Some Essays From The Book Teacher Teacher

Some Essays From The Book Teacher Teacher

Dedication

This Book Is Dedicated to

Engr. Demetrio A. Quirino Jr., Teacher, Founder of the Technological Institute of the Philippines,

And to All Teachers Everywhere.

Teacher Teacher A Tribute to Teachers Everywhere

Edited by Abe Florendo

Copyright © 2012 Technological Institute of the Philippines

Rights to the individual essays remain with TIP

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Published and exclusively distributed by the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP)

ISBN 978-971-95164-0-8

Book Design by Chris H. Bayani

Printed in the Philippines by Paragon Printing Corporation

Foreword

A Tribute to Teachers

Everywhere

On the occasion of the 50th Foundation Anniversary of the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP), which was founded by my husband Engr. Demetrio A. Quirino Jr. and me, I feel that the celebration for this momentous milestone should also be a celebration of the noble profession of teaching. Deming and I started out as classroom teachers for many years until Deming thought he could do more for the Filipino youth by founding a school. Rooney (in Sullivan, 1996) said: “Teachers who have plugged away at their jobs for twenty, thirty, and forty years are heroes. I suspect they know in their hearts they’ve done a good thing, too, and are more satisfied with themselves than most people are.

“Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remem- ber them for the rest of their lives.” Teachers empower their students with new learnings…learnings that will be their guide, their lighthouse in the storms of their lives and their sun in the highs of their lives. “To teach is to touch lives forever.” The teachers of TIP and teachers everywhere have touched the lives of students in ways they will never be able to measure. This book of essays, Teacher Teacher, pays homage to all teach- ers for having made others better persons, the best in fact that they can be. What greater reward than this, than to be thanked in no uncertain terms, through this book. To Beth, my daughter and the president of TIP, and the TIP 2012 50th Foundation Anniversary committee, thank you all for publishing this book as a fitting tribute not just to one teacher, my husband, chairman and founder of TIP, Engr. Demetrio A. Quirino Jr., but also to all the teachers whom we remember and honor with these essays—indeed, to teachers everywhere.

Dr. Teresita U. Quirino Vice Chairman Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP)

Introduction

God Bless You Please, Miss Cacabelos

By Abe Florendo

y own “most influential teacher” would be Miss Cacabelos, who taught grade-school English in the provisional classroom on the ground floor of an old, dilapidated Spanish colonial house just across from our old and dilapidated Spanish colonial house in the center of town in Narvacan, Ilocos Sur. Miss Cacabelos patiently corrected my grammar and my spelling in our composition class; one day when she was frustrated with everyone else’s composition, she announced that it was only me that had the promise to take up journalism. I had the vaguest idea of what journalism was. Was journalism the articles in the Free Press, which I read to my father, from cover to cover, seated on a stool beside him in his botaca, his legs splayed out on the long arms of the reclining chair? I don’t know if he was losing his eyesight then; maybe he just wanted to see if I could read. I was in Grade 5 or 6 then. “That’s pronounced de-nu-ma ,” or, “That’s ki , not kway [quay],” he would say with a tinge of irritation, or was that conceit? Father spoke a little Spanish and, maybe, a smattering of French. He was wont to say that the Ilocano language was no more than fractured French.

My father was my best teacher, even if he whipped me for some unlikely infraction or other, like when I badly scraped my knee falling from the merry-go-round in the town plaza. He swabbed the wound with iodine and then lashed me across the bottom with his calesa whip. When in Grade 6 I asked his help in making the composition for class on the subject of “What’s more important: labor or capital?” or something ponderous and profound like that for a grade-schooler, or even a college student, he practically dictated the whole argument pro labor to me. He passed away when I was in Philosophy at the San Agustin Seminary in Intramuros, Manila. I would never know if he would have been proud of the fact that I had worked as lifestyle editor in Today, whose publisher was Teodoro Locsin Jr., son of the founder and publisher of Free Press, father’s favorite periodical, and as senior desk editor and op-ed editor in Philippine Star, whose publisher was Max Soliven, whom father also regularly read in a now-defunct Catholic periodical. Although Max often invited me to be managing editor or associate editor in his new magazines, he (or we) sooner or later would come to a point in our working relationship when, to maintain harmony in the staff or the good health of the magazine, he had to decide whether to keep me or fire me. He often chose the latter. We could not get along well together within screaming (his) distance. But, personally, we had remained friends. (Read on further below about “Terror Teachers.”) Max and Ted were my profound influences. Often when I’m writing I find myself writing with them in mind, I find myself writing for them, not for my readers. Go figure. Influential teachers, mentors, or colleagues may not be the easi- est to identify, after a whole lifetime of them. Does a childhood yaya qualify? Yes, of course, but who would acknowledge them in all sincerity? Everyone will talk about their grade-school teachers and the professors they had in college and in universi-

