You learn

I never thought I’d be a teacher. I wanted to be anything but, actually.” That’s a quote, from the best teacher I ever had. “When I graduated with a literature degree, one of my professors asked if I was interested in teaching at UP, so I figured I might as well. [...] Then I realized maybe teaching was actually a worthwhile and useful thing to do, but if I was going to do it, I might as well get some cred, so I applied to grad school and was accepted. Been teaching ever since.”

Flashback to the mid-’90s: I was listening to Blur, Oasis, Pulp. I was probably also still listening to The Cranberries. The Foo Fighters had just come along, and The Cardigans’ “Life,” and Shirley Manson and her aging male cohorts in Garbage. Bjork was birthing mind-bending pop on a regular basis. “Circus” by the Eraserheads was the soundtrack for barkada out-of-town trips. Yano was still going strong. Pinoy rock was enjoying its resurgence.

And I was enjoying a string of the best teachers I had ever had. I probably didn’t even appreciate it fully back then, but it was a very good time to be taking a BA in English (a pursuit that would be hilariously skewered years later, in Avenue Q’s “What Do You Do with a BA in English?”), specifically in UP Diliman. We had, early on, Caroline Hau, who read Italo Calvino to us and twisted our freshman brains; and later, Jose “Butch” Dalisay, gruff and exacting and inspiring; Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, who taught us about clarity and rhythm and tone and many other writing and non-writing essentials; Tina Cielo, who somehow made us smarter — or at least feel we were smarter—in the course of a semester; Thelma Arambulo, Judy Ick, so many more.

And it’s probably wrong to single out a “best” among them — there really is no such thing, they were all exceptional, life-changing — but if I had to name a Top 1 on my Billboard chart of great teachers, it would be Ma. Elena Paterno-Locsin, in those days just Ma. Elena Paterno, “Mailin” to her friends.

We took CW 150 and 151, classified as Writing for Children and Writing for Young Adults respectively, under her. She taught us underlying theories of the cognitive development of children alongside actual examples of literature. She made us appreciate the craft and difficulty involved in often underrated forms such as the picture book or the fantasy cycle. She clarified, questioned, challenged. She was always tough but never unfair in her assessments; our workshops were conducted with professionalism leavened with humor. She handled the most difficult situations—such as when a child-abuse story labeled as fiction turned out to be an autobiographical account by one of our classmates, who burst into tears during the workshop—with grace and calm and intelligence. In short, she made us better students, and better writers, and, by example, probably better people, as well.

In 1995, she co-founded Wordlab, a non-profit organization which provides education for children with dyslexia and related learning disabilities. “I got into teaching learning- disabled children by accident,” Mailin explains. “There was a lot of brain research going on in Boston at the time I was in grad school, and people were devising ways to teach them. It sounds so long ago because now, of course everybody knows about learning disability, but people didn’t know so much then. I became fascinated by how their brains worked, and the cognitive bases for teaching and learning.”

Over the years, Mailin has also written numerous educational and informative and entertaining books, on such subjects as volcanoes and earthquakes and flora and fauna, not to mention classic Philippine tales and legends.

These days, she is the Head of School of the new Beacon Academy Campus in Biñan, Laguna. “Ten years ago, a group of parents and teachers started Beacon. We’re still doing things that some schools don’t do, even if research has shown that it works, like keep class sizes down so you can really talk to kids, have students create things, go on field trips, write to say what you really think. That kind of thing. This year we opened a high school in Laguna. The building is great! And I feel that we’re doing things that can change the way this society thinks about teaching and learning, but you’d have to talk to the kids to see if I’m right.”

And what has kept her teaching, through all these years? “Honestly, it’s been fun. Incredibly interesting,” she says.

Funnily enough, her answer reminds me of something my late and much-missed grandmother, the brilliant Professor Emeritus Priscila Manalang, once said, when I asked her why she racked up multiple degrees and was still teaching the Philosophy of Education well after her supposed retirement. “Because it’s fun!” I can think of few better reasons to do anything.