My Teacher

My Teacher

            He is no Mr. Keating when it comes to entrances. He didn’t enter our classroom whistling the introduction to the 1812 Overture. He didn’t hold classes outdoors. He didn’t encourage the class to rip apart several pages of a book. He wasn’t eccentric. Still, he made a difference, for me.

When he first entered the classroom wearing brown and carrying several books on the course he was teaching us, he did give us some chills. Who wouldn’t, if your teacher was one of the big names in the university? The brown color was especially ominous too as I thought of him as one of the old school of teachers who employed strict methods in teaching, those who, if still allowed by the law, would use corporal punishment, if we had been unruly elementary school children. With this idea of him, and with my own unpreparedness for the course (I didn’t even read the definitions beforehand), I certainly had a reason to chill, despite the heat of the afternoon. When he asked my classmate a question defining curriculum as sort of an introduction to the course and my classmate answered him in his own words, I thought he would be mad. I thought he would rant and rave that we didn’t even bother to look up the definitions and were content to give our own idea, our own opinions of the course, even if we were already in the third year, and the previous students in our program were considered a force to be reckoned with, in terms of class standing. But, as it turns out, these thoughts were all figments of my imagination.

For the next five months of our class, we were lucky if we were able to hold a session twice a week because he had so many engagements that required him to miss class, top official as he is. But when we did hold class, I was never bored and sleepy (and it was an achievement, considering that our schedule was during the unholy hour of one o’clock). He assigned us topics to report in class, and he also posed interesting and often challenging questions on these reports, not only to the reporter, but also to us, listeners. These questions were mostly about the new K to 12 curriculum and the old RBEC curriculum, with free updates on the status of the K to 12 that he gathered from his conferences. Probably schooled in the Socratic method of teaching, I would always ascribe the art of questioning to him whose questions were ticklish and fascinatingly so. Yet, even if we sometimes groped in the dark for answers to his questions, he was the epitome of swabe, always cool and calm and patient in leading us to the tuwid na daan. (In fact, for me brown is the new color of cool, thanks to him). His examinations were similarly riddled with questions, all of them practically applicable to life. With Curriculum Development as a subject and all those terms we needed to memorize, all the curriculum models we had to be familiar with, I was almost sure I would flunk the test because I didn’t have sufficient knowledge of those, combined with the pressure of other comprehensive exams in the major subjects. I was almost sure he would ask us to draw a particular curriculum model and explain how it works, the knowledge of which would only serve for that particular semester because we would all forget it in the months that would follow. But he opted for a more practical, albeit more comprehensive exam, in which we had to craft our preferred curriculum ourselves, including the philosophy of the school, the subject matter, and the like. We all had a chance at drafting an entire curriculum, once in our lives. And what I experienced in those one and a half hours of hurriedly drafting a curriculum taught me more than enough to just shut my mouth and look at how the curriculum is first implemented. Tough, huh?

But it wasn’t like this every time, of course. Even though he touted himself as one of the old school of teachers, he really wasn’t. In fact, I would even say he has successfully passed the transition between the old school and the new, taking with him the good practices in both schools of teaching. He is the only teacher I know who let his students participate in making the syllabus. He freely shares the updates in his conferences, teaching us from life. What I would never forget about him though was that he was very supportive of us till the end. Especially at the end, when we were still at school almost two weeks after the official semestral break started, all because we haven’t finished our research proposal yet and we still had requirements and teaching demonstrations. Especially at the end, when we were all nearing the end of our tether. The day before we were supposed to defend our research proposal (we had two subjects with him), we came to him to ask for yet another postponement because we haven’t finished the review of literature yet, or we weren’t sure about our methodology. We were all but ready to give up, but he encouraged us to finish the job, to stay up all night long just to finish it. ‘I know you can do it. Bisan magpaaga kamo.’ Those words, spoken when you’re about to throw the towel, was like a hand snatching that towel away.

 English humanist and scholar Roger Ascham said, ‘There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.’ I know we weren’t deserving of any praise, lazy students that we were, but it does help, having your teacher tell you that you can do it, because he knows you can. And what’s more, he helped us to do the job. He let us borrow books from the library and even in his own personal library, just to help us, just to give us that much-needed push to finish our work. I don’t know of many people who would do this, who would be willing to do this, after all the laziness we showed him. Most of the teachers I know would give up on us too, because we had already given up on ourselves. It takes a great teacher to see that diamond in the rough hidden somewhere inside every student, even if that student has lost his faith in himself. It takes a great teacher to set aside all traces of power and authority as a school administrator to reach out to his students, to be ever approachable to those who need his help. He is a top official of the university, and he was helping us like this. Some of us may say that challenge comes when you want to prove that you can do better than what your teacher expects of you, that challenge comes from a strict and difficult teacher who demands so much of you. For me, and for the seven of us in Research class, challenge came when you want to prove that you are really what your teacher expects so highly of you. Ikaw na la it diri maaawud kun diri ka pa magtinuhay nga sugad hito kabuotan it im maestro.

He isn’t the type of teacher to get interested in your personal affairs just to reach out to you. He isn’t the kind who would encourage you to look beyond the paint, to open your mind to a new idea, because that is not his philosophy. He isn’t even the bohemian teacher who taught to make a difference in the minds of his students, to make them think differently. But as Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung says, “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” He taught us more about teaching and life with his swabe manner than loud and always emphatic voices could have done.

He will soon be going out of the academe, and on to the next adventure waiting outside the school gates. He may forget us in a few years, but I do know that for us whose lives he warmed with his encouragement, we will never forget him.