ties here and abroad. When we were starting this book project, Angel and Beth Lahoz, the dynamic heads of TIP, played with the idea of limiting the subject of “the teacher who influenced me most in my life” to classroom teachers, for uniformity’s sake, but they understood that this influential teacher could well be a parent, a priest, a tutor, a friend, a book, a movie, a line or two of a poem even, or, yes, a yaya . Beth Quirino-Lahoz herself writes about her father, the founder of the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP), who taught her not in a classroom but in the larger environment of life, wherein his instruction was fired by inspiration and his guidance was forged by example. As Beth Quirino-Lahoz says, when her father was still active in TIP, they ate TIP for break- fast. Apparently, she still does. The mother of serigrapher and sculptor Impy Pilapil figures prominently among Impy’s many influences, and not only because her mother taught her how to choose the freshest produce in the market. In the next breath she credits authors Steiner and Hauschka for giving her a “new perspective” to her art and brightening her life “beyond words can describe.” Columnist and novelist Butch Dalisay wants to mention not just one but two or three of his memorable mentors, and these mentors tell us a lot about this widely read writer, about whom a colleague once said, “He’s writing in English as if he was not a Filipino.” Rosario “Chato” Garcellano, editor at Philippine Daily Inquirer , composes an ode to the nationalist and activist professor Armando Malay in her inimitable style. Thelma Sioson San Juan, the iconic lifestyle editor, writes about Joe Luna Castro, her editor in Times Journal . Since I sat next to her in the editorial room, I knew that Thelma hated his guts like she hated cigarette smoke (mine). “My hating his guts,” simply says Thelma, “makes him the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

Jessica Zafra, humorist, travel and short-story writer, does not have to go too far from home to identify her favorite classroom teacher—it’s her own mother. Now you will understand how Jessica, who dreams of “world domination,” had this idea planted in her mind by a teacher-mother who would ask for a parent-teacher conference “if my grades did not go up from the previous quarter’s,” and if they’d gone down “World War III would have broken out.” Joy Buensalido’s ideal teacher is also her mother, a public-school principal who “overprotected” her but also “overmotivated” her to become what she is today, one of the country’s most successful PR practitioners. Girlie Gruet, corporate communications and marketing consultant, writes about her own aunt, a teacher at a public school in Quezon City, who, going beyond the call of duty, did home visits to her troubled, erring and straying students. No teacher does that now, laments Girlie. The mentoring influence of elders at home is none more marked than in the poet and visual artist Elizabeth Lolarga’s nostalgic remembrance of her Lola Purang in Baguio. Grace Shangkuan Koo, associate professor of educational psychology at the University of the Philippines, also keeps her memories close to home, especially those of her Chinese schoolteacher in Chinese classics, who taught her the importance of “preparation and thought,” and her other teachers in the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong. Prima ballerina Lisa Macuja-Elizalde talks about her Russian ballet teacher Tatiana Alexandrovna Udalenkova, who pounded into her the implications of trudno and bolno . Most people don’t know that food critic and cookbook author Michaela Fenix had a theater background shaped by her mentors, the legendary Maricris Tabora and Conrad Parham. Barbara “Twee” Gonzalez, who I remember saying to me, when she was a columnist in a

magazine I was associate editor of, that she gashed her heart and bled with every column she wrote. She is not bleeding here; she writes affectionately about a “lumbering” Maryknoll nun who, among her other valuable admonitions, taught the young Twee how to comb her hair, perhaps a metaphor for how she had neatly orchestrated her impressive life and career. George Sison, the astrologer and reincarnation reader, writes about a formidable teacher whom they called Mrs. Moses, at the first UP high school on Padre Faura, Manila, the essential liberal teacher that UP students idolize. George one evening in his Temple “regressed” me and saw that I was the favorite concubine of a Chinese emperor who ran away with a general in the emperor’s army. Fascinating. Parallels to my present-day suburbia lower-middle-class life? Secret. Then there are the “terror teachers.” TV news sensation Jessica Soho talks about the late media lion Louie Beltran, her journal- ism teacher in UP, who thought nothing of embarrassing, even humiliating, his students when he found their “ledes” ludicrous or their way of dressing execrable. Jessica plotted “revenge” when she became producer of Beltran’s TV show, but the lion overwhelmed Jessica, who though the most intrepid of reporters and news producers, remains, well, huggable. Dr. Reynaldo Vea remembers Dean Oscar Baguio, his thermodynamics professor, who made his students sign a contract stipulating that 1) if they wanted out of his class, they had only the first day of class to do so; and 2) once he opened his mouth to start the day’s lesson, no one could enter his classroom. “Terror,” writes Dr. Vea, president of Mapua, “is often in the eyes of those seeking the path of lesser resistance.” We should all remember that. As memorable are the literature teachers drawn by Antonio F. Moreno, SJ, president of the Ateneo de Zamboanga University; and Ruth Minerva Cruz, a hard-nosed businesswoman from

