By Arianna Del Rosario
This year’s Teachers’ Week celebration was incredibly jam-packed with activities, surprises, and gifts, full of love and appreciation for our amazing teachers! The entire student body came together to celebrate these awesome people who guide us in our journey of learning.
To start the week off, we had a live streamed Launching Ceremony during the Monday morning flag ceremony! Then for the lunch program, students from all grades–Natalia Nala, Elli Bautista, Isa Manotok, and Iain Perez for grade school, and Ericka Bantiling, Leila Romanillos, Anya Aure, Gwen Quin, Bri Billano, and Pauline Isidro for highschool–got to share their talents during the YouTube Premiere, and the support and kind messages in the live chat were so great to see! It felt just like the high school performances that are normally held in the Rockwell area during face-to-face Teacher’s Day.
The next day, October 5, was World Teacher’s Day, and all of the student body got to show their appreciation for their teachers and mentors in personalized letter videos. The teachers and mentors were so surprised to receive the videos in their email, and the heartwarming reception to all the messages was obvious in the teachers’ replies. The school mass that day was also offered for all our Woodrose teachers and mentors.
Wednesday, October 6 was probably the busiest day of Teacher’s Week. In Junior High School, all classes held the Teacher-for-a-Day activity in the morning. A few students volunteered to teach subjects of their choice to their class, getting to feel what it’s like to be a teacher, and our real subject teachers could drop by the meetings to watch! I know our class thoroughly enjoyed it – Eli Gutay and Arianna Ramos taught the History of K-pop for Art, and LA Fernandez taught our class the dance for Treasure by Bruno Mars for PE! I got to be a student-teacher as well. I taught what makes music catchy for Music, and although I was quite nerve-racked (it was quite a busy day), it went smoothly and I had fun with my classmates cracking jokes and playing the Kahoot I prepared!
Later that day, we had my personal favorite activity–the Amazing Race! The Woodrose Student Council and high school students were able to do an online amazing race for the Interbatch Bonding activity at the start of the school year, but never before for the teachers! And while the high school teachers have been participating in Teacher’s Day amazing races since 2015, this was something new for the grade school teachers! If you’re familiar with the TV show, you kind of know the mechanics already: the teachers are split into teams and must complete a bunch of game stations and team missions, and whichever team has the highest completion wins! I was a facilitator, along with Grade 11 student Fides Esteban, for the “Bring Me” station, and it was most definitely my favorite part of Teachers’ Week! Teams were rushing into our breakout room, scrambling, trying to coordinate and communicate with each other, and cheering when they found all the items. Afterwards, if they had more time, they would rehearse their team cheers! It was so much fun, and all the teachers said they were really getting invested, enjoying being carefree, having fun, and feeling young again, and I’m so happy we got to bring happiness to our teachers who work so hard for us all the time.
On Thursday, October 7, every class had a little surprise tribute during their CAP meetings, completely organized by the class just for their advisers! Our class had so much fun making our tribute, and our advisers were so touched by the effort that it definitely made our hard work worth it. During the week, we had been publishing videos by the class officers every day on the Teacher’s Week Site, each video with two words that describe our amazing teachers! (if you would like to look back at the videos, you can find them at the bottom of the daily subpages here). Each batch spelled out a letter of the word LOVELY: Leaders, One-of-a-kind, Valiant, Earnest, Loyal, and Year-Round Inspirations! The finale of the video series was released on Thursday, which was a compilation summary of all the videos, which you can find on Day 4 of the site! Released the same day was the parody music video made by Spirit Squad, (which was so funny–their energy is contagious!) which you can also find on the site!
Thursday also happened to be the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and it seemed really appropriate to end the school week with a rosary for teachers. The Zoom rosary was hosted by the WSC, but was made more special by the participation of Woodrose alumnae Tatty and Bea Gutierrez, Jacqui Tiongco, Stella Escasa, Sabrina Cantos, and Iya Fernandez who led the praying of each decade.
The last day, Friday, was a rest day–a long weekend, for teachers and students alike to relax. We sent out electronic gift tokens to each teacher (thanks to the generosity of the Management Committee, parents, and WSC) and announced the raffle winners. Finally, this jam-packed week came to a close.
This year’s Teachers’ Week was such an incredible show of school unity, and honestly, everyone deserves a round of applause–for the work behind the scenes of the student body, the class officers, the WSC committees, and both JWSC and WSC. I’m so glad that we all came together to create this amazing celebration for our amazing teachers–our suns, our stars, and our universe!