Back to Iskul Bukol and Memory Lane

A Promdi Blogger’s take on life in the Philippine countryside.

Home » Nostalgia

9 July 2007

38 Views

8 Comments

Print this post

Email this post

Yes, I’m back to school again. Not as a student but as an instructor. I started teaching part time two years ago since I don’t have much to do after office hours. The pay isn’t that big but it gets to pay my cellphone bills so good enough for me. Better than spending my time watching all the teleseryes at home.

It’s a totally different experience when you’re at the other end of the room. I get by without studying while I was a student but now I spend 2-3 hours preparing for my class. I also have bloopers and embarrassing moments but I always escape unscathed. I can always give them a quiz whenever I am not prepared for a class.

There are teachers whom we speak of with respect and there are those whom we talked about with a smirk on our faces. Those who made an impression, somehow influenced us, and those we remember with a smile are the least we forget.

We had a teacher in high school we call Slimer since she remind us of that character in Ghost Busters. When she talks, her saliva froths at the corners of her lips and nobody wants to sit at the front row unless they want to have a second shower.

We would always remember our English teacher in high school with admiration. She was beautiful, dresses well, intelligent and very eloquent. She was already in her thirties but still single back then. She lives with her father who’s already bedridden. Her world revolved around him. Not long after we graduated we heard her father died and not long after that our teacher became mentally ill. Such a waste of talent. It broke our hearts to hear what happened to her. I once saw her in town, very thin and dressed in dirty clothes. She can still make conversations in impeccable English at that. I didn’t have the heart to talk to her that time lest I cry with pity.

Boys will always be boys and even middle aged women can’t escape their eyes. Our English teacher in college was a mestiza. Even at her age she is still beautiful and having foreign blood she has larger than ordinary boobs. We girls haven’t noticed it but the boys did. When she writes on the board she sometimes turn around to explain what she wrote and when she does, whatever she wrote there sometimes got erased by her boobs. I don’t know if she ever wondered why she has chalk on the front of her blouse.

I wonder what my students say behind my back but I really don’t want to know. What I don’t know won’t hurt me. Whatever that is, I hope it’s not that they have not learned anything from my class. That would be the end of my teaching career.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Philippines License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.promdiliving.com.

8 Comments »

kwan said:

te abyan, hard hard ka sa class eh no? wala pa man ka nabatian nga nagtawag sa imo gladita maldita sa classroom? hehehe

hehehe…sometimes i really have to be. otherwise isulod ko nila sa ila bulsa. so far, wala pa man ko may nabatian. but if ever, that person will regret the day he/she set foot in my class.

# 9 July 2007 at 9:41 pm

May said:

Those memories of school days gets you thinking what your students might be saying behind your back huh! Feeling ko, “Bagsik na bala si Ms. T!”

LOL, we had a teacher we used to call Slimer, too! Apir!

And true, true, at least you get to spend quality time torturing your brain cells to go back studying. It’s not like you have anything better to do after office hours, anyway. So be a good teacher and corrupt, I mean shape, those young minds. *wink wink*

Oh yeah, what I did when I was a student came back to haunt me. Hehehe… But really, I was never that obnoxious.

# 9 July 2007 at 10:40 pm

jgavan101 said:

May Slimer man kmi. Goodness, they are everywhere!!!

I want to teach someday. Maybe next year once Im finished with my master’s thesis. There’s a different sense of accomplishment whenever I can impart my knowledge to others. Tani may matun-an man sila kung magtudlo ko pila ka adlaw.

Sakto si Kwan… indi ayhan maldita ang itawag sa imo?

hahaha…they have infested our educational system with their slimes! You do that Jin (feeling close), it’s worth it. I don’t mean the pay but the chance to hone young minds. It’s tiring but at the end of the day if you realize that somehow they learned from you, is’ quite fulfilling.

# 10 July 2007 at 7:40 am

roxie said:

reminds me of my own teaching stint. it’s fun tickling the minds of college students these days. the funny part is i remember the boys more than the girls! hmmmm, bakit kaya? LOL

but i had to leave before it drained all the energy out of me. when you’ve been teaching the same subject for three years, three times daily, you reach a point of exhaustion and there’s really no way but out.

keep it up girl! make your teachers proud!

i wonder….hehehe. i remember the good and bad students more, the in-betweens are often lost in my memory. they’re giving me a different subject every semester so i really have to review every time. jack-of-all trades ang lola mo. trigo, analytic geom, even stat and now chem. o ha, sala-sala warrior eh kun la katuon.

# 13 July 2007 at 8:54 pm

A Simple Life/Neil said:

Daw kilala ko na si Ma’am Boobs, ah. Indi ayhan si Ma’am Y na sya?

Hmmm…If you graduated from the University of San Agustin, College of Technology then it must be her. Hehehe…you are a Timbura generation so she must have been a Y then. To us Safari generation she is Ma’am P, complete initials VYP. That street besides UPV Iloilo Campus was named after her grandfather who was once a Mayor of Iloilo City. She was even the English teacher of our teachers. Very loyal gid sa Techno. Already retired pero very active pa ha. Nag appear pa na sya sa Mang Inasal nga commercial. Te, sya gid man?

# 16 July 2007 at 5:18 pm

A Simple Life said:

Techno ka man gali, Ta?

Sakto gali pakot ko. I kind of bridged the gap between the Timbura and Safari genrations, though