School Year 1979–1980
In Grade 6, students were no longer grouped strictly by academic rank, yet I still found myself in Section 1, surrounded by familiar classmates. Familiarity, however, came with its own quiet weight. I now stood in the shadow of my brother Junjun, who had graduated as valedictorian the previous year, and teachers were never subtle about reminding me of that comparison.
Our English teacher, Mrs. Santos, did not fully accept the new mixed-section arrangement. Instead, she created her own informal screening test, as though she could still sort students into those who truly belonged and those who, in her eyes, did not. She also introduced us to songs that stayed lodged in memory long after the classroom faded, among them "One Little Candle", a tune I would carry with me into high school, into the seminary, and far beyond the walls of elementary school.
That final year also taught me something about consequences. The unkindness I had once directed toward others eventually found its way back to me, with quiet precision. At one point, I sold camote cue to gamblers just to afford school supplies.
And on graduation day, I stood inside an almost emptying church, watching the crowd thin, quietly searching for a familiar face that never appeared, my mother.
I finished elementary school without honors, but not without dignity. Not entirely.
By the time I reached Grade 6, I was quietly grateful to still find myself in Section 1. That placement had come to feel like something fragile, something I needed to hold on to, as if it were a small but meaningful measure of worth in a household where comparisons came easily and praise was rare. Then, that year, the school system changed in a way that put everything in disarray.
Sections were no longer strictly based on academic performance. Instead, students were mixed across abilities and placed together in shared classrooms and shared routines. On paper, it was a more inclusive and democratic approach. But for those of us who had worked our way into the top section, it felt like something had been quietly stripped away, a distinction erased without ceremony or explanation.
Still, I was fortunate that several familiar classmates remained with me: Dennis Guangco, Glenn Alegarbes, Ariel Quijano, and Felipe Abarquez. As for the girls in class, I was not particularly close to any of them, a situation that was common among most of my barkada, who moved through the school year as a tight, self-contained group, largely uninterested in that particular social boundary.
Our class adviser was Mrs. Santos, who also served as our English teacher. She was genuinely competent, sharp in the way good teachers often are. I still remember, with a clarity that has not faded, the moment during enrollment when she turned to my mother and asked, with the casual directness of someone expecting an honest answer, “Is he also intelligent?”
My mother, never one for flattery or hesitation, replied without missing a beat: “Not quite.”
Two words. No malice, I’m certain of that. And yet they settled into me in a way that casual remarks sometimes do, not like a sudden wound, but like something slowly seeping outward, tinting everything I tried that year. The comparison had already been made for me long before I could resist it: my brother Junjun had graduated as valedictorian the year before, and his achievements seemed to arrive in every room ahead of me.
I remember his graduation vividly. Junjun had nearly not made it to the ceremony at all, delayed by a disagreement with our parents, the details of which were never fully explained to me. Perhaps it was something as small as what he chose to wear. Or perhaps it was the familiar reluctance of our parents to attend such events, the same quiet distance they kept from our accomplishments, as though pride were something they had agreed not to express openly. We had long grown accustomed to that absence, not as cruelty, but as a persistent, unspoken lack that shaped how we understood recognition itself.
My sister May had received honors in Grade V, but it was Mrs. Cagigas who pinned the ribbons onto her, because our parents were not there. That image has stayed with me, May standing before the class, being recognized for something extraordinary, and the person doing the honoring being a teacher rather than a parent. Still, on the day of Junjun's graduation, I walked to school early and sat close to the stage. And when he arrived with them just in time to deliver his valedictory speech, something inside me swelled with a pride I did not fully know how to name. I was proud of him. I was proud for all of us.
Mrs. Santos was not entirely satisfied with the randomness the new system had introduced. Whatever the school administration intended with mixed sections, she had her own ideas about who belonged in her classroom, and she wasted no time acting on them. She devised a screening test in English: we were to read a passage and answer four questions. Our scores would determine who stayed and who would be quietly reassigned.