Bacolod City who writes with a mellifluous pen. There’s Miss Bart, the jaunty biology teacher of Winnie Velasquez; and Fr. Felix Glowicki, SDB, who, writes Sonny Coloma, currently the President’s press secretary, instilled in his students “what it means to be hopeful and optimistic.” (Should we take “hopeful and optimistic” as the centerpiece of the Noynoy administration?) Other unforgettable persons of the cloth are Sister Robrecht, whose guidance and example fired the zeal for helping “the least, lost and last” in the crusader and activist Sr. Pilar Verzosa; and Sr. Miriam Emmanuel, who “descended from heaven and redeemed” Vergel Santos, the veteran journalist and influential newspaper editor, then a poor boy from barrio Niugan in Malabon. One afternoon, after 50 years, Joe Mordeno and his jubilarian celebrators visit their English teacher in her modest house in Butuan City. Mordeno gets the “rickety knees” and the “top gones” to reintroduce themselves and reminisce in the sala of their nonagenarian teacher, wheelchair-borne and splendidly lucid, and in the process reaffirm, and come to terms with, how they had turned out to be. Nieves Villamin, now a successful vineyard owner and wine producer in the U.S., also gathers the recollections of her colleagues from TIP of the larger-than-life image of Engr. Demetrio A. Quirino Jr. Villamin and her friends, all successful TIP alumni based in the U.S., predicted their future “by creating it.” The future still lies ahead, luminous and promising, for TIP students Erika Kristel Gonzaga and Frances Joyce Vallejos, who won the TIP essay-writing contest on the “memorable teacher” theme. Their stories could cheer up and uplift the minds of the thousands of TIP students hoping to make a mark in their future professional lives.

Truly poignant narratives by two TIP vice presidents tell of public-school teachers in far-flung elementary schools where getting an education is hampered by poverty—or fraught with danger. Dr. Cynthia Llanes’s Grade 1 teacher in Dicamay, a godforsaken and NPA-infested barrio at the foot of the Sierra Madre in Isabela, taught her courage and the power of example; Engr. Severino Pader’s Maestra Moning, his teacher at an elementary school at the foot of Bantay Gusing in Santa, west of Abra, instilled in him a lifelong lesson on the importance of being “in control of yourself and fulfilling your duties and obligations the best you can,” even if it’s just sweeping the floor of the classroom and locking up after school. Cynthia Ferrer Gubler retells a story about Saint Peter and various professionals seeking entry into heaven, among them a teacher, that she had heard in a get-together or other with friends. We have decided to use the anecdote as an epilogue for this book, and fittingly so, because it’s one of the most beautiful tributes we’ve read about teachers. Even Saint Peter will agree. Lourd de Veyra is one of the youngest writers in this book. He’s a poet and musician, the vocalist and guitarist in a rock band. His mother, in her heyday a classical concert pianist, probably doesn’t appreciate rock, but she’s supportive of what Lourd is doing. He says he loves his mother very much, but he admits that his inspiration, the teacher who most influenced him in his career, was his UST professor, the lion of Philippine litera- ture, Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta. Miss Cacabelos would not come anywhere close to Dimalanta, but, God bless her, Miss Cacabelos was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. Next to my Tatang , my père , in his fractured French.

v v v

Edited by Abe Florendo

Published by the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP)

On the Occasion of TIP’s 50th Foundation Anniversary February 2012

A Principal’s Daughter Remembers Her Mother

By Christine Joycelyn Lumawig-Buensalido

verytime i look in the mirror these days, I see my Mama’s face because I not only am a reflection of her physi- cally, but a living proof, I hope, of her patient training, loving guidance and nurturing. Mama was a teacher’s teacher and she lived her professional life constantly trying to make a difference in the way she taught and trained teachers. Whatever she hoped to achieve with her teachers, she started to do it at home with her own children. I grew up in the conservative small town of Parañaque, where she was a respected school principal and a recognized civic leader, and where I was always referred to as “ anak ni Mrs. Lumawig [child of Mrs. Lumawig].” I strongly suspect that she had used all her secret best techniques to teach and form me into her idea of an “outstanding” student.

Mama’s personal background may indicate why she became an influential and respected teacher. Corazon Ferrer was the eldest of 13 brothers and sisters sired by Mateo Ferrer, a government official, seven by his first wife Eufrosina Nery, who died while Mama was still a teenager, and six by his second wife Remedios Nery, Eufrosina’s sister. Mama often recounted to us the hardships of growing up with a big family. At the dinner table she would tell us about how their mother would apportion the food on each of their plates to make sure everyone was fed. No one could ask for a spoonful more. And so one of the most basic teachings she passed on to her children was: “Eat every morsel of food on your plate and be thankful for whatever is served.” She considered herself lucky because, as the first child, her mother had sent her to a private convent school in Manila, an interna at the Santa Isabel College. She remembered riding a calesa all the way from Parañaque to Manila, an elitist privilege then, like being chauffeured to school today. But soon after her mother passed away, finances dwindled; so she had to stop schooling because there were many younger brothers and sisters to feed. She also told us that her stepmother, even if she was her biological aunt, had been obviously favoring her own set of children, making the lives of the elder siblings tough. But that drove all the elder children to study harder and work harder. Mother took on the role of surrogate mother to her siblings, who later in life would always defer to her as Ka Coring, their respected ate (elder sister) and mentor. They were Jaime, a lawyer who later became Commission on Elections chairman; Paz, a teacher who went on to earn a doctorate in education; Lydia, also a teacher; Carmen, a teacher in physical education who married Eleuterio Adevoso and

became a Cabinet lady during the time of President Macapagal; Juanito, an engineer who was appointed secretary of Public Works during Cory’s presidency; and Simeon, a lawyer and judge and later dean of the Ateneo College of Law. Not bad for children who lost their mother early. I can’t recall how she ended up completing her college educa- tion at the Philippine Normal College, but immediately after graduation, Mama started teaching at the young age of 18 or 19 so she could escape the hardships at home. She married my father, Maximo, a maritime officer, at the age of 25, a little late for marriage during that time.

