A Learning Teacher

A neophyte holds all the innocence and curiosity in only two black orbs,
seeing the darkness while lost and unguided in a tunnel accumulating all
despair and naivety. He takes one step forward with hesitation and a
burden of expectations behind a crouched back. As laughter and
mockery echoes within his soul, he takes two steps back. Just when all
hope is consumed by a never-ending black hole, a light appears right
before him.
It all happens in a place that the youth call a “miserable hell hole that
insists learning” but for people like me to be a “fortress of knowledge
and teaching” – school.
Nobody said it was easy – teaching as you also learn from the different
stories of adolescents required to prove their worth to the daunting eyes
of society.
Sometimes, I dream about my students.
One student in particular was seven feet tall – his long back hunched
over the desk seeming like a bamboo bent after being swayed by the
gentle brush of a breeze. With hands red and raw, grasping a bleeding
pen as if his life depended on it, I wait for even a sound of a pin drop to
break the deafening silence. Finally, inside the suffocating room
enclosed in the imprisoning four walls, his outstretched arm made its
presence known.
Another student wears eyeliner black as coal while she daringly
performs and transforms into a different persona, standing up high in
front of an anticipating audience. “Make no mistake,” that’s what she
had always told herself. However, as she sat in front of my very eyes
every Monday morning, it seemed that she had the automatic response to
be the complete opposite – bending from the ribs, her body forming a
tiny c. To my surprise, when a question leaves my lips, her hand trained
to familiarize gestures in every performance, suddenly shot up faster
than my eyes could see.
Without even a hint of confidence, these neophytes trudge through the
darkness, as if immobilized by the gravity of a loss that had never
existed.
Overworked, overextended, overbooked, overweight, overtired and
overlooked – yours truly.
Yet they tell me that their spelling words went down the drain. I wasn’t
able to believe that so much pandemonium can occur in a single day. A
cat whom their family just adopted yesterday had their homework for
dinner and a work sheet on the table that couldn’t be deciphered after
being soaked in the rain.
Underdog, underpaid, undermined, underloved, undervalued and
underestimated – yours truly.
Yet they still tell me they became slaves for an authority that teaches
them to correct their mistakes. The day passes by in hours that seemed
like a fraction of a second when finishing with their dying will a project
that’s due today – given to them with a justified time allotment, 3
months ago.
Some say that teachers like me need to be the melting wax in a candle
for the wick to burn and illuminate light – a sacrificial lamb to gods that
is now the embodiment of students who disregards a professional that is
the root of all professions. Still, I persevered, for one should not teach
when he is not even in love with teaching.
Some days, they frighten me.
“Shout! Explode! Scream!” I tell the youthful and blinking eyes
belonging to those who sat before me five days a week. Instead, they
look at me and beam – the way they look at foreigners who don’t know
the language in a country they have first stepped on. But that is how
they’ve trained me.
For a neophyte holds all the innocence and curiosity, seeing only
darkness while lost and unguided with despair and naivety can truly
misdirect one’s purpose. I had become the embodiment of a compass
that activates the magnets of curiosity, common sense and confidence –
a guiding light in a tunnel with no light.
It all happened, and still continues so, in a place that the youth call a
“miserable hell hole that instills learning” but for people like me to be
“for the rest to learn from my teaching” – school.
Now I wait until I see a scatter of fingers and then I choose, for I am a
teacher that has journeyed through every student’s story and had become
the encouragement that they need. “Yes, your palm, your hand, your
arched spine! You, with your idea – speak!”