WATCH: All our Teacher Rubilyn skits so far

It all started in July, when Alice Guo, at the time still the mayor of Bamban town in Tarlac, claimed she was raised on a farm and homeschooled. She hardly had any knowledge of or contact with the world outside this nondescript farm except through her teacher, whose name she could only recall as Rubilyn.

The lack of a full identity or origin story made Teacher Rubilyn — to a degree certainly less than Guo herself — a confection in many Filipinos’ imagination.

Given the extent of Guo’s web of lies, it’s highly likely Teacher Rubilyn does not exist. If Guo is to be believed, then Teacher Rubilyn did exist but is already dead, as the beleaguered former mayor told a congressional panel on September 19. (RIP, Teacher Rubilyn, if this is true).

The ambiguity makes the meme of Teacher Rubilyn the perfect character for satirizing the sorry state of our education system and the government in general, whose ill effects trickle down to the classroom (or lack thereof).

Any dysfunction in the administration of our country’s affairs certainly affects our teachers and students: the failure to build schoolhouses, to update curricula, to equip instructors, to equip pupils, to actually achieve education. It’s not automatic; you don’t necessarily come out learned just by showing up to class.

And then there are those things the government imposes that add to the burdens of teachers and students already struggling to educate and be educated. Take the Bagong Pilipinas Hymn, for instance. We imagined what it would be like for Teacher Rubilyn — in our imagination an earnest, dedicated elementary teacher — to try to learn the rather intricate song on the fly because she is expected to teach it to her students.

We let Teacher Rubilyn’s character personify the crises faced by teachers across the country: they were saddled by administrative work and couldn’t focus on actually teaching. They weren’t — aren’t — earning enough to spend on their own professional and intellectual advancement. They are overworked. They are confused by the government’s inconsistent dictums. At one point, they weren’t even allowed to put up visual aids in their classrooms.

Every teacher was once a student, too. Wouldn’t deficiencies in a student’s upbringing, including nutrition, affect the kind of teacher they are going to become? We put all this in a skit, too.

We were saddened when we heard Alice Guo say, in a nonchalant way, that the one teacher who helped raise her had already “passed away,” and therefore could not be summoned by Congress to a hearing. But, sad and incredulous as we were, we could not not milk the moment.

We took it as an opportunity to highlight headlines on the plight of Filipino teachers, how everything our broken system deprives them of is — we hope only figuratively — killing them.

If there really was a Teacher Rubilyn who taught Alice Guo her ABCs, could she be turning in her grave over how her pupil turned out? But then, in a way, Teacher Rubilyn is real in every teacher who puts their heart and soul into rearing the nation’s children and whose heart soars at their triumphs and breaks at their troubles.

If you’re wondering what business a news organization like Rappler has dabbling into skits and satire, the answer is simple. The news audience is shrinking. Fast. Our inundation with “content” and the complete customization social media affords us means people are taking the path of least resistance and are watching whatever they find most entertaining on their phones.

Notice the vertical format of these videos? Yes, it’s an altogether new genre of video that newsrooms across the globe are racing to figure out. How do you get audiences, especially young audiences, to pay attention to the doom and gloom of the news when they’re one flick of the thumb away from the latest meme or dance challenge?

Hence the effort at exploring new formats of delivering facts. Maybe embedding them in memes — like Teacher Rubilyn — will work. Maybe it won’t. Maybe you can teach us.

Happy World Teachers’ Day! – Rappler.com