Teachers are heroes, too
When you are young, you feel invincible. You dream of being all the heroes you’ve read about or watched on television or in a movie. Most often, the world will also tell you the same thing – that our potential knows no bounds. What they don’t always tell you is that it is also unbelievably overwhelming.
After receiving my college degree, right off the bat, I knew I wanted to do something significant. But as any millennial will tell you, adulting can be hard. No one really tells you the rules of the “real world” and it took me some time to latch onto a definite career path. It was not ostentatious or ground-breaking – it was teaching. And so one afternoon, as I was making visual aids for my class the next day, when I received an email from the UST College of Science Grand Alumni Association (UST COSAA) that I was going to be awarded as one of the Ten Outstanding Alumni in the UST College of Science. At 24, and only three years after graduating, you could imagine my surprise.
I was in a roster together with a Presidential Awardee for Scientific Research, an environmental biotechnologist, humanitarian doctors, renowned researchers, a former rector. It was extremely humbling. They have achieved far greater feats than I had. I was just a teacher in a public elementary school behind Amoranto Sports Complex, 15 minutes away from home. I felt abashed for receiving a medal for a work a lot more people around the country have been passionately doing for years. But after much reflection, I recognized that the award went beyond my name.
Machiavelli mentioned that it is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles. These connote that the title does not determine us as the title is only worth what everyone has put into them. It is thus the people, and consequently their actions, who honor the title and become worthy of them. Actions that for me, are more valuable than the award. And what we did were products of a vision, advocacies, hard work, perseverance, constant teamwork and even failures.
This award is for all the teachers, for the work we do is not as easy as it may seem. Being a teacher entails being multifaceted – we are parents who nurture and care for our kids, we are police who enforce law and order, nurses who tend to their wounds, architects who design lessons, entertainers who make them laugh and smile, magicians who tickle their curiosity and scientists who explore the beauty and wonder of the world. We spend hours outside school preparing for our classes, checking papers and worrying about their lives! So for all the underappreciated teachers out there, this award is for you. Truly no other vocation has the same influence to so many in such a formative period in their lives. But more importantly, this award is about the youth, for it is a symbol of the power we hold to create significant change even if they are incremental. Because it is not about our age, what titles and positions we hold, or how big our contributions are. As what Machiavelli told us, it is our collective actions that prove how much we are capable of leaving our mark and building a better nation.