Memoirs of an Amnesiac

Let's set the record straight. I HAD NEVER REALLY ASPIRED TO BE A TEACHER. I remembered full well that when our Language teacher in Grade 3 would ask us what we would want to be when we grow up (you know those seemingly endless essays that took forever to write and are repetitive because each grade, until probably when you reach high school, your teachers would ask you to write about them), I had always written: a COMPUTER ENGINEER or a REPORTER but never a TEACHER.

Yet somehow, it just happened, like those pop quizzes you so hate to take. I came from a below average family (correction, poverty line status). Technically my father could not afford to send me to a big university. Back then, he only asked me one question that spelled the rest of my life. "Are you going to study here or you won't study at all?" The idea of not being able to study and to stay home while my peers were on and about researching and fretting about home works, quizzes and tantrum-filled teachers, was by then downright scary for me. It was just too difficult to handle. So with eyes puffing (from too much crying and I have the school's records to prove this) and this fear of not being able to study, I took the entrance test and did the interview. I was glad I did or I would have missed out on the greatest joys there are on teaching.

Whoever said that teaching is easy is downright wrong or he/she has never gone to school at all. From writing the lesson plan that entails more of your foresight and imagination, of course, to checking compositions and quizzes, handling parents' complaints to answering one's administrators why you had to impose this rule and that in the classroom are such a juggling act. But it takes more than just a juggler and a circus entertainer to be able to handle all these.

Yet somehow, despite our seemingly low lucrative income, we seem to be tireless bionic workers, always doing what seemed to some was routinary: the molding of minds.

I could spew out a dozen expletives and some other idiomatic expressions I probably have read or memorized myself, but there never really is anything more profound than teaching. It is a very serious task. One writer once wrote, "a teacher affects eternity. He could never tell where his influence ends." All our actions and even the many lessons in the classrooms, from the parts of speech to the poems that we so love to dissect, these reverberate through the rest of the student's lives, for only God-knows-where they end.

One commercial once had this line, "to whom are you waking up each morning?" I could say I wake up for my students. ( I must add that I slept late for them, too.) They drive me to search and probe the innermost faculties of my mind to be able to really fully relay the day's lessons, never mustering the urge to show a frown even when I missed someone so badly.

They are my lifeblood, always encouraging me to reach my highest potentials even when THEY already ARE my highest accomplishments . Their innocence, dependence and great sense of trust on me are so humbling that I would not exchange anything in the world for them.

And just as the next poem is ready to be dissected tomorrow, I am very much hopeful that like all the many lessons we learn in class, my students will remember that life, despite its many misgivings, is really worth living for. That love, even when it gives us sorrow, it leaves us so much to hope for. That like a flower blooming in the early dawn, everything is in the process of becoming.

I guess the record is clearly stated now. I never really aspired to be a teacher.

Well, technically I didn't, until I'm living it today.