Experience

My Teaching Experience

I cannot speak of my teaching experience without mentioning my parents who were both teachers. My elementary years were spent under the wings of my mother, Nena Balleza, who was a Grade I teacher in the central school of my hometown, Barotac Viejo, Iloilo. When I went to high school, I came under the shadow of my father, Pablo Sr., who was the principal of Barotac Viejo High School.

My first teaching experience was in 1969 in my hometown, in the high school where I graduated. I became co-teacher to my own teachers whom I revered and regarded with awe. Somehow they looked up to me too, being a graduate of the prestigious University of the Philippines. [It was not fashionable then to call UP Unibersidad ng Pilipinas and to sing UP Naming Mahal. We sang UP Beloved.]

I remember being asked to lecture to my co-teachers during the middle of my first year of teaching. They got fascinated with my method of computing grades. While they were using a transmutation table to convert scores to grades, in my case, I used the normal distribution of scores to assign grades.

After three years and my marriage (to a co-teacher of course), I was just raring to move on to greener pastures, a college. In 1973 together with my wife, I moved to an agricultural college. After two years, I was promoted head of the academic department. After another two years, I became college registrar. I stopped teaching because registrars don’t teach. I became a glorified clerk.

In 1979 I applied for study leave and enrolled in Master in Management (Public Management) at UP Visayas. As fate would have it, I got recruited into the intelligence service of former Pres. Marcos by a classmate, a colonel in the Philippine Army. After the EDSA Revolution, in 1986, first love called and I responded. I went back to teaching, this time in my beloved Alma Mater, UP Visayas.

I started as Earth Science teacher in the high school. I loved giving challenging multiple choice tests with answer sheets which required students to blacken boxes. Then checking became a matter of looking through a template and counting blackened boxes.

At that time UPV had only one computer laboratory. It had 20 IBM PC compatibles running floppy DOS. “You cannot use unless you know how” was the rule. Knowing I will never get to know how unless I starting using one, I bravely entered the lab with a booting disk in my hand and sat down in front of one, all the while quaking inside with fear (or was it anticipation?).

It was smooth sailing after that first time. I became a habitué of the lab. I saw in the computer infinite possibilities and I wrote the VCPD about it. It must have made a good impression because I was appointed faculty-in-charge of the computer lab. Then when former UP president Dr. Francisco "Dodong" Nemenzo took over as Chancellor of UPV, he created the Computer and Instructional Media Unit (CIMU) and made me coordinator, a position I held until 1999.

I am always on the lookout for ways of doing that require less energy loss. I was doing carpentry job at home one day while sitting down on a chair. My father told me, “That’s a lazy way of doing it. Stand up.” I disagreed and murmured, “If I can do it sitting down, why should I do it standing up?”

Computing grades is among the most tedious tasks in teaching. Lotus Symphony™, popular integrated application software at the time, lit the idea bulb in my mind. Why not create an electronic class record (ECR) that can record scores and compute grades at the same time? I started the project in 1990 and then trained members of the College of Arts and Sciences faculty on its use. I migrated ECR to Windows and was able to distribute the first Windows version in 2002. Since then, the program has undergone several major and minor revisions.

Today, the ECR (I wouldn’t say final version) is available for download at my website, http://sirpabs.ilahas.com/ecr/ecr.exe. It’s a database program running under Microsoft Access and customized for the UP System. A version for elementary and high school is also available at http://sirpabs.ilahas.com/ecr/ecrhs.exe. Under a UP grant, I undertook research to determine the applicability of the ECR to the UP System. It is still ongoing.

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Freelance award-winning Filipino 3D animator and graphics artist