According to a great man Goethe: “We only learn from those we love.” This is very true to me. As a teacher who has been teaching in public high school for more than a decade, this job is the longest I’ve had. And because I stayed here longest, that means I love this job.I learnt to embrace it to the fullest. I can proudly say that I have already digested most of the stories, the very images of Afro-Asian and American/English diverse poems, and the smell of the essays,tales and plays that I teach each year.

But I tell you, my students love teachers who listen to them – not only to their difficulties with the perfect tenses or the reading (because we read a lot of literary masterpieces in my class), but more importantly, their struggles in making that evolution from childhood to young adulthood. We were young once, many summers ago, and confused. Thus, we are all too familiar with the pains of growing up: of moving into the skin of a young adult, with its many, mystifying changes. That’s why they depend on us to teach them how to.

And this is what I’m trying to do best. Why? Because they do not learn only from the theoretical teachings inside the four-walled classroom. More so, they wade through the process of developing themselves in a holistic manner. Meaning, as a teacher, it is mainly up to you how and what would they become as they depart from this institution.

From their stories of broken homes, abuse, bullying and identity crisis (to cite few), we teachers are their cicerones whom they can entrust their problems. All of these stories are sprinkled with melodrama. They’d make your friendly teleserye proud. But these things happened, and as I write are still happening. The cast of characters and the settings are the only things that change. And this, is the scenario in a public high school.

As a result, students’ grades take a plunge. They sit at the back of the classroom, wearing sunglasses to hide their eyes lined with red – from drugs, from insomnia, perhaps from grief. Or they don’t mind at all. Their young lives have become a sinkhole. And a few don’t make it.

But some survived. And are still surviving. Kudos to Alternative Learning System (ALS), Open High School and other programs of DepEd. The agency never ceases to find solutions to this immemorial problems. Nonetheless, these are not enough. I believe that it is up to us teachers to avoid this from happening.

And this is what I tell these young people through stories, essays and poems. These literary pieces become avenues of what I really want to tell them. One suffers – everybody suffers – but one must learn from it. It steels you; hones and sharpens you. It gives your life inner dimension and depth. Yes, it makes you sadder, but infinitely tougher, and wiser. I ask my students to read the poet Langston Hughes “Mother to Son”, where he said that life ain’t been a crystal stair. It had tacks in it. And splinters. That to succeed, one must overcome trials.

I don’t tell my students that life is a fairy tale, like what’s happening in books. No, I tell them,life is one road full of twists and turns, and they must steer along those perilous curves with all the skills they could muster. Maybe faith and friendship would help, but in the end, it is them alone who would have to do it.

This is the life of a teacher – overworked, underpaid, and even if we thinkwe are brilliant – these can only do so much.

But then, I come across with my students again. I bump into them at the malls, at the airports, fastfood chains… everywhere! They now look more settled, calmer, more put together. They no longer fear perfect tenses, long quizzes and overdue assignments. They have begun to heal the scars of the past, or are drawing arcs and building bridges, touching a bright future. They tell me about my short hairdo I hadmany years ago, the passionate poems I made them write, or other stuff that, frankly, I no longer remember.

It does my seasoned age proud that I taught them in the last 13 years. And know what? Goethe was right: we only learn from that which we love.

By: Vilma S. Fernando | Master Teacher I Bataan National High School | Balanga City, Bataan