Know what your talents are, and develop them in every possible way.

With her meager earnings as an elementary-school teacher in San Mateo, Rizal, her greatest luxury was to watch movies in downtown Manila, armed with a bag of peanuts, with her sister Paz. The two single sisters often watched double-program movies in the theaters in Quiapo and Santa Cruz, which they could only afford at that time. Mama passed on that passion for movies to me; even now, when younger people prefer to download movies from the Internet or watch pirated DVDs, I still maintain my regular movie-watching with my husband to catch at least one movie a week. I was only six or seven years old then, when my mother would treat me to movies in downtown Santa Cruz and Quiapo (there was no Makati yet), and it was such a thrill for me to buy either

roasted chestnuts in the Santa Cruz church courtyard or salted peanuts at a nearby Chinese store called Hen Wah, which we would take to the movies. It was from my mother that I first heard that peanuts were “food for the brain,” something I still believe to this day. Movies, peanuts and other nuts, and a running interest in entertainment programs have been my way of destressing. When she became busier as school principal at the Dongalo Elementary School, she allowed me to watch movies with her “favorite” teachers (who eventually became my ninang and ninong ), presumably to keep me out of trouble and harm’s way.

“No amount of success,” she would always say, “can ever make up for a broken family.”

My mother was a disciplinarian but as the principal’s daughter, I was allowed more freedom and access to roam the school premises. It was often joked about that my school clothes would always be either ripped around the waist or the hemline after a day of too much playing. (Pants and shorts were not yet in vogue.) Guess who ended up sewing my torn clothes? My home-economics teacher! The same one who took me to the movies and was one of my ninang . My mother never showed interest in traditional motherly chores like sewing, washing clothes and cooking. I’m the same now; I prefer to write and read rather than do something around the house. One amusing incident my mom loved to tell her friends about was when I was in Grade 1 or 2 during one examination time. I finished ahead of my classmates so after passing my paper, I started going around and volunteered to check their answers.

Needless to say, education was of prime importance to my mother so she trained me early to be active, to be a leader. Some foremost lessons I learned from my mother while I was growing up were: • You can excel in any subject or activity as long as you try hard enough. • Get involved and join organizations because you will not only learn from the experience; you will also be able to serve the community at the same time. • Know what your talents are, and develop them in every possible way. Thus, from grade school and on to high school, I was a “joiner.” Name the activity, and I was bound to be in it. I was a folk dancer, I ran and won as mayor of the school, a declaimer and a girl scout, among others. The only extracurriculars I was not encouraged to join were sports and out-of-school camping trips. (My mom has always had an issue with safety because her youngest brother died while swimming.)

In a way, I was overprotected and yet I was also overmotivated: to get involved and to do my best.

My mother herself was super active not only in her public- school teaching, but in community work as well. She and my father were devoted members of the Christian Family Movement and the Parañaque Parish Council (of which she became head at one point); she became grand regent of the Parañaque chapter of the Daughters of Isabella. Naturally, when they organized the Junior Daughters of Isabella, I and my young friends in the parish were drafted to be the first members and, like my mother, I also became the

president of that chapter at the age of 15. That was when I learned the rudiments of working with peers. While my mother sharpened my abilities to lead, she carefully set the foundation and the mantra for that leadership: “Everything we’re doing is service to God, so we must thank Him for every good thing in our lives.” After I graduated from the Dongalo Elementary School, a consistent first honors from Grades 1 to 6, Mama took me to take an entrance exam for a scholarship program at the American School, then located on Menlo Street, Pasay City. After passing the written exams, I was interviewed by a panel of school officials; I must have done well because my mother hap- pily announced to everyone that I had been accepted as one of 10 Filipino scholars, from a field of hundreds of applicants, to receive a full six-year scholarship at the American School. That was a major feat in my academic life. I spent the next six years imbibing an all-American curriculum and interacting with Americans and other foreign nationals. It was my first taste of a global education. My world at the American School was far removed from my girl- friends’ conventional schools like Assumption, St. Theresa’s and St. Scholastica’s, where they were very restricted compared to my environment at the American School, where my 13-year-old classmates were into makeup and dating. Given my conservative upbringing and church background, I felt like I was a foreigner in my own country, the “minority” in this school. Looking back, I could have easily been influenced by and adopted the more liberal ways of my foreign classmates, but thanks to my mother’s close guidance and example, she kept me grounded on the values of modesty, decency and upright- ness. Thanks to my mother I did not end up rebellious or

problematic even as a teenager. My form of self-expression came in the way I dressed, which my mother often found unconven- tional, but she allowed me that since I was, she said, a bright student. And in the way I spoke, with a slight American twang, it was almost like they had sent me to school abroad, for so much less expense. Consistent with my predilection for joining clubs, I was a member of the high school’s drama club, the glee club, our school paper’s staff; I even passed the tryouts for cheerleader,

She ended up completing her college

one of the most coveted “titles” in my school. Of course, my co- scholars were definitely more brilliant and smarter than I am academically, so my mother encouraged me to outshine them in the arts—singing (I had a singing group), dancing (I knew all the latest dances then and eagerly displayed them at parties), and in community activities: whenever youth volunteers were needed, my mother would always give her ready approval for me to join. education at the Philippine Normal College, but immediately after graduation, Mama started teaching at the young age of 18 or 19 so she could escape the hardships at home.

