“Invest in the future, invest in teachers”

This year’s World teachers’ Day  theme, “Invest in the future, invest in teachers” summed up my experiences as a youth who dreamed of anything but to be a teacher who literally invested for the future when I took up Bachelor of Secondary Education twenty seven years ago. For indeed, it was a spur-of-the moment decision then that was bound to help me coped up during one of the lowest points in my life.

 It may sound a cliché yet it is a fact that poverty did not pave the way to realization of my plans when I was young.  It had instead offered me two inconvenient choices towards my future – quit my college dream or persevere to pursue a teaching course in the only state university in town.

If I couldn’t be the moon, I could be a star and take the future just the same.  So with a rather heavy heart, I used the Two Hundred Fifty pesos from my mother to secure further education. 

After four years of struggle as college student while I worked/served as library aide tutor, vegetable vendor and barangay secretary, I got my college diploma and passed the Professional Board examination for teachers that followed.

However, I traversed a different path of life and dared not to practice my profession until sixteen years later.

A financial tragedy hit my family that prompted me to apply for a teaching position so I can have a stable job. It was a door opened to me to a room with more open windows.

Much more than the financial compensations are the wonderful emotions which are beyond the worth of gold. 

There were times when I was summoned to the principal’s office or to the guidance office because of my errant advisory class members.  Which later I will tell them same repetitive lines: “Do you know that for my whole life as student before, I was never called to such offices for misbehaving?  But now that I am a already a teacher,  I am always called because of you.” Yet they were the same students who lead the line to offer me flowers and wave the banners for me during Teachers’ Day.

There were times when I had to ask the canteen people for pay-later foods just so I can feed students who were suffering from stomachache for missing meals because of no food to eat.  Yet they were the same students who always said thank you for big and small deeds.

There were times when  I felt disappointed to students who seemed so slow to comprehend simple lessons.  Yet they were the same students who were all-smiles and grateful only because of line of seven grades.

There were times when I felt like emotionally tortured sounding board to students whose life were far worst than I had because at such you ages, they had dysfunctional family, extreme poverty and illicit drug exposure. Yet they were the same students who brought me happiness when they kept their promises never to give up striving for positive changes.

Through the years, hardship may increase while monetary rewards may prove just enough yet, I hope that good deeds tremendously prosper as I continue to mold the minds and touch the hearts of students through my little ways. For truly, there is a special sense of fulfillment in the teaching profession that led me to realization that my college diploma was, after all, one of the best investments I made in my lifetime.