A turkey shoot at the TOY Corral

The analogy of teachers as turkeys is not meant to offend. Our apologies to the turkeys! The stereotype on turkeys is that they are an affable and gullible lot, fragile and docile creatures. Need I say more? Gobbledygook!

Traditionally, Education Day for PSS is a time of silliness and frivolity. Yes, there are the platitudes and inanities, enough to go around another school year, but the early morning dew Wednesday at the Hopwood school grounds evidently had transfused into the damp and cold spirit of the gathered faithful.

That did not deter inspired Kagman HS pedagogue/parson Dave Bucher to bluntly tell the crowd to heed a popular political adage when confronting the myriad of challenges facing PSS: Lead. If you can’t, follow. If not, get out of the way.

As an austerity measure, the Tinian/Rota contingent was reduced to a representative few but when it was time to be presented, the contingent received the support of other schools when they stood behind them. We trust that the gesture was not lost on the miserly Scrooges up front who apparently decided that the full contingent of the Tinian/Rota teachers were not important enough to bring them over.

The dynamic duo of Chris Cabrera and Rosalyn Ajoste kept an upbeat tempo throughout the program while livewire TOY 2006 Charlotte Camacho’s diminutive bearing belied a gargantuan presence that relentlessly challenged everyone’s engagement and participation. The children’s Edu Day theme logo and essay contests awardees reminded the audience, lest they forget, that their [I]raison d’etre[/I] is ultimately the learning experiences of thousands of children in the Commonwealth.

But it is the individual school presentations of selected Year’s teacher, aide, and support staff that have been the mainstay of the festivities, and the varied qualities of these presentations, from the weird to the wacky, the solemn and the sublime, held true to form this Wednesday’s abbreviated event.

Head Start soft-shoed, top-hatted, tap-danced themselves into Broadway center grounds to launch the presentations and the momentum built up non-stop from there. ChaCha and Dandan followed, regrettably to be super-overshadowed by the MHS superheroes who earned their luminous 15-minute fame with their blazing heroic rendition. OK, so triathlon athlete Tyce Mister as a superhero is a redundancy, but meek and mild-mannered Karen Borja in colorful tights streaking across the Hopwood field is a rare and precious sight. One will never look at the HS Principal with the same eyes ever again.

Peacemaker Kagman HS Principal Alfred Ada, whose entourage entered with a blaring and water-spraying fire truck, had BoE teachers’ rep Ambrose Bennett and Dandan ES principal Jonas Barcinas in the diplomatic abrazo, presumably to lay to rest a controversial cross-dressing brouhaha a few weeks back. Tanapag’s bubbles were a hit with the kids and GTC’s rocket ship offered visions beyond the green flash horizons.

Southern painted a three-back(board) mural. Oleai and Hopwood did their thing. SVS hooded chic dancers counseled teachers to “loosen up.” They sinuously did. I played the TOY attired ala Shaolin boyu chasing after the convertible that carried the rest of the awardees, shouting, “Do not leave me behind!” In a break with tradition, instead of the Edu Day theme on the t-shirts, SVS wore what has since become a familiar play on the No Child Left Behind Act into the “No Teacher Left Behind” campaign.

Koblerville’s Karate kids kicked butts. But their veiled Faridahs of Falujah mysteriously evolved from harem denizens to hyper-gyrating Harlem dancers. There were a lot of girth rolling and hip grinding performances that preceded and followed them. We had hoped that our dear AB had his eyes elsewhere when the San Antonio bunny/material girl/phat pretty hot and tight routine came through. Even WSR Disney’d, ali baba’d and I, Robot’d their way in. But when Central ushered their dancing queens, we figured that undulating bodes were morally safe, if not politically correct, this teachers’ outing day!

Sobriety came heavy, fittingly and appropriately at the end, when GTC’s Sadaria Ngewakl’s 40-year timeline enumerated individual students who have served as a benchmark in an illustrious journey as a professional educator. The treasure and the gift that the teaching profession offers seeped in and deeply to what began as a lackluster audience, so much so that by the time Tanapag bubble Acelia dela Cruz’ selection as 2007 TOY awardee was melodramatically announced, the shuffling of feet and the folding of chairs had already begun. The closing remarks were brief.

Life has its own built-in accountability and pronounces its own absolution. The day, put in the context of life’s larger pictures, reduced blown-out differences, convenient limitations, unacknowledged mistakes, negligent omissions and regrettable commissions, to forgettable smithereens. A planet already on a 4.5 billion year journey can very well afford to be dismissive of the arrogance and shortcomings of its human civilizations. Ours, 7,000 years old, is but the last 30 seconds before midnight on a 24-hour planetary scale. Of the 7K, the Commonwealth as an intentional entity is only 30 years old. Indeed, we can afford to “loosen up.”

Given human proclivities and predilections, educators will be back with not so friendly ribbings and petty bickerings, pompous posturings and pious pronouncements, unfounded allegations and corrosive suspicions. Nevertheless, not unlike Wednesday, there will be days when in our ordinary routines, we accomplish extraordinary things. In one of TOY 2006 Camacho’s quotable pronouncements, “we are special people capable of accomplishing special things.” For now, the past is done, the day is all we have, and PSS’ future remains to be created again, and again specially, and perhaps, for the first time once more.