If there’s one time-proven, time-tested ways to ensure clean environment and free from disease - causing vectors which pose threats to everyone, what could be more reassuring than adhering to the habit of cleanliness and orderliness which, not only provide beauty and comfort but are also marks of an institution where learning does not only stay idle inside the pages of notebooks and papers but are applied towards achieving a better environment for everyone?

Once a green horn teacher I was, at an exclusive school, instead of the usual set of officers to lead a certain classroom routine, we had it by group of learners: academic, spiritual, socio-cultural, and cob committees. The academic group take care of the academic activities and program of the different subjects including peer tutoring, the spiritual group are responsible for the regular church and prayer schedule, the socio-cultural handle the announcements regarding birthdays, holidays, and the cob committee undertakes schedule of cleaners and ways to keep the classroom clean, orderly, and beautiful, truly presentable all the time. Our learners really enjoyed their new-found task where they showcased leadership, teamwork, and followership. A learning venue for each one, responsibilities were valued and enjoyed where you would not see cleaners running or hiding away from performing their obligations which I appreciated it and so I borrowed that interesting idea.

During our annual meeting and drafting of plan of activities in the Science Department, I had the chance to inculcate COB (Cleanliness, Orderliness, and Beautification) as a year-round activity for YES-O. The name fits right here, YES-O gave me a chance to try using COB Habit as a solution to cleanliness issue here at COBNHS. Where imparting cleanliness is not inherent to many of the students, it has to be implemented forcefully with the help of the class advisers even just for an hour on a Friday as scheduled under the annual plan of activities (APA): first Friday is general cleaning, decorating, and bulletin board update, second Friday is ground-improvement, third Friday is tree planting and landscape gardening, and the fourth Friday is back to general cleaning, decorating, and fixing of broken classroom amenities. This year, we launched it again during our weeklong Science Fair. This time, it will be the basis for choosing the best homeroom.

Hopefully, COB Habit will not just be for COBNHS but for the whole City of Balanga where care for environment is one priority program of the city government in kinship with its promotion of a healthy lifestyle. True, every family has its regular cleaning regimen but how is it for consideration on a regular basis everyone available throughout the whole city gets to tiptoe, pull the broom and cleaning materials and all and join the clean-up fun… another biological clock! Where Zumba already has its place towards making Balanga a tobacco-free city, why not adopt COB Habit towards a more habitable, healthy, dengue-free and world-class city?

How can COB be done?

Patterned on our drafted plan of activity, here is a way to implement it:

First Friday: General cleaning inside the classroom

Second: Ground/ backyard improvement

Third: Landscape/ Tree Planting

Fourth: General Cleaning/ Bulletin Board Update /Decoration)/ Repair

None is new, we have been practicing this. Just we borrow or coin other term for it. What would make this fun to do is when you see the neighborhood doing the same as yours. I could not stop myself from giggling every time fogging or residual spraying is done in one barangay or school campus, shooing mosquitoes temporarily to another barangay to the outrage of the latter. Then the latter would schedule their own fogging to shoo those mosquitoes to another. But if it is done simultaneously, you would place those vectors nowhere but to their deathbed. City of Balanga has a solid COB (Cleanliness, Orderliness, and Beautification) Habit! So there ,we know what people value.