Thursday, March 20, 2014
Blog Co-Author
60 year old woman to graduate from La Consolacion College
Sixty-year-old Perpetua Cañete is enjoying her last few days in college as she finishes her teaching practice assignment in Lilo-an National High School.Cañete is among the 37 graduating students of La Consolacion College in Lilo-an town in Cebu for Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education major in Social Science.
Before the big day on March 22, Cañete had a taste of what it is like to teach a room full of teenagers.
"I enjoy teaching young students, maybe because at my age, I have learned how to get their attention and have them listen to everything I say," she said.
Cañete has three kids, all of them professionals. One works as a nurse, another a seaman, and the other a businessman running catering services. Cañete's husband, meanwhile, is a barangay tanod in Poblacion, Lilo-an.
She said it was her family who urged her to enrol and pursue her dream of becoming a teacher.
In 2009, Cañete took a few units in Education.
"I just wanted to test if going to school is really for me. At my age, it's pretty funny to sit inside a classroom with students who are young enough to be your grandchildren," she laughingly said.
But Cañete was surprised that her professors were so supportive of her that they encouraged her to pursue education.
She said her classmates would also lend her their notes whenever she missed a class because of some household obligations.
When she was young, Cañete took up medical technology in Southwestern University. She, however, never got the chance to finish her studies as she got married at the age of 20.
But Cañete said being a medical technologist was never really her dream. She just pursued it because it was her parents' dream.
Teaching was something she would have wanted to take at that time, she said.
After she got married, she needed to work abroad to help raise her family. She worked as a caregiver in Taiwan for 10 years and then went to Hong Kong to be a babysitter for two years.
"I have worked as an OFW, encountered a lot of different kinds of people and children. This experience made me more equipped in handling students and teaching them," she said.
Though now 60 years old, an age suitable for retirement, Cañete still wishes to land a job after graduation as a teacher.
But she said public schools may not hire her. So she is hoping that private academic institutions may find her age an advantage.
"I am 60 years old, I'll be 61 in July. I really hope that schools will consider me and look at my age as my edge from all the other young graduates. I'm a mother, grandmother, teacher rolled in one," Cañete said.
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