It was not surprising, therefore, that she also chose my college school for me: Maryknoll (now Miriam College), a choice

prompted by nothing more than to keep me away from UP, then the hotbed of student activism. I welcomed the idea of going to Maryknoll, because at last I would experience going to an all-girls school. But it was not meant to be: Maryknoll had a requirement that freshmen should have finished a Filipino history subject and all I had was an irrelevant American history. My mother, against her initial judgment, promptly took me to UP and arranged that I be accepted as an “entrance” scholar based on my good grades. In 1967, it was much easier to enter UP if you had a solid academic record, not to mention, in my case, an educator-mother who also happened to be a “veteran” of World War II for her role in helping Filipino soldiers during those turbulent times. I enjoyed a substantial cut in my UP tuition because I was a “scholar ng bayan. ” I could easily have been influenced by and adopted the more liberal ways of my foreign classmates, but thanks to my mother’s close guidance and example, she kept me grounded on the values of modesty, decency and uprightness.

In college, my parents hardly spent on my education; but not for this reason did Mama start to relinquish her “tight guard- ing” on me. I was already 17 and she was 52, at the peak of her career, a district supervisor who was poised to become assistant superintendent of Rizal. She had other urgent matters to attend to, like her church projects and her many community

organizations. She allowed her daughter to be independent, but only after stating that I could only have a boyfriend after I graduated. It didn’t mean that I could not go out with my friends, so I thought it was not an unreasonable demand. I would commute from Parañaque to UP Diliman either in a car pool or by public transportation, but in my senior year, when my class schedules and campus activities made it difficult for me to keep on commuting, Mama decided I could live on campus, in one of the boarding houses. That, to me, was her final sign of letting me go. I was really thankful that she had prepared me well to face the outside world. I eventually gradu- ated with a master’s degree in mass communication. I continued to live with my parents even after I got married. I watched Mama retire from public-school work and spend more time for her social and civic work, and for us, her family, because that was one value she always kept sacred. “No amount of success,” she would always say, “can ever make up for a broken family.” When I became busy with my career, she took care of my daugh- ter, who became her “teacher” in a reversal of roles as Monique, the preschooler, took to taking her school lessons home and teaching them to her lola . Mama received countless awards for her many involvements, but her Papal Award for her work in the Parañaque parish was what she cherished the most. More than that, she kept her name and her reputation untarnished and her family intact. Today as I look in the mirror, I realize I not only have her eyes, her cheeks, her fine hair, her fragile voice and possibly every physical condition I saw her go through, but I’ve also inherited her love of God and family, her resolute determination to

make her children’s lives better than hers, and her constant need to serve her community with whatever talent God gave her. I haven’t quite fulfilled that last character trait yet, but I know I will keep on trying to be like my mother, the consummate teacher.

v v v

Christine Joycelyn Lumawig-Buensalido owns Buensalido & Associates, one of Manila’s top public-relations practitioners. Married to a dermatologist, she is proud of her children—a doctor, a journalist and an architect.

“Everything we’re doing is service

to God, so we must thank Him for every good thing in our lives.”

Father Felix: Always in Our Hearts

By Sonny Coloma

id you ever have a teacher from your younger days who touched your life so deeply that you would always remember him? Fr. Felix Glowicki, SDB, was our rector in high school at Don Bosco Makati. When he passed away on Monday, May 11, 2009, a week short of his 78th birthday, many of my high-school class of 1969 friends shed tears. I could almost see their moist eyes through the computer screen as I read their messages of grief streaming through our e-group inbox. Father Felix never taught us inside the classroom. But he was our teacher in the bigger classroom that was our school campus. He was our teacher in the bigger classroom that was our world as teenagers struggling to discover ourselves in our adolescent years. The lessons he taught us are now embodied in our memories and consciousness. These are to be gleaned from the many stories of love and kindness that we now share with one another as we honor his happy memory.

My classmate Manny Andal remembers this vignette about Father Felix quite vividly:

Circa 1965. Don Bosco Makati campus. Pair of parents approaches a Caucasian man, obviously a priest out of his cassock, hunkered over what appears as a just-started tiny garden patch. Parent taps the priest’s shoulder and asks: “May we know where the principal’s office is?” Without getting up, the priest points to the high-school building: “Go up to the second floor, the office is right across the top of the stairs.” “Thank you.”

Father Felix never taught us inside the

classroom. But he was our teacher in the bigger classroom that was our school campus.

