School Year 1977-1978
Grade Three was a year marked by quiet resilience and small yet hard-won triumphs. I was not placed in the top section.
We were not a wealthy family, but I learned,in the way only a child with something to prove can, how to carry myself with quiet confidence, even when it sometimes required a degree of pretense.
That year taught me that effort, even when it goes unrecognized, does not vanish, it accumulates.
And one day, often without warning, it is finally seen.
I had long felt that my Grade Two teacher did not think much of me.
So when I moved up to Grade Three and found myself in Section Four, it did not come as a shock. It felt more like something I had expected all along, an unspoken judgment finally made official.
Section Four was a step down from where I had been. It was part of a ranking system everyone understood, even if no one spoke of it openly.
At Pardo Elementary, the section system was simple and rigidly defined. Section One was reserved for the “bright” students, the ones teachers praised and the school proudly showcased.
The rest of us were placed in lower sections, where it often felt as though we were simply there, not quite seen, not quite challenged.
My teacher that year was Mrs. Abao, a woman in her forties who carried herself with a quiet composure I did not yet know how to interpret.
On that first day, I could not tell whether she would notice me at all or if I would simply fade into the background, as I had before.
By then, I already understood that those two things were not the same.
Whatever the world thought of Section Four, I had not given up on myself. I kept pace with the lessons and, before long, found myself competing with the sharpest minds in the room, among them a girl named Marissa Buaya, who was quick, formidable, and not easy to beat.
Our teacher held classroom contests that I still remember vividly.
We would stand in a line between the desks, and for every correct answer, we took a step forward. Whoever reached the front of the room first was declared the brightest in the class.
I stepped forward often. Sometimes Marissa reached the front before I did; sometimes I did.
But I was always there, part of the contest, moving forward and that was everything.
That year, my learning deepened. I studied English and Filipino grammar with growing fluency.
In Mathematics, I moved beyond addition and subtraction into multiplication, division, and the early, tentative edges of fractions.
Each new concept felt like a door opening onto a larger room.
More than anything that year, I longed for my teacher’s approval. The wound left by Grade Two, a year of being overlooked, dismissed, and even scolded over something as small as a coffee stain had not fully healed. The hunger it left behind drove me harder than any lesson ever could. I wanted Mrs. Abao to see me, truly see me.
After one periodical exam, I discovered that I had made only two mistakes. Another classmate had achieved the same score. Mrs. Abao congratulated us both, but then, gently and with careful hesitation, she voiced a doubt. She wondered aloud whether someone might have cheated. The words were softly spoken, yet they stung all the same. I had not cheated. I knew this with a certainty that felt rooted in my bones.
The truth emerged soon enough: our scores were the highest in the entire Grade Three level. It wasn't just in Section Four, but across all sections, including Section One, where the school’s top students were expected to excel.
I genuinely liked my classmates that year. There was no bullying, no cruelty, only the easy, spontaneous camaraderie of children brought together by circumstance who quietly chose one another anyway. We laughed often, and without restraint.
One morning during gardening time, that laughter got us into trouble.
It began, as most mischief does, with me. I started throwing lumps of clay at the wall near the Industrial Arts building.
My classmates joined in, and within moments we were all flinging clay and howling with laughter, convinced the world belonged entirely to us.
It did not. Mr. Abasolo, the Industrial Arts teacher, stepped out from behind the door, and the laughter died at once.
He scolded us with the efficient authority of a man who had seen this exact scene many times before.
In a panic, grasping for anything that might soften his displeasure, I heard myself say, “You see, sir, I was throwing stones to remove the clay from the wall.”
Even as the words left my mouth, I knew they were hopeless. My classmates knew it too.
But we survived the scolding, and for years afterward, that excuse became one of our private jokes, the kind only those who were there could truly appreciate.
The desire to be seen as capable, as someone who truly belonged, sometimes pushed me into choices that, in hindsight, cost more than they were worth.
During school fundraisers, I was always among the first to raise my hand. I volunteered contributions even when none were required, pressing my mother for money despite how difficult things were at home. She never refused me outright; she simply grew quieter each time I asked.
