraded for sometime. This stark actuality disturbs us to the face.

All arguments cease in injustice. Socrates, the father of philosophy, couldn’t reason out drinking his poison among the Greeks. There was no due course for it. But look at the Gloriagate, it could not pass apology. There is simply no way for it to stay unless fallacy becomes our ideal where chaos is our rule. Even existentialism, with matter inching over mind, reverses balance for it to remain glorious in thought.

COLA to performance? You can do it if the great field of taxonomy, classification, is not there. But it is there and we find no evidence to divorce from that: it is sunlight to science.

Moreover, exacerbating the plight of ordinary teachers is the indifference of their superiors in the granting of the increment where, while the highbrows received P3,000, they got only P1,000. It is as if the administrators do not know that many teachers in Naga City have not received their salary differentials for years they have been religiously working, wearing themselves depreciated in body and spirit.

I know of one of these lowly personnel coming to the house and borrowing money. When she couldn’t pay, she would hide avoiding my life. Sadness creeps into my thoughts not because of the unpaid loan, it is on shame of the borrower I emphatize. It’s terribly disarming.

In this situation how can we encourage the entry of good teachers in our public schools that the predicament they have to face is definitively oppressive to dignity? I don’t say that the better-offs in the ladder be saints in dealing with teachers. Fairness can’t hurt them and it will be so much for the teachers in Naga public schools.