Some people spend their whole lives trying to outrun where they came from. The more interesting ones learn to carry it with them. Dr. Penjelo Gomez Baybay belongs to the second group — a Cambridge Science teacher in Seoul who still remembers exactly what a plate of New Year’s spaghetti made from ketchup and corned beef tasted like, because for years that was the only version he knew.
Today Dr. Penjelo teaches middle and high school students at Korea Foreign School, preparing them for their IGCSE examinations and mentoring the teachers who arrive after him. It is a long way from Loma, a barangay in Amadeo, Cavite, where his family lived in a house of bamboo and plywood that lost pieces of itself every time a strong typhoon came through. He does not tell the story to be pitied. He tells it because he thinks the distance between those two points is the whole point.
The house that the typhoons kept taking
Dr. Penjelo is precise about the poverty of his childhood, and the precision is what makes it land. Not abstract hardship, but the specific memory of a roof that could not be trusted. “Our house was made of bamboo and plywood, and whenever a strong typhoon came, parts of it would be blown away,” the Cavite native shares with TGFM. The line is delivered without drama, which is somehow worse and better than drama would be.
The small luxuries stayed small. Spaghetti was a once-a-year event, engineered from what the household could afford. Money was tight enough that Dr. Penjelo took a job at Jollibee during college, working shifts around his class schedule to help pay for his own education. He is blunt about what kept him moving through the long hours: “Every long shift reminded me why I had to keep going.”
The math of his ambition was simple. Education was the exit. The young student earned his Bachelor of Secondary Education with a major in Biology, and later a Master of Education in STEM Leadership and a Doctor of Education in Educational Management — degrees stacked one on top of the other by a man who understood early that credentials were the currency he was allowed to accumulate.
A contract that wasn’t renewed, and the door it opened
Here is where the story could have gone flat. Dr. Penjelo began his teaching career in 2010 at FEU–Cavite, and after a single year, his contract was not renewed. Losing a first job is the kind of setback that convinces plenty of young professionals to shrink their expectations. It did the opposite for him.
“Losing that job gave me the courage to take a chance, apply for teaching positions abroad, and step into opportunities I never thought were possible,” the former FEU instructor says. In 2011 he accepted his first international post at Fairview International School in Malaysia and left the Philippines with a single, unglamorous goal: to give his family the comfort they had never had.
Dr. Penjelo frames the whole detour in terms he finds more persuasive than luck. “Sometimes, what feels like a setback is actually God’s way of leading us to something greater,” he reflects. “If I had stayed where I was comfortable, I might never have discovered the life and career I have today.” It is a sentiment that could read as tidy if the years that followed had been easy. They were not.
What followed instead was movement — a career that carried the former Jollibee crew member across borders. Four years at Fairview in Malaysia. A return home for three years at Noblesse International School in Pampanga. Five years at Gwangju International School in South Korea. Then Osaka YMCA International School in Japan, and International School Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, before landing back in Seoul, where the Filipino educator is now in his second year at Korea Foreign School. Along the way the roles multiplied too. Dr. Penjelo taught not just secondary Science but Physical Education and Performing Arts, ran student events, supervised the student council, mentored personal projects, and rose to Global Science Head, Coordinator, and eventually Assistant Principal.
The two years he almost didn’t come back from
The arc looks smooth written out like that, a clean upward line. It wasn’t. The hardest chapter of Dr. Penjelo’s career had nothing to do with lesson plans.
At one international school, hired to help improve the institution’s systems, the young leader ran into resistance that curdled into something uglier. “Because I was younger, Filipino, and a non-native English speaker, they questioned my education, my experience, and even my ability to lead,” he says. The discrimination wore him down until the job became untenable, and after only a few months he resigned.
The resignation was the easy part. The two years afterward were not. Dr. Penjelo carried the experience like an injury that would not close. “It made me question not only my abilities as a teacher but also my worth as a person,” he admits — and coming from someone whose entire identity had been built on the belief that effort and education could carry a person anywhere, the doubt cut deep.
What pulled him out was not a new job offer or a motivational epiphany. It was one person who refused to let go: a Filipino priest and close friend based in Korea, who sent message after message, prayed for him, and kept insisting there was a better plan somewhere ahead. Two years later, the Filipino teacher returned to Seoul, and Seoul gave him back what the other school had taken. “I found healing, regained my confidence, and rediscovered my passion for teaching,” Dr. Penjelo says. The lesson he took from it is one he now repeats to younger colleagues: other people’s opinions do not get to decide who you are.
What success actually bought
Ask Dr. Penjelo to name the reward of nearly two decades abroad and he will start with the honest, unfashionable answer — the salary. Coming from where he did, the educator refuses to pretend money didn’t matter. It bought his family a comfortable home, built him a house of his own, and recently financed a dream he still seems slightly amazed to say out loud: a penthouse condominium in Tagaytay.
He is aware of how a list like that can sound, and he heads it off directly. “I do not share these accomplishments to impress anyone,” Dr. Penjelo says. “I share them because there was once a young boy who lived in a small house made of bamboo and plywood, who dreamed of nothing more than giving his family a comfortable life.” The condominium is not the point. The boy who could not have imagined it is.
But the achievement the Science teacher returns to most is not a purchase at all. After years of climbing into leadership positions, Dr. Penjelo made a deliberate choice to step back toward the classroom, because that was where the work meant the most to him. Now the mentoring of new teachers has become the center of it. “Knowing that I can make a difference in the lives of both students and fellow teachers is what makes this career truly meaningful to me,” he says. He measures his success in other people’s confidence.
The final chapter, literally
This November, the former math tutor and office clerk turns 40, and Dr. Penjelo has given himself a fitting deadline. For three years he has been writing an autobiography, From Poverty to Pedagogy: A Journey of Hope and Resilience, begun during that bruising two-year stretch when he was, in his words, struggling with life. The educator is now on the final chapter — Chapter 40 — and he wants to launch the book on his birthday.
To keep himself accountable, Dr. Penjelo has been sharing pieces of the story on TikTok under the handle @amanofexperience, hoping the fragments reach someone who needs them. His plan after his overseas years is to bring all of it home: to teach, to lead, to mentor aspiring Filipino educators, and to remind young people from humble beginnings of the line that has organized his entire adult life. “Where you start in life does not determine where you will end up,” he says.
It is the same idea Dr. Penjelo keeps in his back pocket as a personal mantra, and it is worth ending on, because it explains why he keeps telling a story that others in his position might quietly bury. Your beginning does not define your destination. The Cambridge Science teacher has the penthouse and the doctorate to prove it — but he would rather you noticed the bamboo house, because that is where the more useful part of the lesson lives.
