This essay is for my mother, who taught Music in many classrooms for more than 40 years
I’ve been teaching for 33 years – the longest job I’ve had.
But because I stayed here longest, that means I love this job. I admire those who’ve spent 40 years teaching without repeating themselves. They’ve taught for 40 different years, not just one year repeated 40 times. Teachers like the now-departed Dr. Doreen G. Fernandez and the retired Professor Emmanuel “Eric” Torres come to mind. Both have taught with us at the English Department of the Ateneo de Manila University for decades before they retired.
Doreen and Eric were poles apart in their teaching style and temperament, but both taught with intensity and depth. They taught with the books closed, without the help of a pair of crutches called Cliff Notes. It was because, as National Artist Rolando S. Tinio would put it, they have digested the images, the textures, the very smells of the literature they taught. In short, the texts lived inside their skins.
They evoked imagination and wonder from their students, feats that only a few teachers could now do, even with the aid of the quicksilver PowerPoint presentation or a handy sheaf of work sheets. And even after they retired they still read ravenously and continued writing, unlike some fossils in academe who have stopped reading ages ago, after they defended their derivative dissertations and received their Doctor of Philosophy degrees, allowing them to wear their balloon-like and colorful academic gowns during graduation ceremonies. There are also other kinds of detritus, errr, professors whose main source of lectures is your friendly Cliff Notes, now called Sparks Notes, or the secondary texts they preserve in their yellowing notebooks, if not cribbed shamelessly after a quick search with Mr. Google.
The past 30 years of my life as a teacher just flew. Sometimes I would feel as I were the newbie teacher who lived in an apartment in Project 4, Quezon City, rushing to take the jeepney in the street corner, bound for Katipunan, then hailing a tricycle that would take me to the green campus of Ateneo de Manila University. My notes and student papers would be inside a clear, plastic envelope that my mother (herself a former Music teacher for more than 40 years) along with a long, blue umbrella that I always carried with me to ward off the unseasonable rain and the merciless rays of the sun in these islands.
Yes, the years just flew. As the poet Andrew Marvell put it in his poem, “To His Coy Mistress” – “And at my back I always hear, / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
With the passage of years, two things have remained constant with me. First, as a piece of stationery I once saw said: “A teacher’s work is aardvark.” And second, from the great writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself: “We only learn from those we love.”
Students love teachers who listen to them – not only to their difficulties with the past perfect tenses or the labyrinthine meanings in the required reading for the week, but more important, their difficulties in making that transition from childhood to adulthood. We were young once, many summers ago, and just as confused as our students now. Thus, we are all too familiar with the pains of growing up: of moving into the skin of a young adult, with its many, bewildering changes, with its fears and dreams.
Larry was 10 years old when he first heard his parents quarrelling in their room. In his pajamas, he stepped out of his room and peeked into their room. He saw his father beating up his mother, whom he adored. It broke his heart. Until now, in college, his one wish is for his father to die – perhaps by a dread disease, or one fatal accident. Until now his father still beats up his mother, suspecting her of having a younger lover. Before he goes to sleep at night, he slips a knife under his pillow, listening to the angry and tormented voices in the night.
Rhoda is the only daughter of wealthy parents who have since separated. Her strict father drives her to school every day, and promptly picks her up after her afternoon classes. Once, he saw her talking to a young man near the driveway of the school. She turned pale when she saw her father. In the car he was quiet, unusually so, but when they reached home, he dragged her out of the car, dumped her in her room, and began slapping her, calling her a “whore,” like her mother. The mother had dumped her father earlier and emigrated to the United States.
Lorena has nobody to talk to at home. Her mother is one of those matrons with beehive, maroon hair who cuts big ribbons for this important occasion, or raises funds for that charity event amply covered by the society pages in media. Her father is a shrewd businessman.. Then one day, she met a gracious young man who simply listened to her and made her feel important. But he is already married. The world, of course, is not perfect. But still they fell in love, and she became pregnant. Her parents forced her to have an abortion. After the abortion, her frightened boyfriend abandoned her. She began to withdraw inside herself, her luxurious room turning into a cocoon.
All of these stories are tinged with drama. They would even make your friendly teleserye writers proud of their literary masterpieces. But these things happened, and as I write these words now in my laptop, 8,000 miles away from home, they are still happening. Only the characters and the settings have changed.
As a result, the students’ grades take a plunge. They sit at the back of the classroom, wearing big sunglasses to hide their eyes lined with red – from drugs, from insomnia, perhaps from grief.
But some survive. Larry said he has already dug a graveyard for his father – but only in his mind. There, he has poured all the bitterness of the years. His mother has separated from his father, and he now lives with her. He is taking postgraduate studies and has applied for a scholarship overseas. After his studies, he would find a job there and file a petition to bring his mother to live with him.
Rhoda has a boring social life – with no boys to date every weekend. She is plodding along, but one day, she knows she will meet somebody who will lover her despite her past. But maybe she won’t? She has steeled herself to the possibility that she might not. Her grades now are good enough for her to make it to the Dean’s List. She plans to work after college, then maybe go to graduate school in the UK, and then perhaps live overseas
Many of them see life overseas as like the turning of a new leaf—the seasons changing from winter to spring.
And this is what I tell these young people who were once in my class, years or decades ago. They still send me messages in my Facebook account or through my email. I only give them advice when they seek it. One thing I tell them is to let go. One suffers – everybody suffers – but one must learn from it. It steels you; hones and sharpens you. It gives your life inner dimension and depth. Yes, it makes you sadder, but infinitely tougher, and wiser. I ask my students to read (or reread) the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke said that sadness should be treated like a guest that comes to your house. Welcome it and feed it well, offer it wine and the most comfortable chair in your house. But worry not, for it will leave again.
I remind them of the words of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Octavio Paz, who said: “Time passes.”
Our naïve Catechism teacher was wrong after all when she told us in Grade Two that life is one direct path to God. No, you tell the young and the restless, life is one zigzag road, and you steer yourself along those dangerous curves with all the skill you could muster. Perhaps faith and friendship would help, but in the end, it is you alone who would have to do it.
And then, you meet your students again. I bump into them at the shopping malls, holding the hands of their very young children. I would see them at the airports in Manila and overseas, going on holidays or moving to another country. Sometimes I would see then in the meetings I had attended, whether it was for my teaching, my publishing or media work, my social-development job at the United Nations.
They now look more settled, calmer, more put together. They no longer fear the past perfect tenses and in my mind I pray that scars of the past have healed. My students remind me about the black silk shirt with green dots that I wore to class many years ago, the erotic poems I made them write as exercises in language and creative writing, my wicked one-liners about their clunky freshmen compositions that, frankly, I no longer remember. Those classrooms—with the raised wooden platform where I stood beside my teacher’s desk and the chair, with its blackboard (really a green board) with a small figure of Jesus Christ on the cross hanging on the ceiling—those classrooms now seem like galaxies away.
But it does my greying hair proud that I have taught all of them in the last 33 years. Goethe was truly right: we only learn from those whom we love.