I WAS not a bit surprised when the regional PAFTE, acronym of Philippine Association for Teacher Education took Naga City Mayor Jesse Robredo as a guest for the 2008 Student Teachers’ Congress, February 22, Crown Hotel. The mayor is a no-nonsense manager.

        It was one of those occasions you could guide them, student teachers, to substantiate a hope to be good on their chosen field, to inspire children. Though not an easy task, the loco parentis, substitute-parent principle, is sacred in teaching and an oath to teachers.

        I said, I’d listen to the Naga chief as I’d been watching, sometimes, Naga’s routine. You see, about a month ago, when the tail-cold front started its unnatural downpour, the junction of Burgos and Hernandez Streets leveled over six inches of murky, pungent water sprouting from dead drainage, passers-by knew, down to the Abella corner. Seeing graders wading the route, I thought of writing on it in this column and before I could do it, city hall laborers were already fixing the mess. I felt wonderful being in Naga tasting the fruit where taxes went. No-nonsense ha?

        To cut the innuendos short, I saw the youngsters in the assembly thrilled at the grasp of the mayor’s instructional tidbits, here and there, somewhat becoming more fascinating as his terminal English twang seemed at home in the sad state of our teaching. It had no other option, I mean his discourse, to rather tread the messy parts than the bright day ahead of the teachers-to-be come March.

        The mayor is schooled in the finer politics. He might be professor in college or in the graduate school, an ocean apart from the pupils and high school students.

        This should be the reason that when he talked of accountability in education, the answerability aspect of teachers, of all, of course to improve the lot of children, his arrows twisted and turned in search of target. I can see his point of reference: the economics of teaching. And it’s well worth a process. It does carry the filed a notch higher, a hill I suppose but no mountain.

        Its score, I modesty reckon albeit not fully verified as yet came from the mayor’s observation that Visayan students performed better on academic work than their better supported counterparts elsewhere in the country. If it’s accountability at issue here, a-dose-for-a-dose tacks itself in a highly volatile equivalence with the measure of objectivity difficult to extract, later to accrue to its error.

        Nonetheless, responsibility, a variance of accountability, paired with privilege is here to stay, like say, input and output. For this offers, the so-called liberal mind, his window in evaluating his actions whether they are to his advantage or a waste of resource that he is unwilling to accept.

        Today, this borrowed commercial tool has been adopted in education as standard. In administration of teachers, they are considered personnel or worse manpower with a fine-tune exemplification in the eight-hour labor law. Their being stereotyped in uniform is enormous, pressure of tradition without its accompanying dignity, know why? Literal copying.

        Teachers, professors are being made to answer for jobs they’ve done. At the start of every schoolyear or a semester, they plan performance targets and register their completion on vacation, which to many is a brother of a joke. To get you off the back of civil service, they’d define something for your independence, employees have to grow old also, you know.

        As for the more than 500 student teachers in their congress in Naga last Friday who could have added a digit or two in their number very easily had it not been for distance and the individual fee of P350 from their parents’ budget, we’d have to wait a little for them to speak on accountability. Have you heard that a group of student teachers, about 30, came a day earlier and been booked in a local hotel? Have you heard as well students looking for handouts in the forum they can never see? Have you heard them complaining for the main speaker was absent?

        Some accountability with the congress’ theme, “The Power of the Human Spirit in Teaching,” needs looking into, to spell maturity to the immature but learning student teachers.