No Sagala. Department chair Alvin Yapan says Kwiz Bibo is more in line with the department's goals. Photo by Migi C. Soriano.
“MAGPAPAHINGA NA muna ang Sagala ng mga Sikat.”
Filipino Department chairperson Alvin Yapan said the annual Buwan ng Wika event is being cancelled this year, in light of financial and logistical issues as well as concerns over its alignment with the department’s goals.
The Sagala has been celebrated in the Ateneo since 2005, and was first introduced during the Filipino Department’s 30th anniversary.
According to Yapan, who was also the head of the Sagala committee during its first year, the department’s vision in creating the Sagala was to introduce the students to the characters, personalities, and events in Philippine literature and popular culture.
Problems with Sagala
While the Sagala has become an icon of Ateneo’s Buwan ng Wika, Yapan said that it is now unable to fulfill the vision and mission that the department had in mind during its inception.
“We’ve noticed that for the past few years, the entries that the students pass are becoming repetitive,” he said. “It seems that all the personalities and characters they know are the same, especially since these are freshmen, and their knowledge in literature and popular culture is not yet that broad.”
Yapan said the Sagala usually featured characters from the Noli Me Tangere, El Filibusterismo, Florante at Laura, and Ibong Adarna.
Another major concern was the financial and logistical aspects of staging such an event. Each class was spending too much money, and the Buwan ng Wika celebrations usually fell during the rainy season.
“Every year, our problem with Sagala is how to tell the students that they should not spend too much in making their archs. And every year, there will always be classes that want to really beautify their archs, so the students, parents, and the entire section ends up spending,” Yapan said. He added that some participants had even designed floats for the event.
“They brought trucks in here. And we thought, ‘that’s not what we envisioned for Sagala ng mga Sikat,’ because what we wanted to promote was creativity,” he said.
Yapan added that they often had to talk with the physical education (PE) department in order to use the covered courts when it rained during the event, disrupting PE classes in the process.
Kwiz Bibo
To replace the Sagala, Yapan said the department is holding a quiz bee, entitled “Kwiz Bibo,” open to students taking Filipino 11, 12 and 14.
The Kwiz Bibo is not a new event, according to Yapan. “We did this [Kwiz Bibo] once, and it was a hit. We just didn’t continue it back then because we had Sagala ng mga Sikat. The faculty would have double the work load, so we had to choose,” he said.
“Back then, the Sagala was still feasible, so we cancelled the Kwiz Bibo. But since it had a good impact, we decided to bring it back now,” Yapan added.
Buwan ng Wika Committee Head Claudette Ulit said that they have decided to make the quiz more interactive, instead of sticking to the standard question-and-answer format. “We saw that the students were really excited, so we decided to make it interactive. For example, they will have to watch a short video first, or they will have to dance [the answer],” she said in Filipino.
Ulit added that the quiz bee is also more fitting with this year’s Buwan ng Wika theme of Rizal as a scholar.
“We know that other offices here in the Ateneo are already celebrating his being a novelist [or] a doctor, so we wanted to focus on his being a researcher, because right now we are promoting research in the Filipino Department. That is why we chose the theme KaPANTAS (scholar),” Yapan said in Filipino.
Meanwhile, annual competitions like the Timpalak Awit, Timpalak Tula, and Timpalak Blog are still ongoing. New additions to the line-up have also been included, such as the Timpalak Pabalat in partnership with the Ateneo de Manila University Press and the Timpalak Video Essay, which replaced the previous year’s Timpalak Slogan.
