By Nicasio L. Calde
No kid must be left behind. Everyone must be given a fair shot at getting educated. Whether in fishing villages by our shores, or in remote mountain corner barangays with only very few houses.
Kids need not hike for hours uphill, down dale or literally cross seven rivers to reach their schools. For the schools can be brought to the kids’ barangays. Then their poor parents would not be reluctant for their children to attend school. Their safety is assured and right after classes they can help in farm work or other chores.
Based on the traditional concepts of putting up schools, a village has to have enough kids to make a school viable. The government has to provide one teacher per grade. Otherwise, it was seen as impractical to put up a school if there are only five kids in grade 1, eight pupils in grade 2 and nine learners in grade 3. With this thinking, kids in remote areas had to walk far into bigger barangays where there are enough pupils to justify the building of classrooms where one grade occupies one, and other grades have one classroom each.
Enter the concept of multigrade teaching where one teacher takes care of two grades or even three grades, using the same classroom. Then the expenses to build such a school becomes justifiable.
Multigrade teaching appear to have started in the “prairie” of America when the new arrivals from the United Kingdom had to find a way of having their kids get some education. Their settlements were of a few houses so, naturally there were few kids in the new environment, mostly wilderness they had to tame. The answer they came up with was multigrade teaching. One teacher for the few kids belonging to different grades in one classroom.
The system was adopted and is being implemented all over the world—in the savannahs of Africa to the thick forests of Central America, in the humid tropics of Asia to the frozen environs of Europe and the Caucasus—everywhere. Because there is no place on earth without remote villages.
In the Philippines, multigrade teaching has been with us since the 1920s. It was brought here from the “prairie” by our American colonizers.
It was not heard of around big towns for quite sometime. Now it is again being implemented with encouraging results as can be borne out by my own experience in Bauko, Mountain Province.
Bauko II District is composed of 20 elementary schools, fifty five percent (55%) of the total schools are multigrade. These schools are Ambacbac, Bebe, Binaka, Monamon, Pangao, Sadsadan Bato, Salin Elementary Schools and Asbiagan, Nanggawa, Pitpitan and Sengyew Primary Schools. It is obvious that there are more multigrade schools than monograde ones in the district.
I was once designated as Teacher In-charge at the same time multigrade classroom teacher in Binaka Elementary School. I experienced and encountered so many challenges, problems and sentiments in teaching even to the extent of thinking to resign and find another job here or abroad—the proverbial greener pasture– but in the end I realized how effective and efficient being a multigrade teacher is. It is rewarding and fullfilling when at the end of every school year you see the results of your so many sacrifices.
My personal assessment is multigrade teaching in Bauko II District was very effective despite the CHALLENGES that had to be surmounted, one after the other.
These multigrade schools participated or competed in Co-corricular and Academic activities in the School, District, Division and Regional levels. The results of the Academic performances and Co-curricular activities show that multigrade teaching in this district was very effective. The overall National Achievement Results for five years in the following multigrade schools could attest to how effective and efficient teachers were in Bauko II: Asbiagan 60.61%, Bebe 63.97, Sadsadan Bato 61.39%, Pitpitan 70.32%, Ambacbac 66.73%, Salin 63.91%, Binaka 73.23%, Pangao 70.00%, Monamon 69.50%, Nanggawa and Sengyew no graduates yet.
So let us have more multigrade schools. So no kid will be left behind.**