I scored 2 out of 4. So did Felipe Abarquez, my classmate, widely regarded as one of the sharpest minds in our batch, and the boy who would eventually graduate as our class valedictorian. Only a handful of students managed a 3 or 4. Mrs. Santos drew her line: anyone who scored at least 2 would remain in Section 1. I had cleared the threshold, barely, and that was enough. I was staying.
Looking back, there is something quietly revealing about that moment that Felipe and I stood on the same rung of that ladder, if only for that afternoon. It did not make us equals in the long run. But it did remind me that the distance between “not quite” and “capable enough” was sometimes thinner than the labels people so easily attach to others.
Among Mrs. Santos’s many gifts to us was her love of music, not as entertainment, but as something to be learned, carried, and passed on. She taught us a song called “Service,” and another that would follow me through the years like a quiet companion: “One Little Candle.”
We sang it again during our Junior-Senior Prom in my third year high school, its melody echoed in a stage briefly transformed into something larger and more luminous than itself. Two years later, I sang it once more during a formation program at San Agustin Seminary in Makati, as part of a candle-lighting presentation. Our group had little else to rely on that evening, and the song, simple, earnest, already softened by repetition that carried us through. It was the kind of song that does not age, not because it resists time, but because it was never bound to a single moment in the first place.
Here are its words, and the music that gives them life:
We had other teachers that year who left their marks in ways I have never entirely forgotten. Mrs. Bacayo, who taught Health and Science, was strict in a manner that sometimes crossed the line between discipline and something harder to excuse. When a student failed to answer a question to her satisfaction, she did not simply move on, she would pinch the skin near the ear, or sometimes the softer flesh of the armpit, with a precision that suggested long practice. I was on the receiving end of that particular correction more than once, and it lingered in ways that outlasted the moment itself.
Mrs. Kiamco, on the other hand, was the opposite, a teacher whose methods ran on encouragement rather than pain. She offered twenty-five centavos to any student who achieved a perfect score on her quizzes, a sum that felt genuinely meaningful to us at the time. On one occasion, I was the only student in class to earn that perfect score. But when I reviewed my paper just before it was collected, I noticed an error I had missed. Without much hesitation and with a quiet, private certainty that I did not want to disappoint her, I corrected it before anyone else could see. I kept the twenty-five centavos. I also kept the knowledge of what I had done, which sat less comfortably.
On many other occasions, however, I truly earned those perfect scores. That fact still matters to me, perhaps more than it should.
I had a tight-knit barkada that year, and belonging to that group gave me a confidence I now understand was not entirely earned. There is a particular recklessness that comes with being part of a circle, the way shared laughter can turn cruelty into something that feels like wit, and the way collective amusement can blind you to the harm it inflicts on the person at its center.
There was a girl in our class named Marietta. She was dark-skinned, with tightly curled hair, and we, I, in particular, called her “matsing,” the tagalog word for monkey. We said it casually, the way children speak before they fully understand the weight of their words. We thought it was harmless. We thought it was funny. We were wrong on both counts.
One day, just before the noon dismissal during our classroom cleaning session, Marietta finally reached her limit. She grabbed a broomstick and brought it down on me with a force I had never expected from her. The pain was immediate, sharp, heavy, and lingering for days afterward in a deep ache I can still remember clearly. But I pretended it was nothing. I could not bear to admit, in front of everyone, that the girl I had mocked had struck me and that, somewhere beneath my embarrassment, I knew I had earned it. So I stayed silent. I absorbed the pain quietly. And in that silence, I began to understand, however imperfectly, that cruelty has a way of returning to the one who gives it.
In the afternoons, we reported to the large workshop building for Industrial Arts. Our teacher there was Mr. Abosolo, a man who carried himself with the quiet authority of someone who had mastered his craft so completely that he could no longer tolerate watching it done carelessly. He taught us technical drawing and lettering, carpentry, and a range of practical skills most of us encountered for the first time under his supervision.
