The examples teachers set

JAKARTA (JP): At the now defunct Ngawi (East Java) High School of Teacher Training (SPG), where restrictions outnumbered freedoms, one teacher, Mubini, was the most beloved enforcer of the regulations.

Unlike other teachers at the school, who enforced the regulations with such physical punishments as ordering offenders to run around the principal's office, Mubini punished rule- breakers with allusions and jokes.

"Hi, you Yanti, you must have been so busy dating that you did not have time to wash your undershirt," said Mubini, "punishing" my classmate Haryanti who broke the rule requiring all students, male and female, to wear an undershirt beneath their uniforms.

"Listen up everyone, Riyadi here needs the help of his mother to cut his fingernails," Mubini announced one day after noticing that my fingernails were too long.

That was one of the unwritten regulations established by Mubini himself for his students.

Of course, other teachers had their own unwritten regulations on top of the written rules, such as the one requiring all students to wear black shoes, white socks, gray pants and white shirts from Monday to Thursday.

Our gym teacher, Naryo, for instance, banned all students from smoking, even outside of school. Once he spotted one student contentedly puffing away in a movie theater. The next day, Naryo interrogated the guilty student in front of the class.

Naryo, Mubini and all of the other teachers at the school constantly emphasized that as future elementary school teachers, SPG students had to learn good habits and abandon bad ones, so that when we became teachers we would set only positive examples for our students.

Thus the saying "Guru kencing berdiri, murid kencing berlari" -- which literally means "Teachers pee while standing, students pee while running" from the belief in rural areas that it was more polite for men to squat while urinating -- was popular among the SPG teachers.

Naryo, for example, announced to the class after interrogating the student he had caught smoking: "If you smoke cigarettes, your students will smoke cocaine."

That kind of warning may sound strange now, but we took it seriously.

As future teachers, we could not drink alcohol or frequent places that could be seen in any negative light, such as cafes, bars or even movie theaters, where prostitutes sometimes trolled for customers.

Some of my classmates eventually went on to become elementary school teachers. And, I would assume, they are good, responsible teachers, even though they have to do side jobs such as farming or trading to make ends meet.

One such former classmates, Sumardi, who recently visited me in the capital, said he did some work as a middleman for people who sold everything from bicycles to houses.

He also has a fishpond near his house in Sukoharjo district, Central Java.

The money he makes as a broker and from his fishpond supplements the meager salary he earns as an elementary school teacher.

Sumardi assured me, however, that these little extra jobs did not in the least take away from his work as a teacher. He still has time to offer his students extra-curricular activities free of charge.

When I asked him if he still went by the saying "Guru kencing berdiri, murid kencing berlari," he said it was even more important now. He asserted that upstanding elementary school teachers inspired their students and encouraged them to be good and to succeed.

Most elementary school teachers, I believe, are good and responsible people. Most of them, I would say, are the products of those rigid educations at SPGs across the country, before they were abolished in the early 1990s.

True, demonstrations and strikes were never part of the SPG curriculum. Nevertheless, teachers did stage a massive protest last year, demanding better pay. And the government met their demand and gave them a raise.

"It was a significant increase. I think it was the highest pay increase in my 15-year career as a teacher," Sumardi said.

And now teachers are making headlines again. This time, they went beyond demonstrating and staged strikes in a number of areas, pressing local administrations to make good on the back pay owed them from January.

As one might expect, the sight of teachers walking out of the classroom resulted in vigorous debate. The national education minister weighed in with his opinion that teachers should not strike, but instead should engage in talks to reach a settlement.

But Sumardi thought the strike was understandable because local administrations continuously failed to recognize teachers as the assets they are, and as a result continued to neglect them.

It is hard to rebut his argument because, after all, if you devote your life to helping students take their first and most important steps on the path of life, you must have a leg to stand on yourself.

-- Riyadi Suparno