InsiderPH features the inspiring stories of Metrobank Foundation’s awardees as Outstanding Filipino for 2025—teachers, soldiers and police officers who are making significant contributions to nation building.
There are children who were made to believe they do not belong in school. Sadinas was one of them.
As the eighth child in a family of tenant farmers, he missed many school days to help in the fields. One day, when he returned from another long absence, he scored zero on a quiz, and got bullied by his classmates.
Knowing firsthand what it feels like to be left behind, he dreamed of becoming a compassionate teacher —one who would never let a child feel unworthy, but instead one who values differences among learners. He held fast to J.M. Manchanda’s adage, “A good teacher recognizes that each pupil has a different talent lying hidden and unexplored. His duty is to unearth it and help it blossom.”
Through nine years of hardship as a houseboy, a tutor, and a house helper ironing uniforms not his own, he earned his degree on the strength of borrowed books and the kindness of others. people’s kindness.
When he finally entered the classroom, he met his calling in the faces of the “last section” — indigenous children, over-aged and undernourished learners, those from broken homes and broken systems. “I saw myself in them,” he says.
From then on, he became more than a teacher. He made house visits, brought food for those who have none, and made flashcards by hand with scarce resources.
A Grade 5 non-reader he once tutored now thrives in college — a story repeated in countless lives he has touched.
In 2019, he left for South Korea for a teacher exchange program. There, in classrooms where no one spoke his language, he introduced a project called “TAPIS: Tatak Pinoy sa Sokor” — a patchwork of lessons based on Global Citizenship Education and framed in the colors of home.
For three months, he faced down language barriers and cultural dissonance. But still, he explained climate action through the country’s raw leaves and garlic, taught lessons in being Filipino in a room full of strangers. By the time he left, 360 students, 22 teachers, and 50 families knew a little more about the country he came from and what it meant to love it.
Upon his return, he wrote books — contextualized and rooted in the dialects, culture, customs, and traditions of the children who had never seen themselves in textbooks. One storybook he authored was reproduced across public schools and libraries in Nueva Vizcaya, handed to children who had long believed their stories were too small for paper.
He also initiated and led the transformation of a former dumpsite into a living classroom. They called it Project APPLICATION, or Applying Pro-Environment Practices and Local Ideas, a Collective Advocacy Towards an Intimate Care for Our Nature. At its heart was a village for indigenous learners, an open-air lab where lessons were drawn not just from chalk and graphs, but from the land itself.
They made organic insecticides from backyard leaves and flower bloomers from native herbs. They grew mushrooms the old way, fed undernourished children from the garden, and taught environmental stewardship through hands caked in soil.
It was not easy. There were no grants or constant streams of support. The pandemic came, and budgets collapsed. But the work never stopped. He kept showing up.
The impact is substantial: 72 children fed, 206 students engaged, 15 teachers trained, over 1,500 parents reached.
But the most powerful parts of his work are the ones you won’t find on official forms: the Grade 5 student who couldn’t read but is now in college; the shy and silent campus journalists he mentored who now hold degrees from the University of the Philippines, and the former student who tapped him on the back during his master’s graduation, whispering: "Sir, I became a teacher because of you."
In October 2024, when his mother nearly died of pneumonia and his child struggled to breathe, Sadinas still showed up to school. When his wife and father-in-law battled dengue, he did the paperwork. When their savings dried up and loans mounted, he led another Learning Action Cell (LAC) session for fellow teachers. He did all this not because he had no choice, but because he had long made one.
He would like to be remembered, he says, not as someone remarkable, but as someone reliable. A second parent to those who had none. A civil servant who lived the Panatang Makabayan not as recitation, but as a daily, deliberate truth: “Iaalay ko ang aking buhay, pangarap, at pagsisikap sa Diyos at Bansang Pilipinas.”
And maybe, in that small upland school where the soil is rich with intention, and where lessons blossom alongside eggplants and flowering vines, he already has. —Metrobank Foundation
