My Mother, The Teacher

A 10th-grade student from Negros Occidental goes to Twitter to ask students to think about their teachers, too

- Kerry Tinga

The hashtag #Academic-FreezeNOW has been trending on Twitter, filled with Filipino students pleading to the Department of Education (DepEd) to cancel the upcoming school year. Due to the current Covid-19 health pandemic, DepEd has canceled all face-to-face learning and prepared an online and modular school year to start on Oct. 5. Students have gone to social media to complain of the poor infrastructure, mental health issues, and other complications that will make the upcoming school year impractical for many, even impossible for some, to learn anything.

Among the top tweets, one stood out, a student thinking not of himself, but of his mother, a teacher.

“I agree [with] Academic Freeze because I’m a student… but I don’t want my mother’s (who’s a teacher) full-effort [to be for] nothing,” writes Stephen Emperado, a 10th-grade student from Escalante City in Negros Occidental. “Academic Freeze or not, it was a situation where neither party won.”

Attached to the tweet, which has gotten over 1,000 likes and hundreds of retweets, are photos of Stephen’s mother working on a laptop to help create lessons for her students.

“Proud ako sa mama ko (I am proud of my mom),” Stephen adds in his Twitter thread.