On World Teachers' Day, Mrs. E Once Again

Dedicated to the committed teachers in my family:

Rolly & Ida Fernandez, Eileen & Suzy Lolarga & Auntie Linda

"Hey, Teach, your hips are too wide!"--student Junald to Teacher Babeth

I considered myself a successful teacher on some level when my high school student in a weekly elective on creative writing came up to me recently after I laid my bag down on the classroom table and said that to my face with no inhibition. In the Catholic school where I grew up, he would've been called impertinent and sent to the guidance counselor's office.

I came into teaching rather late in life--at age 55. I held back for many years, despite worthy offers, because I held the profession in high esteem that I felt I had to accumulate decades of experience in my field of specialization and get almost browbeaten by life before I had the "K" or right to stand in front of a roomful of students. Yes, there were the summer workshops and weekend writing seminars I conducted but not the everyday commitment that real teaching required. At those workshops, I insisted on being addressed "Tita", not by any honorific like "Ma'am" or "Teacher."

The lessons learned from Nieves Benito Epistola or Mrs. E, the late professor emeritus of the University of the Philippines Diliman, have truly been internalized in midlife. She was genuinely interested in what her students were doing and talking about. In conversations, she would use the hip expression in current use.

Once, after a heavy lunch, she hailed a cab, then turned to me once we were inside, "Let's smoke in my office and watch the smoke rings come out of our mouth!" This was decades before the UP campus became a no-smoking zone.

Or, when a new shopping center ("mall" wasn't the common term then) went up, she'd eagerly invite me to "case the joint."

When her colleague and friend Dolores Stephens Feria was released from prison and returned to the university after years spent underground, she told Mrs. E, "Looking around, everyone has grown old and gray, except you, Nieves." That same day, Mrs. E rushed to Cubao and bought a pair of denim jeans.

She enlarged my world, she and husband SV bringing me to art exhibitions, foreign film festivals, Palanca Awards Night, concert halls, an orchid show at UP Los Baños and introducing me to a Who's Who in the arts and culture arena. She took it upon herself to gather my sheaf of poems and practically badger editor Franklin Cabaluna into publishing them in the literary section of his soft-porn magazine, Fina. She gave me the highest recommendation in my first reportorial job. She had my survey forms for my undergrad thesis mimeographed and disseminated by her own students to lessen my feelings of being overwhelmed at the academic requirements before me. And when my first book of poems was published and launched, she barged into the publisher's office the next day, demanding to buy the unsold copies.

Her carport-turned-porch on M. Viola street was a magnet for "kindred spirits," she called us, on Sundays in the early '80s; we hanged out there right after breakfast, overstretching the couple's hospitality by staying on till early dinner. Actress Gigi Dueñas quipped, "Mabuti na lang di alam ni Imelda (Marcos) about High Tea with the E's or else gagayahin niya rin."

This generosity of spirit, the sticking out of one's neck for one's student even way after she has graduated, is mostly lacking in teachers I've encountered when I went back to school at the same university in this decade. Overweening ambition/careerism, I surmise, generally defines the academics of today. Mrs. E once took the young instructors in the English department to task in a poem, dismissing them as "these young competitresses."

Even as she rose to become associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters, she did not demand an office with a view or one equipped with comforts and staff befitting the post. I still visited her at faculty room number 1118, the one assigned to her after she returned from Harvard and her other colleagues had earlier picked out the better located rooms. She gave me the spare key to that room one summer so I could concentrate on my freelance writing assignments when I was in between jobs. Later, I learned that she was not wont to do that with just anyone.

I suppose that was Mrs. E's personal and affirming legacy to me, the one I wish to pass on to my students: that I am, and they are, special.

"Hey, Teach, nice pants!"--Carem to Teacher Babeth

Poster grabbed from Gwenn Galvez's Facebook page