POST-SABBATICAL NOTES. 1 AUG 2014. FRIDAY. N1. Goodbye, sabbatical days. ONE OF THE DELIGHTS OF BEING an academic is this chance of getting away from academic life scot-free for a semester or two depending on ones resources and ability to pray to the gods of heaven and earth and skies. Years of teaching--of being glued to books and test papers and modules and everything that has something to do with student life and education can bleed a teacher dry, and can make him run to the next shrink. Teaching is normalizing. But it demands a lot of patient understanding, and this patient understanding is towards ones own self as well as to all students who come into your life in their uniqueness and with the limitless possibilities of their gifts. I did not train to become a teacher. When missionary life lost its enchanting hold on me, I ran away from the walled seminary and found myself knocking on the door of a college that catered to working students. That college was in the heart of Manila. Its neighbor was the Papal Nunciature and I thought I had ran away from it all, this church-thing, but did not succeed. That college, famous during its heyday, lost its luster, and one day, while I was tasked to oversee it, a big fire razed to the ground. Conflagration was it, that fire whose tongue turned everything to ashes, records and all, and our hopes to help young and working students. We never made it. From there, I moved to that one royal and pontifical university where the sainted Pope John Paul visited twice and where the current Pope Francis will visit in January 2015. It has been teaching since then, from the tarmac assassination to the awakening of the people from that delightful phantasmagoria some people called benevolent dictatorship as if that kind of dictatorship is at all possible. A semester of running away from the classroom was pure delight. It provided me the time to go follow the wind, to go where the spirit leads, and to think through many things that had to be thought through. The sabbatical has ended yesterday, 31 July. Now, back to the business of training the young and the old again. I did one thing: I wrote Gabriela! Gabriela! and students taking up Ilokano at Waipahu High staged it. What buena suerte this is! I cannot wait to have a longer, more delight-filled sabbatical next time around. Say, one year of gallivanting, of reading books in the mountaintops of Bauko and Bakun. Or staring at Picassos Guernica again--for four times!--like the way I did last time in Madris Sofia Museum. When the next sabbatical comes, I shall take the train to Ukraine and figure out the mystery of Donetsk. WPH/
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 07:53:19 +0000
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