I intended to return to my blog to discuss something else but tonight I find it a need to ventilate whatever it is that I am feeling inside this ancient heart.
It is not easy to be a teacher. Everyone who has made a life or even dabbled into education realizes that there is truth to the rumor: you do not get rich teaching. You spend sleepless hours preparing lectures, checking papers and computing grades with stone-etched deadlines --- but you do not get rich.
Teaching is not a profession. It is a vocation . And in certain semesters/trimesters/quarters, it is an act of self-flagelation.
You never stop learning if you decide to teach. You ever stop working.
And the lessons only play a part of being a teacher. After years of teaching, I have come to realize that the greater part of teaching is you as a teacher. Students nowadays can get more concise and precise lessons from the internet: YouTube can provide you with all the lessons --- whether conceptual or technical --- if you knew how and what to look for.
But no internet video can duplicate the influence of a teacher. In the same manner, every class is not a one-way learning process. The teacher learns as much from his students. If he does not, then he has fallen short of his mission. Indeed, it is not the lesson alone that matters --- but the very being of the teacher in what he teaches, what he proposes, what he explains --- that is as important to the students.
And in my years of teaching I have come to realize that there is nothing more gratifying than to see the success that my students garnered. Nothing fills my heart with more pride than to see the heights that my students climbed --- and how they have affected and even changed the lives of others. Somehow I feel that somewhere along the way ... a part of me was given to them that mattered in whatever extent.
I have never boasted of the roster of students who once sat in my classroom in De la Salle University but I feel that their names along have scored me terrific points in heaven. Leila de Lima, Kim Jacinto-Henares, Cesar Purisima, Benhur Abalos --- just to name a few of the countless others who once-upon-a-time had to sit behind a desk and listen to my lectures.
That is also why being a teacher is such a personal thing. You cannot help it. There will be some students who will eventually become your kids. Way before, they were your friends --- but nowadays I found out that I am teaching the children of the first batches of students I handled in the late 70s and early 80s. Those "kids" I had then are now Senior citizens like me : when I get invited to these spur of the moment reunions, I realize just how much the students have played so much a part of my life ... and defined my timeline.
That is why when one of my students leave this life so prematurely ... so unexpectedly I cannot help but feel not only heartbroken. I am devastated.
Late last night I found out that one of the final batch of students I welcomed to the Film Program of the College of Saint Benilde has passed. I was in complete shock, asking myself how this could have happened. Earlier today I found out that this was the boy who won a scholarship because of the outstanding work he did in Senior High school and that he was all too eager to be part of the Benildean film community.
The circumstances surrounding his death made it all the more painful --- as it had affected not only his peers and classmates but also his teachers.
Even if I am not close to this young man --- and that our encounters were few and quite some time ago, I am still trying to figure out why this has such an impact on me. I need not think hard: it is the feeling of disappointment that all that talent, all that enthusiasm has come to an abrupt end. All the potential, all the promise.
It also makes me wonder why. Or if anybody could have done something to change the sequence of events. But such thoughts only come as an aftermath. What is real is what is true: we have lost one of our best students in the Film Program and it is so saddening.
But for a teacher it is not merely the feeling of loss. It is the pain of losing somebody who was at a time entrusted to you --- someone who hopefully listened to you and you wish you were there for him right to the very end.
Never underestimate the importance a teacher gives his students. I remember somebody asking me, "You have a chosen a life that deprives you of having children. Aren't you afraid that there is no one you can leave your legacy?" I told him, "Are you kidding? Every fourteen weeks in La Salle, I have twenty to twenty-five even forty children who will bring me in their hearts for the rest of their lives. I will never run out of legacy."
Not will I ever grow numb with the pain --- when one of my children leave me.
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