A few minutes pass, and the parents are back by the priest’s side. He’s still busy coaxing little green things in the soil. “Excuse us, Father, but we were told you are the principal and it’s you we came to see.” The priest flashes a big smile. “But you were looking for the office,” he answers. And he flashes an even bigger smile. Another classmate, Bob Lumba, saw him last in Don Bosco Dumaguete about two months before Father Felix died. He remembers: There was this glow about him, the warmth and fun and playfulness of somebody who is at peace with the whole creation, and with God. We strolled around the campus

and he showed me his garden. Then that memorable image of our high-school years flashed across my mind. There he was in Don Bosco Makati pushing wheelbarrows full of soil with his cassock sleeves rolled up while we played jolen (marbles) near the concrete basketball courts. It was the late ’60s. Until his final days, that was his distinctive trademark: his green thumb. In the background of the photos I sent you, you can see how even exotic plants bloom in his gardens. He suffered a stroke while at work in his office. Talk about going with one’s boots on. Indeed, he was such a dynamo, yet always a gentle presence. He never shouted, and he was always smiling. He was not a stern disciplinarian; we remember him as a kind and fatherly rector—a modern-day re-creation of Don Bosco himself. (Years later, when we had a jolly Polish Pope, John Paul II, we remembered that our jolly Father Felix also came from Poland.) He was very proud of the chapel, which he said was his first project. There is a similarity in the design of the chapel to the chapel where we used to hear Mass in Don Bosco Makati. Then I remembered: he was also the one who encouraged us to sing and play guitars at the daily com- munity Mass soon after the winds of change from Vatican II began to blow into the Catholic Church. When I saw him last, I left him near the chapel and then I turned around after a while to see he was waving goodbye. I thought it was such a nice send-off. I think I froze that moment in my brain knowing somehow I might not see him again, but I was not sad. He had such a peaceful, happy

smile on his face as if we both knew he was about to embark on his final journey.

Another classmate, Dikki Kapauan, had similar fond memories:

I remember him most for calling me and advising me to refrain from getting into deeper trouble with some of our schoolmates after I was involved in a rumble. For a moment, I thought it was the end of my Don Bosco Makati days, but he spoke to me in such a soft and understanding manner that there was no need for me to say anything. He gave me no challenge, just a caring look that said: “No need to worry, I understand and you are forgiven.”

He sowed the seeds of faith in our youthful hearts by teaching us to appreciate plants and greenery and enjoy life’s beauty.

When I failed my Philippine Military Training because of my long hair and the principal was hell-bent on barring me from graduating, he interceded for me and said that I could go to summer camp at Nichols Air Base to make up for my absences. Thanks to him, I graduated from high school. Such is the mark of a deep and caring man, a man who understands how teenagers are, and how to treat each and every individual with perception and genuine caring. We gathered at a memorial Mass in Don Bosco Makati about a week after his burial in Cebu. The church was full of Bosconian alumni, who were part of many successive cohorts

of past students whose lives had been touched by Father Felix’s beneficence. More than 30 priests concelebrated that Mass. For a while I thought it was simply the way the Salesian community of priests wanted to honor him—until the homilist said that each of the priests had been personally mentored or taught by Father Felix as they pursued their priestly vocation. I have been a teacher for more than 20 years, but I don’t think I have accomplished a fraction of what Father Felix had done in terms of shaping so many young lives, and molding these into priests and evangelists of our faith. He sowed the seeds of faith in our youthful hearts by teaching us to appreciate plants and greenery and enjoy life’s beauty. He made us realize what it means to be hopeful and optimistic. Much of who we are today was shaped and formed during those years, and for that we still love him today, more than 40 years since we left high school.

Thank God for Father Felix. We will not forget him. His memory brings joy to our hearts.

v v v

Herminio “Sonny” Coloma is the Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary in the current administration of President Noynoy Aquino. Coloma held the same office, though less unwieldy of name then, during the time of President Cory Aquino.

The Journey

By Ruth Minerva G. Cruz

here i sat mesmerized by the way the tip of my teacher’s slightly curled tongue pressed against her upper front incisors as her raspy voice wrapped itself lingeringly around the L’s.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

It was an otherwise ordinary day in my second year of high school at the old Molo campus of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas. Our English literature teacher had directed us to the page in our thick Anthology of English Literature that contained Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

I had justly earned my reputation as the most successful sleepyhead in class by dozing off virtually undetected in all my pre- and post-lunch classes in the first year and was hunkering down for my usual nap that afternoon. I also hated poetry then. I did not like the structure that forced words into lines and found the rhyming silly. So my teacher was up against circadian and attitudinal issues of teenage proportions. But she read on undeterred.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

From a distance of 32 years, her name escapes me even as her reading of this poem remains very vivid. All thoughts of slumber were arrested. She had whisked me to the countryside of England, but it was not the bucolic picture of giggling, corsetted ladies under their wide-brimmed hats and dandy gentlemen in tights astride their horses. Rather it was a somber landscape peopled by lowly peasants. And there has been a death among them. The early stirrings of empathy grew in my 15-year-old heart.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,

