10/08/2026
FEATURE || ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐ฐ๐๐๐๐
๐ ๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐
๐๐๐, ๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ช๐๐๐๐๐, ๐๐๐
๐๐๐ ๐พ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐พ๐ ๐ช๐๐๐๐ ๐จ๐๐๐๐
7:14 AM, and the line already stretches past the sari-sari store on the corner. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, watching the gate barely move. Guards check bags and scan IDs one at a time, a routine that wasn't this careful a few months ago. I do the math I do every morning: if scanning starts at 7:20 and I'm still this far back, I will be late again. Not because I woke up late. Not because I don't care. Because there are four hundred of us and one gate built for a lighter world.
By the time I'm finally through, the strap of my bag has already dug a groove into my shoulder, a reminder of what's waiting for me once I sit down. Inside: Learning Activity Sheets I haven't started, a ballpen with maybe one page of ink left, and a knot in my stomach that has nothing to do with breakfast.
This is what my school week looks like now. Half of it in a classroom that's still standing. Half of it at home, teaching myself what the other half missed.
๐ ๐๐๐ข๐ ๐ก๐ญ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ซ๐ซ๐ฒ ๐๐๐๐จ๐ซ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐๐ญ๐
I understand why the line is longer now. After what happened in Leyte this year, every school in the country looked at its own gate and asked if it was safe enough. Ours answered by slowing down, checking more, trusting less at first glance. I don't resent that. None of us do.
But understanding a thing doesn't make it lighter. The girl in front of me shifts her bag to her other shoulder for the third time. Somewhere behind me, someone mutters that we're going to be marked late again, and no one disagrees, because we all know it's true, and none of us know how to fix it without asking for less safety in return.
By the time we're inside, some of us have already used up the calm we needed for first period. We walk into homeroom already tired, already behind, carrying a kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with a line that exists for a reason we understand and still have to live through every single day.
๐๐ฎ๐ซ๐ข๐๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐๐๐, ๐๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐ฉ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ฌ
Our school splits us into two groups. This week, mine reports Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Next week, we switch, and the group that had Tuesday and Thursday takes our seats instead. It isn't a program we chose. It's what happens when an earthquake leaves half your classrooms too damaged to hold a class in.
On the days I'm not on campus, I'm still supposed to be learning, just without a room, a teacher, or a bell to tell me when. The clock on my own wall says 8:15, and I'm still on page one of five Learning Activity Sheets. No discussion, no raised hands, no "does anyone have questions," just me, a pen, and a stack of paper that's supposed to stand in for a lesson.
I don't fully understand the diagram in front of me. But I don't have time to understand it, I have time to finish it. So I write the answer that sounds closest to right, move to the next question, and tell myself I'll come back to it later. I never come back to it later. Cramming a week's worth of lessons into a single afternoon. Cramming understanding itself, squeezing it into whatever minutes are left after copying, computing, and filling in blanks, just so the paper says done.
At night, it's worse. I sit with my LAS spread across the bed, no teacher to ask, no classmate beside me, just me, a search engine, and a deadline. I get the answer right, eventually. But I couldn't tell you, an hour later, why it's right. And when the sheet comes back marked, the comment isn't about what I understood. It's about how neat my handwriting is.
๐๐จ ๐๐ข๐ฆ๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ญ๐, ๐๐๐ฌ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฌ
Nobody handed us a manual for this. One week I'm a student sitting in a real classroom. The next, I'm my own teacher, reading a module meant to replace a lesson I never got to hear out loud.
I get why the split exists. The buildings that cracked in June aren't safe to fill with forty students at once, and until they're rebuilt, someone has to decide who sits where and when. I'm not angry at the schedule. I'm tired from it, which is a different thing.
The hardest part isn't the switching. It's that the online and modular days are supposed to hold the same amount of learning as a full day in class, with none of the things that actually make learning happen: a teacher explaining it twice, a classmate asking the question I was too shy to ask, someone noticing when I've gotten it wrong before it's too late to fix. Instead, it's just me, the LAS, and whatever I can piece together alone.
๐๐ก๐ ๐๐๐ข๐ ๐ก๐ญ ๐๐ ๐๐ก๐จ๐จ๐ฌ๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ซ๐ซ๐ฒ
None of this is really about the backpack. It never was. The bag on my shoulder is just the part you can see, the part that's easy to point to. The real weight is in the parts no one clocks: the line at the gate that exists for a reason none of us question but still costs us every morning, the LAS we finish without understanding, the nights we spend teaching ourselves what a classroom was supposed to teach us, all because the building we used to learn in isn't safe to hold us anymore.
We're not asking for the gate to open faster at the cost of safety, or for the schedule to disappear before the classrooms are ready. We're asking for what's underneath both: guidance that meets us halfway on the days we're on our own, and the acknowledgment that what we're carrying right now is heavier than a backpack was ever meant to hold.
We'll keep carrying this until the buildings are whole again. We just hope, somewhere along the way, someone helps carry it with us.
By Eurika Vienne Catipay
Pubmat: Sahidsahid
