Strangely shifting roles for the first time— from student to teacher— I often catch myself gazing out into the sea of expectant faces, thinking to myself, Am I getting my point across? Am I looking stupid? Do they even have an idea that I actually don't know what I'm doing? It's an interesting feeling sitting now at the other side of the classroom for the first time, not anymore a student, but not quite yet a teacher.
But make no mistake about it: there is nothing more exhilarating than teaching. It's the only thing that gets me through the ennui of the week.
Driving home from class today, looking foward to a quiet evening of DVD's and probably a late-night stroll in Loyola, I was reminded of an essay written by noted Literature Professor D.M. Reyes of the Ateneo.
So, do you remember who your teachers were? I do.
* * *
Easy to Forget
D.M. Reyes
The door that leads to our office rattles a bit when it opens. It has been my experience that, now and then, a student walks in with a shifty look on his face. Glassy-eyed, he would glance from partition to partition. When he figures out that the office is quiet, with most of the teachers having stepped out to meet their classes, he would clear his throat and ask, as if addressing the burning bush in Sinai: “Excuse me, I'm looking for my teacher.”
“But who’s your teacher?” Out of habit I’d rise, demanding to know the teacher’s name, so I could scrawl a message or hand the student some paper to write on.
The replies that I get reveal such astounding honesty. For one, they tell you that young people don’t lie when they watch with their eyes. Then again, they tell you how these students do have the talent in describing a character with precise words, hitting the bull’s eye. Watching them fumble, I do get amused sometimes. I even lose a little tact when I tell them: “Oh-oh, watch out. You’ll be in trouble for saying that.”
Why not, when they can’t remember their teacher’s name, getting quite bold enough, only to blurt out: “He looks kind of undersized,” or “A little too fat and she's fond of wearing halters,” or “He talks about pearl shakes all the time,” and once, even a candid “’Yon pong medyo bading, sir.”
My own effort to remember teachers and know them by name had been prodded quite early on. The memory keeps company with Miss Aruba being our class favorite when Miss Universe was first staged in Manila or the nuns calling off classes so that the entire school could cheer for Muhammad Ali as the nation hosted Thrilla in Manila.
This was in Grade I. One rainy day, our teacher quite suddenly mused about her former students. She must have been at work for some time then for she spoke about pupils who had grown up, gone to college, and finished either as a doctor, a dentist, or simple gone abroad, then promptly forget her.
She taught them to cipher and to sing, drilled them their Judys and Johns, their first action words of “we look and see, we work and play, we come and go.”
Now, none of them remembers her. She sighed and made us swear not to forget her— Mrs. Juanita Vigilia who taught us about Judy and John skipping rope and attending the Holy Hour, their dog Spot after which her own dog had been named— the one that she came to school puffy-eyed about one day, because the dog had run away or thieves had put it in the sack and carried it away the night before.
Even today, I can still recite the names of all the class advisers who took care of me from kindergarten and all through high school. The compelling need to remember comes with the guilt, as if it would mean breaking Mrs. Vigilia’s heart, she who asked to be remembered.
A score of years later, with my own classes of college literature and composition to fret about, I often see students struggling to describe their teachers, flipping the roster briskly and back on the bulletin board outside the office, thinking hard and still missing the name.
In “The Book of Remembrances” the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano begins his story by going back to the etymology of remembrance. He takes the word recordar, roots it back to the Latin word re-cordis, which means “to pass back through the heart.”
Finishing from grade school, I had one other teacher who taught me this true worth of remembering. At a young age, I had been enrolled quite eagerly for piano lessons. My brother and I trooped to the house of the music teacher, a gypsy-like woman who had expressive eyes and fair skin acquired from her Chinese forebearers. The lessons were all the more memorable as she taught me between house chores— out there in the garden, washing a piece or two of her children's soaked clothes in her basin of sudsy water or halting the furious scales so I could sip a bowl of nilaga, just to know if she had seasoned their lunch all right.
But lessons with he were cut short when I won a piano scholarship in school, the nuns all too happy to take me in because I could read the notes fast enough and keep time when I played. My mother accompanied me to ask permission from Mrs. Guiland— that hence, I would train at the music studio in school, play the piano and the electric organ, too, so I could accompany the masses in church. When I finished grade school, the church gave me a medal for being the youngest member of the worship team, a medal for so many mornings of liturgical service.
The graduation was held in church. At the end of the ceremonies, while we were posing for photographs with the nuns and the priests, a young girl tugged at my starched shirt, holding out a sweet garland of Japanese magnolias. “This is from Nanang— Mrs. Guilang, I mean,” she was quick to say, having figured out that I could not guess who sent the flowers. “We’re at the back, you see,” she explained, smiling before she turned away.
No pictures were taken with Mrs. Guilang because we could not find her. But my mother told me to wear the garland, even as one of the teachers looked miffed and fussed abut the blooms obscuring the medal. Yet my mother insisted and said “Wear it proud because if not for Mrs. Guilang, you would have no medal today.”
Between Mrs. Vigilia and Mrs. Guilang, there’s a blazing memory of many other teachers whose names are not easy to forget because they have something, by way of a gesture that shone and traveled back to the heart. And no one would be jealous, I tell myself, because remembering them, there is always a pleasant memory to accompany the sound of their name.
And now, after more than a decade of my own tireless chalk-talk, do I write because I have looked more deeply, a student-turned-teacher quite honestly acknowledging my own brief need to be remembered? Or do I remember them because I, too, have sat at the room's other end and seen for myself that endless mass of youthful faces— an analogue to time's harsh passage beheld year after year after year?
I am writing this piece with small hands and trembling little fingers, a present of spidery letters with ink smudges here and there— memory’s river running on and flowing back to the heart— for Mrs. Vigilia and those countless others who ask not to be forgotten.