She skipped letters adroitly here and there as though she were traipsing over a field of daisies. I was breathless as I followed every syllable coming out of her mouth. I was invested in the plight of the peasants now. My teacher’s voice soared and dipped, wailed, whispered and cracked at strategic moments to squeeze out the maximum dramatic effect.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:- The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

She had me by the heartstrings. After a subtle pause, she delivered the most famous lines of the poem that would echo through my future.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Silence reigned as she paused to allow teen synapses to connect and for perception to happen. The words echoed to the deeper recesses of my mind and found residence there. I wonder if some hapless contender to the sleepyhead crown managed to win points from me by dozing off then. What a ride they would have missed! For me, it was the beginning of an important journey. In all my forays into this magical alternate world, nothing could quite equal the exhilaration of that ride. I felt the dirt on my shoes as I walked down a country road. I saw, I heard, I smelled. I got sucked into a vortex and landed in another place and time. But I did not only journey from my seat to a somber English countryside and from there to the depths of

the ocean and the vast desert wastelands. A portal was opened and I discovered a path that took me to even more interesting grounds, to the realm of ideas, thoughts and insights. I did not just experience the physical world of the English peasants. I journeyed to their very hearts and minds. It was an astonishing destination. How does one conjure the magic to inspire a young mind, to coax it to explore unchartered lands? My teacher guided me there. It was a visit that would prove very memorable. This poem became a guiding light to me in adulthood, informing my values and the way I see my own world. While the moment was certainly a confluence of many factors, I credit my English literature teacher as being the major component. Today, living on a farm and running a private school for underprivileged children, looking out for the gem of purest ray and the sweet flower among them, I wonder whether that moment was a part of my destiny or whether it was the epiphany that led me to choose from several potential destinies. How does one conjure the magic to inspire a young mind, to coax it to explore unchartered lands? My teacher guided me there.

There have been other teachers who shared more personal relationships with me before and since, whose names I do remember decades after I passed through their classrooms just because I had more frequent interactions with them. At St. John’s Institute (better known hereabouts as Hua Ming) in

Bacolod City, there was my elementary language teacher, who patiently and lovingly taught us English and mentored me through two deeply terrifying declamation contests when I was just four feet tall. There was the beautiful, green-eyed señorita who taught us introductory Spanish and Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” in the original at UP Diliman, who inspired me to consider becoming a language teacher myself. But my English literature teacher was the first to bring me to the threshold of a brave new world. Was she conscious of how significant she had been in my life? Probably not. It does not matter and it should not matter, because teaching was her own journey, as learning was mine. And that day, that moment, we journeyed together, teacher and learner. I suppose it would be easy for me to recall my English literature teacher’s name. I could hunt my closet for our yearbook or ask my classmates in Facebook. But in the spirit of Gray’s “Elegy” I have decided not to name her. There is something to her anonymity that immortalizes her as the exemplary teacher in my mind and my heart. Because her feat remains, in a way, unrewarded, it remains pure and powerful. She and, through her, all other English literature teachers who continue to read out poems to their classes in the hope that magic happens embody the heroic plight of that poor peasant buried that day. They plod on, largely without gold and glory.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.

In me, my English literature teacher gained a true student. That day, she made me literate in a significant way. She gave me the key to unlock the magic of the written word. Throughout that

year, we journeyed together with the other Pilgrims of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We examined despair and redemp- tion in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29.” We listened to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s traveler who stood before the ruins of the statue of the once powerful Ozymandias. We counted the exquisite ways that Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed her love for Robert Browning. We drank deeply of Alexander Pope’s Pierian Spring. I was never the same again after that year. Ironically, while she taught me how words clothe thoughts and ideas, I never found the right ones to express my gratitude and appreciation for her contribution to my education. Like all other students in my class, I continued on my journey and left her behind after the end of that school year with only a back glance and a simple “thank you.” I know she did not mind. Because she knows that every time I read a poem or a book, she is there with me.

Our journeys continue.

v v v

Ruth Minerva G. Cruz manages The Quiet Place, a resort and spa in the midst of a vast sugar-cane farm in Bago City in Negros Occidental. She helps in the family’s Herbanext, which manufactures products based on the Ganoderma lucidum. She devotes much of her time running Lumen, the school for underprivileged children in Murcia set up in honor of her mother. She studied in Germany and speaks fluent German.

My English literature teacher was the first to bring me to the threshold of a brave new world.

