The Wages of Being a Teacher
Education anywhere else is always a miracle.
When students come back to you and flatter you a bit and say
that they learned a lot from you, you can react in two ways: take in all the
argumentum ad populum or dismiss it totally.
I warn students to not flatter me.
I have taught the problem of fallacies in human reasoning
for many years, and I have had the privilege of spotting when flattery begins,
and real praise ends.
People always act with a mixed of motives; there is no pure
motive at all, and this, I always tell my students.
It pays that many of my Indo-Pacific classes have mutliple
designations, including ethics.
This has given me the chance to journey with my students in
our act of enriching our minds, and in our act of divining what is it in there for
us in our invidual and collective lives.
Even as I attended a ‘Mele Festival’ for my daughter today,
I also had the chance to meet with her teacher, and expressed my thanks to her
for taking care of my daughter, and for giving her best to teach my youngest.
She said, with a joyful expression, ‘She is a good student.’
In the exchange, I thought of my work as a teacher, a
life-work in some sort of way.
I had not known any other profession except
teaching.
I do some other things beside, but it is teaching that I have always gone back to, providing the money that I need to put food on the table.
The other things that I do are all geared towards how I can
improve my craft at imparting knowledge, and hopefully, at facilitating the transformation of minds.
And so when my daughter’s teacher told me that my daughter
was a good student, I remembered how my students flattered me with those same
praises as well, telling me and to my face that I was instrumental to their
conversion to the 'Philippine cause'—the cause of understanding the difficult
realities of that country that has contributed ten percent of its population to
exported labor.
It is an unjust situation, this.
But when a country has not much to offer, it might as well
send its citizens to other countries, and there urge them to earn dollars and
remit these earnings to make that country's economy afloat.
One student told me: ‘Of my entire college life, I only have
three teachers I can praise without any qualms. First, these teachers have given so
much of themselves. Second, they have made knowledge an event, not the mere transfer
of information.’
I look at him.
I sense his seriousness.
There is pride in
his voice, this New Yorker of a man, who is a veteran of life.
A father twice over of children in college like him, he is
the most intellectually mature in the class, and always drawing from his work
experiences when explaining things.
‘You are one of the three,' he tells me.
'I thought you are a dude even if
at first, I did not understand what you were saying, how you were able to put
two and two together, how you made us work together, how you forced us to think
otherwise.’
I listened.
I looked for some signs of deception.
There was
none.
‘I am graduating, and I do not have anything to be afraid of
anymore. So this I must say: I want to become a teacher, and want to teach the
way you teach. Bold, daring, provocative. And oh, boy, you made your students
work so hard!’
Ah, the wages of being a teacher.
Teachers can never change the world.
But we might contribute to the changing of the minds that
will change the world.
That might be enough.
Hon, HI/May 10, 2013
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