Teachers should not be burdened on printing and distribution of modules

Just recently, DepEd released a memorandum OUCI-2020-307 titled: Suggested Measures to foster Academic Ease during the Covid-19 Pandemic dated October 30, 2020. The memorandum which was signed by Undersecretary Diosdado M. San Antonio suggested that “teachers should not be burdened on printing and distribution of modules”.

While this memorandum seemed very positive and advantageous to all of the teachers nationwide, there are also real talk commentaries and suggestions from the teachers themselves on this matter. Let me give my personal reaction to this as a teacher also.

First, this memorandum may be created to lessen the burden of the teachers in doing their task during this new normal way of teaching/learning process and we are very much grateful to those people who feel us and our sentiments but this is way too much late already since we are already on our way to Week 6 in giving our modules and activities to our students.  You should have thought of this long before the start of classes since we always had webinars and you could have included that in our topic so as to relieve us a little of the workload.

Second, we teachers don’t have problems with the printing of the modules since whether we like it or not, it is really very important to print those materials because if we didn’t, then who will do it for us? I don’t think DepEd will do that for the teachers because even the slightest paperwork that supposed to be done by those clerical people in service, teachers were the ones doing it for them to easily submit it wherever they need it. Sorry but I guess this is really a true scenario in our system today. As you can see what stressed us the most are those additional paperwork/s (like LDM and every other day another paperwork to comply) that we need to comply with. How can we divide our bodies, we still have modules to print, distribute, activities to check and record, when we are supposed to be focusing on monitoring and helping the parents guide their students at home? If the teachers will not do it, the system dies with it. This is the reality, sounds funny but true.

Third, not all of the schools are providing the necessary materials for printing all the modules. There are a lot of teachers who spent their own hard-earned money on buying what is needed just to reproduce it (lucky for me that our school provided us with the RISO machine and bond papers but prior to this, my 5-year-old Canon printer who I loved very much gave up so I decided to avail an installment for another printer). There is no problem with the printing if everything is possible and given.

Lastly, we do understand our duties and responsibilities as teachers through thick and thin even if we don’t have any idea that this pandemic will hit us big time. It is only that we do hope that the higher authorities can really see what is going down under their tables to really know the real scenario of their schools. We are not complaining because with all due respect we are teachers and all of this is our responsibility, even with what we are facing right now. We still are very grateful for those people who look for ways to help their teachers because we know there are only a few of them. – Clea | Helpline PH