His grading system was simple and uncompromising: one mistake meant a score of zero. Not reduced, not partially credited, zero. The first time I heard this policy explained, I assumed he was exaggerating. He was not. And yet, through careful attention and a steadiness of hand I did not know I possessed until he demanded it of me, I consistently managed to earn perfect scores. Those afternoons in his workshop were among the few moments in Grade 6 when I felt entirely certain of myself.
Outside school, the neighborhood remained our kingdom, and play its language. Just across from our home lay a stretch of open earth, shaded by coconut palms, flanked by banana plants, and anchored at one end by a bamboo hut with a nipa roof and a cool cement floor. It was there that the older boys gathered to play hantak, a coin-flipping gambling game, and cards too. I was too young to join the grownup kids, but not too young to watch and in watching, I was quietly learning how money moved and how men filled their idle afternoons.
One day, I found myself in urgent need of a Pentel pen for an Industrial Arts project. It was not optional. Mr. Abosolo’s standards allowed no improvisation or substitution. But when I asked my mother, there was nothing she could give me, no spare coins, or probably she was just wanted to train me.
She did not turn me away. Instead, she offered a solution: a kilo of camote (sweet potato), bought for one peso and eighty centavos. She showed me how to cube them, fry them in oil, and coat them in caramelized sugar until they glistened amber on bamboo skewers. I carried them to the hut where the gamblers gathered, and I sold each stick for fifty centavos. By the time the last piece was gone, I had just enough, exactly enough, to walk to the store and buy my Pentel pen.
It was not some grand act, though a bit shameful. It was necessity shaping me into someone to become resourceful. But there was something meaningful in it, the weight of those coins earned by my own hands and spent on something my education required, that felt, to a twelve-year-old boy, like the faint outline of a self-reliance he had not yet fully grown into.
As graduation approached, conversations among my friends increasingly turned toward high school, on what came next, which school to attend, what kind of future might be waiting beyond elementary classrooms. Felipe had once considered enrolling in a technical school in the city, where admission required an average grade of at least 85. But when enrollment season arrived, I found him instead at Gullas High School, and I understood the reason without needing to ask. It was the same reason I never pursued the technical school myself: money or more precisely, the dependable absence of it. Financial contraints have a quiet way of redirecting ambition long before ambition has the chance to argue back.
Sometime in March 1980 came the culmination of my elementary school years. The graduation ceremony was held at Pardo Parish Church, whose old stone walls and arched ceilings lent the occasion a solemnity none of us quite knew how to carry. I sat through the ceremony without receiving any honors, though I will admit, quietly and honestly, that I had hoped for at least one. A district-wide examination had been administered earlier that year, and the highest scorer in each subject was supposed to receive special recognition.
I had scored 95 in English, the highest mark in the subject. But I wasn't the only one: the daughter of a teacher had matched my score exactly. In the event of a tie, the recognition went to her. I never learned by what principle that decision had been made. I only remember how it felt to stand at the same height academically and still walk away empty-handed while the ceremony carried on around me.
After the final applause faded and the crowd began to thin, I started looking for my mother. At first, I walked slowly, scanning the faces gathered near the pews and along the church steps. Then faster. Then with the restrained urgency of someone trying very hard not to panic. But she was nowhere to be found.
So I waited. I remained inside the church as the other graduates drifted away with their families, the photographs being taken, arms wrapped around shoulders, laughter spilling into the noon from people who belonged to one another. I waited until most of them had gone and the church had grown quiet around me. Then I walked back to school alone for our pack lunch.
Eventually, I did manage to have my graduation photograph taken. By then, most of my classmates had already gone home to their families and celebrations. But I stayed behind. I stood before whatever backdrop remained and let the shutter click. It became the only photograph I would keep from that day, incomplete, delayed, taken in the quiet aftermath rather than at the center of the occasion itself.
I finished elementary school without honors, without a ribbon, and without my mother beside me for the photograph I had imagined. But I finished. I had sat in those classrooms, run those errands, sung those songs, endured those wounds, both given and deserved, and emerged on the other side still standing, still recognizably myself, though perhaps a little more honest than before.
And perhaps, in the end, that was its own kind of graduation.
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