Through the Wringer

By Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.

wish i could say that I had just this one favorite teacher who put me on the path of academic diligence and professional success, but I can’t. I suppose I did become diligent enough in school to eventually become a teacher myself, and I’ve done well enough in my career to keep my mother smiling, even if it took her firstborn 14 years to finish college. But several teachers were responsible for that—for the transfor- mation of a boy (and then later a young man) who didn’t know better into someone who did. To get right to the point, the most valuable thing these teachers taught me was discernment—the fact that I had choices to make, and that it was up to me to make the best one. If there was someone I never forgot from high school, it was my English teacher—Mrs. Agnes Banzon Vea—who fired up my imagination, gave more importance to my words than I myself

did, and made me understand that writing was as much discipline as delight. She was the one who walked us through the classics, who challenged us to read beyond our years. But the toughest lesson I learned from her took place outside the classroom. I became editor of the school paper pretty early, in my sopho- more year, and so might have been forgiven for a little cockiness. Mrs. Vea was also our paper adviser, and so she looked over my shoulder to see how I and the paper were doing. There was

The most valuable thing these teachers

taught me was discernment—the fact

that I had choices to make, and that

it was up to me to make the best one.

this one time when we were faced with a deadline, but I was feeling out of sorts, too lazy to write an editorial there and then, and told her so. “I’m not in the mood,” I declared with all the insouciance of my 14 years. “Well, you’d better be!” Mrs. Vea said, with an edge to her voice I’d never heard before. That was all it took to snap me out of my stupor. I haven’t forgotten since that a professional writer—or anyone who aspires to be one— can’t have the luxury of moods, and that we have to produce words on demand. This helped years later when I joined Today as—what else—an editorial writer who had to turn something in by 2 pm, several times a week.

If Mrs. Vea taught me discipline, another teacher reminded me that the world was much larger than our school, and that,

with daring and imagination, we could venture forth and make our mark in it. The actress Lorli Villanueva was just a fresh graduate herself and only a few years older than us when she became our drama teacher. But through her, many of us signed up with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) for a summer theater workshop that had us apprentice with some of the country’s best-known theater personalities then. The Peta connection opened another door that led me to many places—I wrote my first television play at 16, which was produced on Balintataw . We had many other brilliant teachers at the Philippine Science High School—a young physicist named Vic Manarang, not yet the Ayala executive, was among them—but it took humanities teachers like Mrs. Vea and Ms. Villanueva to coax the creative spirit out of us budding nerds. Like I mentioned earlier, college for me proved to be a long, tortuous route. I became a student activist and dropped out of the University of the Philippines (UP) in my freshman year, and was arrested and imprisoned shortly after the declaration of martial law. After my release, I didn’t feel like going back to school, given how UP had become a virtual garrison; instead I found a job, got married, and began writing plays and stories on my own. In 1981 I received an invitation to join the Silliman Writers Workshop in Dumaguete, where the formidable Ed and Edith Tiempo held court, sifting through the work of young, new writers. Doc Ed must’ve seen something in mine, because he took me aside and told me something that would cause me many sleepless nights: “Save your soul. Go back to school.” He had known that I had dropped out of college and was churning out PR material for the government agency I was employed in.

He had probably seen the restlessness in me, the desire to write what I truly felt instead of what my office wanted.

I took that advice to heart; shortly after, I resigned from my job and went back to my university studies, part-time and then full-time, as an English major. Going back to school as a 27-year-old sophomore might have been traumatic, but such was my thirst to learn that I didn’t mind the curious stares and giggles that came my way. Besides, there was Prof. Sylvia Ventura, whose classes in Shakespeare and Elizabethan litera- ture I eagerly looked forward to. Lorli Villanueva reminded me that the world was much larger than our school, and that, with daring and imagination, we could venture forth and make our mark in it. You knew she was an icon the minute you sat in her class. She was what teachers used to be and were supposed to be, and more: immaculately coiffed, impeccably dressed (and one, it was said, who never repeated a dress over the semester), perpetually behind a pair of stylish sunglasses. She had been schooled in New York, the daughter of a diplomat and a teacher, and was married to a corporate biggie. We sat in awe of her, some in fear; I felt like a schoolboy all over again, eager to impress the ma’am, so I plunged into my readings, dashed ahead of the syllabus, recited with such gusto that my younger classmates were probably disgusted (and some of them later confessed they were).

Her exams were notoriously difficult, requiring you to identify, contextualize, and discuss spot passages from any one or two of the many Shakespeare plays we took up. But we learned to read Shakespearean texts so closely that we could almost sniff the perfumed sails of Cleopatra’s barge—and to read and to think first before mouthing an opinion. For all her seriousness, Sylvia was not beyond smiling—and her smile of approbation was reward enough. Many years later, I would meet her in the corridor; I was older and balding by then, and she herself was a little slower of walk, but I swear—and I don’t know if I’m just imagining this now—but she paused to buss me on the cheek to thank me for some nice things I’d said about her in a column. And if you think I’m saying these things again to finagle another kiss from the lady, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. She was matched in fervor by another legendary “terror” of the English department, Dr. Wilhelmina Ramas—she of the page- boy silver hair that some wags unkindly called a helmet, so stern was her demeanor, so scathing her rebuke of the ignorant and unprepared. Ramas pushed and pressed us for the best possible answer. The Greek gods didn’t just “get angry,” Ramas said—they became “enraged” or “consumed in wrath.” When it was time for our class in “The Idea of Tragedy” to take its final exam, it took me three bluebooks and five hours to give the professor what I thought she wanted—and even then, the best I could manage was a 1.5. Dr. Ramas was the toughest professor I ever had, bar none, counting even all my professors in graduate school in the United States. And it was a good thing I’d been through the wringer with Ventura and Ramas when I went to Michigan for my MFA. A glutton for punishment, I enrolled once again in a Shakespeare