A rare reward
June 25, 2001 | 12:00am
Twenty years ago, I decided that there was nothing more that I wanted to do with my life than to write and to teach. I had just graduated with my bachelor’s degree–14 years after entering the university, and three years after returning to school as a 27-year-old sophomore, with martial law, marriage, fatherhood, and several jobs coming in between. Hardly had the ink dried on my diploma when I applied to teach with the English department, and they seemed happy to let me in: I was, after all, their product.
The writing had always been there, thanks to parents who valued books and reading, and who were tickled pink every time I published something anywhere, like the school paper. Though he never finished college, my father wrote well, and was the person everyone in town ran to when they needed an impressive letter or a speech. But I wanted to do more. I was still in shorts when I realized that creative writing was the coolest thing: you could fabricate your own worlds, your own situations and characters; you could make people talk the way you wanted them to. I made-believe I was a writer–and publisher–by sewing sheets of bond paper down the middle and then filling the pages with my drawings, and what passed for stories–my homegrown versions of the Hardy Boys mysteries, transplanted from Bayport to Boni Avenue.
When I nearly got kicked out of the Philippine Science High School in my freshman year for flunking math (an ignonimous fate for the same guy who topped the entrance exams), I promised my father that I would hang on and do my best to survive my probationary year–not because I loved algebra, but because I had it in mind to write for the school paper. I wanted to be a writer, and nothing was going to get in my way.
I’m not so sure where the urge to become a teacher came from. Well, of course my mother was a schoolteacher, having graduated from UP back when a BSE was the degree of choice for young provincial ladies seeking a respectable profession. The youngest of 13 children and my grandfather’s pet, my mother was the only one so privileged to have been sent to the city for college. But then again, like many other women of her time, she gave up teaching after just a couple of years, because she had gotten married, and deferred to my father’s old-fashioned preference for her to stay at home and take care of me. I have a picture of me at around two years old, pulling on a stalk of grass in the schoolyard, presumably waiting for my mother to get done with her class; I never saw her in front of a blackboard.
It was, I suppose, my own best teachers who impressed and inspired me strongly enough to make me want to teach. There was my English teacher at the PSHS, Mrs. Agnes Vea, who awakened and encouraged a passion for literature and writing that more than compensated for my mortal weakness in math (a situation little helped by a teacher who kept us in constant fear of being sent to the blackboard to perform impossible and indeed dubious feats of calculation).
There was my Shakespeare teacher at UP, Prof. Sylvia Ventura, who taught us to see the magic of language at its best, as well as Prof. Wilhelmina Ramas, whose day-long exams on tragedy gave you an intimate appreciation of the subject and steeled you for anything that graduate school–whether here or abroad–could possibly present. When I did go abroad to study with the likes of Drs. Robert Turner (Elizabethan drama), Stuart McDougal (film and literature), and Eric Rabkin (fantasy and science fiction)–professors who actually wrote the books and textbooks that thousands of American undergraduates continue to use–I stood in awe of how some people could have so much learning at their fingertips. I found myself aping their manners and mannerisms, when it came my turn to handle classes in freshman English and creative writing as a teaching assistant. At Michigan I taught well-scrubbed upper-middle class teenagers; in Milwaukee many came from the inner city, and the roughness of their lives showed in essays that dealt with gangland warfare, drugs, and rape.
After America, I felt that I could teach anyone. I taught with pride and passion, ever aware that my students saw me as a Filipino–a foreigner–who presumed to know something they didn’t, and I wasn’t about to disabuse them of that notion. Like anyone who’s worked there, I fancied staying on for a while, but the temptation passed after about two minutes; America didn’t need more English teachers (and neither does the Philippines, my nationalist colleagues would insist). I had an obligation to return, and beyond obligation, I was eager to share and to apply what I had learned.
And so 10 years ago almost to this day, as Pinatubo’s ashfall darkened the skies above the city, this former dropout came home with a newly-minted PhD–a title I personally haven’t found too much use for, except to ease my entry into the professoriat.