One fundraising drive remains especially vivid. I asked for two pesos and brought it to school the next morning, placing it in my teacher’s hand with the barely concealed pride of a boy who longed to be seen. I glanced around the room, waiting for others to follow.
No one did. I was both the first and the last to give. Two pesos is a valuable sum in those days for a family like ours.
The wave of regret was immediate and cold. I could have stayed silent. I could have kept the money, and my mother would never have known the difference.
But the truth was, I had not given the money for the fundraiser. I had given it for myself, for the version of me I so desperately wanted to impress, the teacher and my classmates.
But the efforts, the studying, the competing, the reaching, did not go entirely unacknowledged.
On several occasions, Mrs. Abao quietly singled me out, along with one other classmate and invited us to visit her home during special occasions.
It was a small gesture, perhaps. But to a boy who had spent two years feeling invisible inside a classroom, it meant the world.
There was another incident that year that I have never quite forgotten, though I have laughed about it many times since.
One morning, Mama sent me to school with a small batch of coconut candies to sell to my classmates.
I liked the idea in principle since there was a commission involved, after all, and a boy mindful of his pocket money could appreciate that.
But the moment I stepped into the classroom, something in me recoiled.
In the arrogance of my young mind, selling things felt like an admission of need.
And to admit need, in front of the very people I had worked so hard to impress, felt quite shameful.
So I said nothing. I sat through the entire day with the candies tucked away, untouched, unsold.
Only in the final minutes before dismissal, when courage finally, barely, overcame pride, did I lean toward my classmates and say, as casually as I could manage, “I have coconut candies. Do you want some?”
I did not tell them they were for sale. I offered them as though they were giveaways, as if the gesture had been mine all along.
When I arrived home, my mother was mad at me.
Almost nothing had been sold.
Though a few candies had remained, the commission was lost, and the capital she had hoped to recover was gone too.
She did not need to say much, the look on her face said everything.
We were a large family, and the middle of a large family is a particular kind of place: you inherit what the older ones have worn out, and you make do.
When the school bag passed down from my older brother finally gave out, its seams splitting, its straps fraying, my mother did not go to a store. Instead, she went to her sewing machine, gathered whatever fabric scraps she had left from her work, and made me a new one, stitching it together both by machine and by hand.
I carried that bag to school, made from remnants of cloth and old clothing, without offering anyone an explanation.
Then one afternoon, a girl from the neighborhood we called Jica, short for Jessica Cabaluna, noticed it and exclaimed with genuine delight, “Ninduta bag nimo, Uly, a!” which means, “Your bag is really nice!”
I think about that moment more often than she probably ever realized. A girl who had no reason to notice my bag, appreciated something stitched from scraps and saw it as something beautiful. It was perhaps the kindest acknowledgment my mother’s handiwork ever received.
This was the martial law era, the years under President Ferdinand Marcos, when the country moved under a particular kind of weight that children felt without fully understanding. Yet even then, expressions of kindness existed.
At school, the government ran a feeding program called nutriban, a free bread that was sometimes paired with powdered skim milk distributed to children in public schools, especially those from indigent families. It was a quiet acknowledgment that many children arrived at school with empty stomachs.
The bread had a peculiar smell that we could never quite account for, something like the scent we associated with cockroaches. We laughed, as only children can laugh at unpleasant things, and gave it a name: “pan de ok-ok,” or cockroach bread.
We ate it anyway. It was food, and it was ours, and it filled the hollow places that nothing else could reach before noon.
My favorite, though, was not the bread at all. It was the skim milk powder, pale and faintly sweet, dissolving slowly in water into something that was not quite milk, but close enough to matter.
I lined up for it at every recess without shame or hesitation. Hunger has a way of dissolving pride far more efficiently than anything else.
Around me in that line were some of my classmates: Julius, Francisco, Roel, and Eulogio, the last two of whom also happened to be our neighbors back in Kabulihan.
We stood together, tin cups in hand, in the ordinary solidarity of children who were all, in their own ways, simply trying to get through the day.
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