From Ad to Ed

"Those who can, do; those who can't teach. Like most sayings, this is only half true. Those who can, teach; those who can't -- the bitter, the misguided, the failure from other fields -- find in the school system an excuse or a refuge." - Bel Kaufman, UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE


This wasn't her dream, yet it came true. She never thought of becoming a teacher, yet she is one now and has been for years.

Her long lost friends, plus some fair-weather ones, and her former classmates might drop their jaws in disbelief if they found out that she is now connected with the academe, with their former alma mater to be exact. They probably couldn't imagine her encased in four walls with a stick in hand and hair in a tight bun. She just wasn't the type to waste her time erasing the blank stares of students and cajoling them to mouth more than monosyllabic responses to thought-provoking questions. Nor was she the type, as the cliche goes, to mold young people's minds, the way a potter molds clay. She wasn't even known for patience in high school and in college. Having tantrums when Plan A didn't push through, blowing her top when a group member forgot her I.Q. on her pillow, and throwing writing instruments at whomever she thought deserved it were what she had been known for. Hardly the qualities one expected from a member of the most noble of all professions.

How did she end up a teacher anyway?

She isn't sure exactly how it happened. She used to write copy for an ad agency but couldn't take her boss' breathing down her neck every time there's a deadline or being surrounded by creative but weird cigarette-smoking and foul-mouthed creatures of the advertising world. She had to quit before she wound up in a looney bin.

The teaching job landed on her lap by pure chance. Feeling low one April morning, she decided to pay her old college a visit. Her Chair was there, and discussion turned to careers. Learning of her disenchantment, her Chair popped the invitation for her to teach. She wasn't given a chance to reject the tempting invitation because schedules for demo teaching were shoved in her hand. She could only acquiesce and ponder her luck.

Her intellectual capacity and ability were challenged once again. They stopped when she got no welcoming committee in the real world. Now, her mind went into its previous analytic mode, with a green light all the way. She hungered for knowledge and was eager to apply it in her new world as a professional. She devoured great heaps of information, gobbled huge amounts of data, including trivia from the works of the learned, and swallowed everything her mind could take in.

Her first day of teaching was quite memorable. She didn't quite know how to establish rapport with the freshmen, but she found herself blurting out, "You may not call me MOM because I am not your mother. You may not call me MUM because I am not a deodorant. But you may call me MA'AM." It wasn't her intention to come up with her version of the Ten Commandments but she said: "ONE, you are not allowed to sleep in class. Neither dreaming nor snoring is allowed. Failure to keep this commandment would mean a trip to the washroom and back. TWO, you have no right to remain silent...when asked to recite or report in class. Anything you say can and will affect your grade. THREE, you may raise any questions regarding the subject matter to clear any cobwebs you may have in your brains...assuming that you have one." Mixed reactions -- amusement, apprehension, apathy -- followed her pronouncements.

Her love for Bel Kaufman's book Up The Down Staircase should've jarred her into the realization that she would become an English teacher. Sam Levinson commented that the book was the kind of funny that hurts, referring to the book's satirical undertones. That comment hit her too. Her students considered her a funny teacher, and it hurt to teach English.

Teaching English as a second language is no ordinary task. Being a freshman in the profession, she assumed a lot. She assumed that her students knew simple subject and verb agreement -- I am, You are, He/She/It is, You/We/They are.

She assumed that they knew the difference between a phrase (Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone") and a clause (who was the child actor in the movie "Home Alone") or why a fragment (Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone") is not a sentence (Macaulay Culkin played the lead in the movie "Home Alone.") She was wrong. She assumed too much.

The results of her students' quizzes and exams confounded her. Why did a third if not half of the class sometimes fail? Had she not explained everything clearly? Did she not always ask them if they understood, and say that she would not think them stupid if things weren't clear? She could not always accept the fact that the reason was the "teacher factor." She once gave them items for a quiz which they reviewed and encountered again in the periodical test. Why did they still write the incorrect answers?

Although she felt that she lacked the qualities of a perfect English teacher, her students believed in her, respected her, and even liked her. Evidence, grammatical errors included, made her want to cry in frustration as well as in amusement.

- "YOUR cool and friendly. I like YOU'RE approach to us."

- "You make your lessons VERY UNDERSTANDING."

- "The only thing I can say is that you're cute."

- "Having a smiling face MAKE us feel calm."

- "You are not a bookish type of teacher. I hope this will be continued not like other teachers who concentrate THERE lessons in the book."

- "One good reason was the humor...as if YOUR the life of the subject."

- "I like the way you speak because YOU'RE voice is like a baby or a cat."

- "I thought you were just a student the first time I saw you. I was SUPRISE to know that you're our English teacher. But you sound as if you've been teaching for years."

- "I can't criticize you because so far, you're one of the best teachers we've had this sem."

- "There is only one thing that I don't understand. Why are you still single?"

Her first journey into the real world of education as an educator wasn't exactly a bed of roses. A thorn sometimes protruded here and there. Yet some rosebuds had bloomed too.