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There lies the rub: they said it with flair—again. But will it stick this time? In his fourthState of the Nation Address (SONA), President Marcos Jr. finally said the words teachers have been waiting to hear: compensation for overtime and overload. Laptops. Less paperwork. Smarter classrooms. A “digital push,” they called it. It sounded great. Crisp. Clean. Clickable. But for teachers who’ve learned to dance between hope and heartbreak, this was a familiar beat. We’ve heard this tune before. The choreography hasn’t changed. And the encore? Always delayed. Sure, we’ll get overtime pay, at last. But at what cost? We had to burn out before they acknowledged the burn. We had to juggle paperwork, lesson plans, and 70-student classes before they decided our exhaustion was worth anything. Now they’re giving us laptops. As if typing our stress on a sleeker keyboard will make it easier to bear. They say they’ve removed “nearly 100 non-teaching documents.” But when work still follows us home, when holidays mean report-writing, and weekends mean tutorials, what exactly was removed? The President said, “You’ll get paid this school year.” We ask: why did it take this long? Wi-Fi and Wounds Yes, there’s Wi-Fi now. Smart TVs. SIM cards with data. Cool. But who pays for the electricity? The ink? The extra hours spent tutoring a struggling reader while your own child waits for dinner? Digital upgrades are a relief. But they’re not a cure. Because while they upgrade the tech, they’ve yet to upgrade the dignity of teaching. The real virus in our classrooms isn’t just slow internet. It’s systemic neglect—disguised as generosity. Teaching While Tired Marcos now says we’ll no longer be judged by how many students pass, but by how many are empowered. Sounds noble. But how do you empower when you’re running on fumes? How do you raise ambition when your own dreams are shelved so you can afford rice? They created 60,000 new teaching positions. Built classrooms. Bought digital tools. All good. All needed. But again—why only now? Why did it take pandemic scars and mass resignations to remind the government that teachers are human? Were we not worthy of these before? From the Mouth to the Ground Every year, we hear the same promise: lighter workload, hired assistants, digitized forms. But on the ground? Teachers are still doing feeding programs, library inventory, guidance counseling, student home visits—on top of teaching six subjects and acting as surrogate parents. The gap between what’s said and what’s lived is still massive. So when the President says, “We are investing in people more than infrastructure,” we ask: which people, exactly? The Missing Class Groups like ACT Philippines have long been calling this out. Imagine: 6 to 9 classes a day, 45 to 60 students per class, 40 minutes to an hour per session. At the end of it all, we’re still expected to smile through the last two hours filled with lesson plans, grades, reports, remediation, evaluations, and yes, memos. The Magna Carta for Public School Teachers says six hours of actual teaching is the limit. But if needed, we can be stretched to eight, with overtime pay. But here’s the catch: Who’s tracking the hours? Who’s paying? And when? According to ACT, the Department of Education (DepEd) has turned the ceiling into the floor. What was meant as the max load has become the baseline, so they can pretend there are "excess teachers" to shuffle around while shortages scream across the archipelago. The Real Learning Crisis Meanwhile, our students are being left behind. According to the 2022 PISA Creative Thinking Assessment, Filipino 15-year-olds scored an average of 14 out of 60. That places us in the bottom four out of 64 countries. Singapore scored 41. We scored 14. This isn’t just a number. It’s a mirror. The learning crisis is real and systemic. And no amount of Wi-Fi or tablets will fix it if the ones leading the learning are too broken to build minds. Classroom Infrastructure Marcos promised 60,000 new teaching positions and 40,000 classrooms by the end of his term. But by 2025, only 16,000 posts have been approved, with ₱4.2 billion allocated. Good start. Far from finished. Most of these are Teacher I (SG 11), with a handful for Special Science Teachers (SG 13) and SPED (SG 14). A step forward, but still crawling against the enormous backlog of needs, especially in remote areas. Let’s not call this a success story. It’s a draft at best. Classroom Theater Marcos ended his speech with a call for budget support, education reform, and teacher investment. It sounded like a standing ovation moment. A final, hopeful act. But for those inside the classroom, the real drama drags on. Because teaching in this country has always been a kind of performance: One where we smile through exhaustion, improvise through shortages, and take curtain calls for roles no one even clapped for. So yes, thank you, for the gadgets, the pay, the promises. But let’s stop pretending this is generosity. It’s not a gift. It’s back pay for unpaid labor. And if this is the big reform? Then we’re still just reading from the script. The real work—the real change—hasn’t even begun.