More than homework
Of all the quotations I’ve come across about teachers and teaching, one of my favorites is attributed to the actress and comedienne Lily Tomlin, who said that “I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.” That, and a quote I can no longer recall the source of: “I’m not here to change your minds, but to open them.”
I like them because, as a teacher myself, they express exactly how I feel about teaching and its aims, whether grand or modest. Perhaps more to the point, it’s how my best teachers taught me, igniting in me a desire to stand in front the class and put chalk to blackboard, and say something that the young people sitting in front of me would remember all their lives.
Even better than quotations are actual stories of model teachers and how they shaped the minds and futures of their wards. This is the joyful burden taken on by a new book I was happy and honored to have contributed to, Teacher Teacher: A Tribute to Teachers Everywhere, published by the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP) to mark that school’s 50th founding anniversary. Launched last Jan. 21, Teacher Teacher brings together the experiences of 30 authors from all kinds of professional backgrounds, each one recalling the teacher (or, in my case, the many teachers) who made that vital difference in their young lives.
I was neck-deep in work last year when I got a message from the book’s editor, Abe Florendo, inviting me to be one of those authors, but of course I couldn’t say no one, because Abe was my very capable and indulgent editor when I was writing for the Lifestyle section of the now-defunct Today newspaper back in the mid-‘90s, and two, because I felt that I owed it to my mentors to put their names up there with the rest of the best. I’m saying “best” here, but as far as I know, the teachers in this book didn’t win any big teaching awards that kind of public recognition would come later but their rewards were their own students, especially the ones who went on to make a name for themselves.
Just how do we remember our best teachers?
Communications consultant Cynthia J. Gruet recalls her aunt, a teacher of Filipino in high school, Flora Lava Mendoza, thus: “She spoke elegant and strictly correct Tagalog, even in the most ordinary conversations. The way she phrased and structured her sentences somehow clothed her words with a kind of purity and sacredness akin to poetry. Listening to her was my first lesson in the use of language as a tool for teaching and driving home a point paving the way for my eventual career in communications.”
Ballerina Lisa Macuja-Elizalde was 18 and spoke hardly a word of Russian when she was sent to Leningrad to train with the formidable Tatiana Alexandrovna Udalenkova, a former soloist of the famed Kirov Ballet. She writes: “Madame Udalenkova was never satisfied. Our legs could always turn out more and extensions could always be higher. Two of the first Russian words that I mastered were trudno (difficult) and bolno (painful). My only respite from physical and mental pressure were the moments I stood transfixed and mesmerized as Tatiana Alexandrovna demonstrated each combination, her legs and feet in a 180-degree turnout rotation and her arms fluidly making each transition.”
Journalist Vergel Santos was struggling with English and with being poorer than his high school classmates at St. James Academy in Malabon when Sister Miriam Emmanuel, the English teacher, took him under her wing: “Sister Miriam had descended to earth to redeem me. She offered me a tutorial after classes for two days of the five-day school week for 40 minutes each session, exactly as long as the regular class period. She walked me through the operating logic of the language to give me a sense of its structure. She read to me with an authentic voice, had me read to her in turn, then sat down with me to talk about what we had read. Every new word provoked an exciting impulse for discovery, and every freshly turned phrase and deftly crafted sentence raised a compelling challenge for emulation.”
To engineer and now Mapua president Reynaldo B. Vea, UP Engineering Dean Oscar Baguio, known to be a campus “terror,” was “my kind of teacher…. Solving his laboratory exercises was always rewarding. His sample problems were always elegant, designed to bring out the thermodynamic principles involved…. In our first long quiz, he idealized the thermodynamics surfaces as simple geometric shapes and asked how the basic thermodynamic processes could be indicated on them. If you knew the answer, it was pure ‘child’s play,’ to use his own expression…. If you didn’t, you could be scratching your head for an eternity. ‘If you know, you know. If you don’t, you don’t.’ That was our conclusion about the answers to his quizzes. And isn’t that the very idea of a test?”
As it happened, it was Rey’s mom, Mrs. Agnes Banzon Vea, my high school English teacher, who led my list. She made me feel that it was good and all right to be a writer, especially since I was beginning to feel lost in a science high school. On the other hand, my college Shakespeare professor, Sylvia Ventura, made me want to become a teacher by trusting me with leading some class discussions (having returned to UP as a sophomore after a 10-year hiatus, I was expected to know better, and I scrambled to maintain the impression that I did).
Whether they moved us by example, love, inspiration, or fear, the teachers who turned us around saw something worthwhile in us that we may have cared little for or given up on if they hadn’t taken us in hand to pull us along. Teacher Teacher is full of such life-changers, and I urged TIP’s charming and energetic president, Dr. Beth Quirino-Lahoz (who contributed a loving tribute to her father, TIP founder Demetrio A. Quirino, Jr.) to make some copies of the book available to the public, or to groups of teachers, because we sorely need models to inspire us in these days when people in high positions seem capable of the lowest misdeeds, and get away with it.
Beth was also kind enough to give me a private tour of TIP’s 2.8-hectare Quezon City campus in Cubao, which I’d often driven past without realizing what a pleasant oasis it was of architectural beauty and vigorous learning in a district better known for car repair shops. The capacious, capiz-chandeliered Anniversary Hall, designed by Beth’s psychologist husband and TIP EVP Angel Lahoz, is a study in purposive tastefulness, and (a literal aside, but an important one) one would be hard put to find restrooms as stylish and as well-maintained as TIP’s, Makati’s business fortresses included. And all that style has substance a spacious study area includes a big shelf of textbooks that can be used by students too poor to buy their own copies. Such steps and the “grit and determination” it has been known for have helped TIP become a leader in its field, particularly in engineering.
Established schools will celebrate their milestones in their own ways. By paying tribute to exemplary teachers who gave their students more than homework, our launch-day hosts at the Technological Institute of the Philippines gave us more than a book and a free lunch. They gave us reason to believe that, despite its impecunious returns, good teaching does matter, and will be well and warmly remembered.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.