It wasn’t easy coming back to a job that paid so little that, at one point, I found myself pawning a camera to tide us over the weekend. I realized that to be able teach in this country, one has to do many other things–all kinds of things–other than teaching: I wrote film scripts, corporate brochures, speeches, and, yes, columns right and left, on top of the stories, plays, and essays that I managed to produce for relief and salvation. The crushing realities of living and making a living in the Philippines soon dimmed much of the brightness of the idealism I had rediscovered in graduate school abroad: embroiled in politics (national and, worse, departmental), enmeshed in intrigue, faced with roomfuls of young people, many of whom had somehow gone through the elementary grades and high school without the foggiest notion of how language and literature worked to improve their minds, and how improving their minds could improve their lives.
Still I plod on, among many others bearing the same yoke we so willingly assumed. We remind ourselves that teaching is a mission and indeed a privilege, and never mind the platitudes about nobility and psychic rewards. At the end of the day our minds are often a blank, wiped out by fatigue and stress, but sleep and a little dreaming usually suffice to restore our good cheer and revive the imagination for another day at the trenches.
I think of myself as an actor, and of every class as a performance. I take a deep breath every time I enter a classroom, mindful of the need to hold this audience in thrall for the next 90 minutes. It doesn’t always work, and a student sleeping or staring out the window is the worst rebuke one can expect; but the kids, too, are under pressure, a condition which I do not help by harping on one of my favorite themes: that being a UP student bears with it uncommon moral obligations–to serve, to give, to share. It is a mantra I chant as much for my own ears as theirs.
I know I’m still a whole lot luckier than most. A UP professor’s full load is 12 units, or 12 hours a week, but I have other teacher-friends who work in the downtown universities and in other private colleges who carry teaching loads of 33 to 40 units. I wonder how they manage to mark and to grade essays, or if they do at all. (If you think teaching is a chore, try administration.)
It’s considered poor form in the West to speak of positions and salaries publicly, but we Pinoys are obsessed with the subject, probably because we make so little. These concerns always come to a head come promotions time, when one’s academic net worth is toted up and weighed in the balance. Because we had no money, promotions had been frozen at UP for five years–until recently, when President Dodong Nemenzo managed to secure some funding despite and throughout the changeover in Malacañang. Like all my colleagues, I looked forward to some recognition for five years’ work.
In good time, that recognition came, for myself as for most others, in varying degrees. I was generously rewarded with what every university instructor aspires for–a full professorship, one of the few but meaningful honors the university has in its power to grant to its servants. It meant, in my case, a remarkable eight-step increase, a very rare reward given only to a few, for which I was, and am, deeply grateful.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a letter from our accounting department, informing me that, because of an increase in withholding tax, my monthly take-home salary would shrink by P352.84, from P11,702.64 to P11,349.80. Just a little over eleven thousand pesos? Yes–well, I actually earned P22,210 a month as an associate professor, but lost nearly half of it to withholding taxes and a salary loan.
But surely a full Professor 7, just five steps short of a career-ending Professor 12, made a little more? Indeed he did. I reviewed my promotion papers and established that my new monthly salary was now P23,199–a raise of P989.00. I have yet to learn how much of that will go to taxes.
I suppose I could curse the heavens, but I’ve always believed in an indifferent universe, so I’ve decided to smile and to take these graces as they come. I trust that the university has given me the fairest deal it could, and I have only to think of my own best teachers and what they had to go through to put me here.
And now to pray that government, in turn, does more for its premier university, before it loses its brightest lights to other places across town, or to the groves of Michigan.
Earlier this month, Bibsy led a special Father’s Day weekend SNACK, but she wants people to know that a midyear SNACK for children in the American and European school calendar is scheduled for July 16-21. Interested parties can check out the website at geocities.com/snackphil, or call Bibsy Carballo at 721-08-01 and 0917-6151835.
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