A Certain Amount of Smiles

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With a Certain Amount of Smiles

(A Teachers’ Day Tribute)
School years are the hardest of years to live with, I’m sure.  To live with exhilaration, public embarrassment, a minimal amount of sleep and leisure, the overwhelming  stress your parents and teachers put you through, and to be an honor student, the expectations they achingly want you to fulfill . . . a heavy sigh speaking of volumes of my annoyance escaped my lips. 

I looked up, eyes the size of two small saucers and tried to turn away my head around in a rather poor impersonation of an owl.  My heart previously beating with the speed of a cheetah in search of a prey, skidded to a stop.  Words etched on the blackboard in an elegant white stream that somehow became one of my worst nightmares read : “Assignment: Write,” I groaned in dread, ‘A short essay with the theme :What is the greatest thing a teacher ever taught you?’  Write in English journal.”  With a groan of displeasure, I closed my eyes and began to think.

Math, sure!  Full of numbers and equations and things that make heads spin in circles and oblongs and dizzy them.  It was probably a gift, if only I understand it, slightly.  Perhaps . . . no.  Maybe the art of the English language : to comprehend the universal language that has been born from Latin, the words of conquerors and an empire that lasted years – that would earn some points.  But cooking is a survival skill, so what about these EPP teachers who tried so hard?  MAPEH kept us fit.  Filipino is the national language, and MAKABAYAN tells us the remnants of the olden times, of war and how it shaped us to be the people of a nation we live in now.  Science is life: the creation of life, the understanding of life, and life itself.  What could possibly be more important than that?

But yet as I encountered a scene that was always welcomed in my eyes and in my heart, I knew that wasn’t true.

I saw my classmates laughing as if they haven’t laughed for years.  Huddled over a table, they wore wide, bright and blinding grins, eyes shone with a sparkle of mischief.  Suddenly, they were back in Grade V – young and discovering the world through rainbow-tinted glasses, chuckling and chortling with a sense of freedom.  For a nanosecond, my eyebrows furrowed, but then I saw the man in the middle of the room.  A smile tugged my lips.  Here was the boisterous, rambunctious, terrific man who opened outdoors, and showed us how to do something that was worth it.  This was the teacher who . . . an idea sparked the lightbulb above my heads and I began to write.

So perhaps, the greatest  lesson a teacher ever taught me was not a mathematical equation, a plethora of words and stories, or even the art of proper etiquette.  No!

For with a certain amount of smiles, one could pull through, and that what really matters.

JDAndrada/09232012

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