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!