School Sentimental

I walked through the old halls of the school building to get to the audio-visual room where my son, Aidan, was to perform with his middle school's drama guild. The sun was up, way too high, that if I passed through the grounds, I would have fainted. It was enrollment time, so there were many students around. There was a time I walked through these halls with my mid-wedge pumps' sound echoing about, on my way to teach a college class. When classcards and chalks and erasers were still in. Now they are stuff of the past, what with projectors, whiteboards and Apple TVs, and tablets. 

I caught a sniff of that familiar smell of floor wax, the ones they use to keep the hall floors shiny. Some things do not change. I looked across the hallway with the shiny maroon floors, and I imagined the school president, then, Fr. De Boeck, a German priest who was always breathing down my neck for smoking in campus, and for dying my hair bright brown, walking towards me. There was a time I was to meet him by the corridors, and in anticipation of what he was going to be mad at me about yet again, I intentionally looked past him. Then  he said, in this deep voice, just when he walked right past me, 'Good afternoon, Miss Castillejos, even if you pretended not to see me.'  Goodness, the man was really sharp. 

I taught for a couple of years in the college, mentored by an unforgettable person named Marlu Vicencio, who 'discovered' me in her MBA classes. She told me she was intrigued by the lock of hair hanging down my nape, just below my severely short hairstyle. Like it was out of place, yet she said, I looked comfortable with the thought. She told me, too, that she thought I dressed weirdly, in unwashed tattered jeans, low skirts, loose blouses with my bra straps always seen, 'Our Tribe' flat sandals.  I wore black nail polish, too. Yet when she asked me about a case study, I seemed to know the answers. Perhaps the way my brain and my clothes 'looked' did not match?

I have a lot to be thankful for, to Marlu, to Fr De Boeck, to my students, to this school. Where my daughter Ana, and my son Aidan, went to for high school and now, middle school. The school has grown so much, and two decades ago I thought it was already one of the best there was in the city. Along these corridors, within these walls, my dreams were made true: I taught college; I made friends, both from the faculty and my students; I learned plenty about 'being yourself' and the limits of that; I walked from the faculty room to my classes with my youngest sister in tow, 5-year-old Kring, walking behind me like my mini-me who had chalk all over her after each class. It was the best two years of my life. 

I remember this one night I was checking blue books and finalizing grades for one class, when Papa was hovering, trying to look at my students's grades. He saw one which I marked as 'failed', the he said, 'Christianne, anak, please do not fail anyone. Have pity on their parents who paid for their tuition.' I thought then that was ridiculous. I was not a parent yet at that time, so I could not understand what Papa was talking about. I told him, 'Papa, it is not helping them either if I pass them without them having learned anything right?'. To which he replied, 'You are helping already just by teaching them, anak. If they do not want to take their studies seriously, that is their problem. But do not make it their parents' problem.' What do I say to that?