SABOY JELLY MARCH B.

PHIL ARTS 9

STEM 12 E

“The Rights and Wrongs of Vicentiments Short Film on Online Classes.”

A VinCentiments short film depicting students’ rants on online classes has earned ire of
education groups and netizens for allegedly antagonizing teachers amid the shift to online
learning mode due to the coronavirus pandemic. The nearly 10-minute film showed a student
struggling to participate in an online class after meeting up with distractions at home. After the
teacher prodded the student to end her report, the student started to rant about various issues
hounding online classes, including high tuition and many homes not being conducive to online
learning. The student in the film also scored teachers for supposedly being insensitive to their
struggles, adding that an “online class is not equals to online learning.” The video shared over
VinCentiments’ Facebook page on August 7 has, so far, garnered 9.4 million views with 230,000
shares and logged 53,000 comments, as of this writing. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 health
crisis, classes in both basic and higher education shift to distance learning to prevent virus
transmission. While acknowledging that the short film aimed to voice out students’ concerns on
online classes, the University of the Philippines College of Education Student Council slammed
the video as “outright irresponsible, insensitive, and infuriating.” In a statement, the short film’s
director and writer Darryl Yap admitted that the video’s content was offensive, but pointed out
that it opened up “floodgates” for discussion on the matter. The likes of Erik Matti, Jerrold Tarog,
and other renowned filmmakers are skilled in terms of featuring detailed fragments of reality,
and how well they put these simple events together to render it an art form. I recognize the
VinCentiments team as a group of young artists, garnering an impressive audience of over 1.5
million YouTube subscribers and over 2 million Facebook Page followers.

Today, the role of teachers amidst the pandemic is undeniably challenging due to the
additional effort they make in ensuring that quality education is continuously delivered despite
the many limitations present in our educational system. With this, the efforts and struggles of
teachers should never be undermined in any way. While we recognize that it aims to voice out
the concerns of students with regard to online classes, the latest episode of VinCentiments
entitled “Online Class” is outright irresponsible, insensitive, and infuriating. The video narrows
down learning into the traditional mode wherein it is only facilitated in the classroom. Moreover,
it fails to acknowledge that remote learning is not merely limited to conducting online classes.
The video also antagonizes teachers by portraying them as harsh and ignorant to the concerns
of students. This is a direct insult to educators whose efforts, for the past months, are directed
towards adjusting syllabi, curricula, modules, and lesson plans in order to ensure the delivery of
quality and compassionate education amidst the pandemic. What the VinCentiments team
needs to realize is that they have a lot of areas to further improve on as content creator and as
curators of human experiences, especially in the discipline of film. VinCentiments team needs to
understand that online learning can be further elaborated by an array of discussions ranging
from lack of preparations, insufficient funding in the education sector, academic apartheid, lack
of genuine student representation, privatized/commercialized education, decades of
discrimination to curricular stakeholders not only limited to teachers, but also including students
in general, and others. VinCentiments team also must realize the need to act as professionals
given that they are artists by declaration. Being toxic towards their critics is not a personality
brand, and they have to understand that acting in such a way only leads them to
misrepresenting the youth even more. Their sarcastic rants as well as their vulgarity as artists does
more harm than good; they end up contributing to the social stigma that the youth is incapable
of engaging in mature and rational forms of discourse (which, they are not).

The merit behind VinCentiments’ cultural trend is that it stands as a representation to the
pleas and woes and frustration of today’s youth. And in their very own ways, the team puts
themselves in a position to represent the youth; at the very least, that is respectable. In these
trying times, we should centralize our efforts for our education, for our healthcare, and for our
country’s general welfare! Now more than ever, we must know who the real enemy is. Instead of
putting all the blame towards our teachers, our efforts must be directed against this oppressive
administration and in strengthening our fight towards quality, accessible, and relevant
education!