Saturday, October 04, 2008 So: Tribute to teachers By Jocy So Unraveling
"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live." -- James Truslow Adams
THIS should have been an easy piece to write. After all, I spent all but three of my 29 years of existence in schools, both as student and as teacher. I have interacted with teachers all my life, a handful of whom I consider valuable mentors who have left an indelible mark in my life.
When first I set out to write a sort of tribute to these mentors, I thought words would automatically, effortlessly surge out of my tapping fingertips.
But I was wrong. I have written various introductions. All have been deleted or discarded.
This is not an easy piece to write. It is not easy because how can one cram around 20 years worth of educational experience with teachers into one column piece?
How can one begin to thank the nearly 100 teachers from nursery to graduate studies whom I have had the privilege of learning from?
There was my Grade 1 adviser Ma'am Directo who would break the monotony of academic lessons with a storytelling session from our classroom's own little library.
We would sink our heads onto our arms with relief, rest on our desks, eyes and ears focused on our teacher and her story. There was Ma'am Par who despite being a math teacher realized the importance of leisure reading and insisted my mother buy me books even if they're just Archie comics.
They have both helped me and my classmates discover the joy of dreams and stories, and the power of words.
I doubt both Ma'ams Directo and Par realize the extent how they have impacted their students with such simple things.
As a teacher, I know how easy it is to get lost in the immensity of all the things that need to be done: lesson plans to write, quizzes to check, and grades to calculate. So much so that teachers forget about the tiny magical moments, like 30 minutes of storytelling that can forever alter a student's life.
Or the magic of a few minutes of jokes and laughter: to this day, my batchmates and I remember the many corny and funny lines Sir Oca would crack in between explanations about how to solve trigonometry and physics problems.
With his longtime math collaborator, Ma'am Juezon, it was not jokes that helped us get through algebra, but her soothing and smooth voice.
Somehow, like Mary Poppins, both managed to use a spoonful of different types of sugar to make the medicine go down. Math may not be the easiest subject for many of us to master, but with our teachers, we were able to accomplish and understand more than what we thought we could.
Honestly, there are too many more teachers and lessons to mention.
Ma'am Arlene who showed me the fine points journalistic writing, Sir Bocs who valued living each day to the fullest and looking at things from different perspectives, Ma'am Gina who calmly demonstrated to my squeamish male classmates that dissecting a frog is a piece of cake, Ma'am Galido (now Tan) who once cried in front of our fourth grade class earnestly explaining why the bad word one of my classmates wrote on another's quiz notebook was demeaning and hurtful.
There are so many teachers, I doubt that I will ever be done remembering all of them and realizing how so much of who I am today is thanks to them.
In a speech to Stanford graduates, Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs once said that life is like a series of dots. We can only see how the dots connect only when we look back into the years that have gone by. This is how I feel about my teachers. They are the dots that connect and explain why life has led me down the road of being an educator like them.
In many ways, I am who I am today, I teach the way I teach today, I live my life the way I do today because of these many individuals who had given their time, energy and know-how to help me learn.
Last September 28 marked the birthday of China's greatest teacher and philosopher, Confucius. As a Chinese-Filipino school, Davao Christian High School celebrates its Teacher's Day to coincide with this date, in honor of the man who lived in 551 BC and who has influenced Asian thought and ethics for more than a thousand years.
The many ordinary teachers around us may not be as well known as Confucius.
They might not be immortalized in statues and books. Their teachings might not evolve to a religion or a set of ethical guides. Their birth date might become a basis for a celebration. However, ordinary as they are, they are immortalized in the hearts and minds of countless students in whom they have all left an extraordinary, indelible, and lasting imprint.
Belated happy teacher's day to all educators. (Jocy L. So studied at Davao Christian High School.)
