Phantom Pain

                I am now in my fourth year of my teaching career and there are so many things that came along, most especially in how I was trying to tame my language and my being to become an efficient teacher. I admit that the first years were not that good for me, professionally speaking. I admit that there were so many errors that I made and in the last two years of my teaching, I have been trying my best to pay for my sins. Even though I was forced to leave in my previous work due to the style that I brought and with that I was furious, but that should not be a shocker to me for I know what I was going against. However, that was the first time that I have tasted rejection in the professional level and all because of the very ideals I fought for.

                I was young and fiery. I thought that I was already world class, but I placed that bloat of an ego into my egotistical self and what I had is a reckless academic. I was so excited to impart my experience into the mind of my fellow youth because I seem to have placed so much value to what I went through. I seem to overly bloat myself and use to flaunt the names of the Universities I was growing up to show the kind of intellectual dominant I am. Later on I realized that indeed the names were a good strategy to market one’s self, but I was just using them to claim legitimacy of my thoughts. Not to say that I had my personal beliefs and used their names to show authority; I did learn a lot from those institutions but it was more of a tagging and bragging that the teaching itself.

                Thence I was facing an institution that was not even a shadow of where I came from. I forgot that reality was the workplace and that my ideals were so high that I wish to impose everything to the world I was immersed into forgetting the other details of why such shocker was highly incompatible. First, the home environment is not the same for all the youth, most families rear their children not in the intelligentista manner like that to open discussions while having a family dinner and or watching National Geographic as a form of teleserye. Second, the second home during the elementary days was not the same, for I was brought up in an elitist school with elitist standards and elitist training. Third, economic status of my family is a little bit well-off and I do not have to support my own college education and worse, to help my family survive or myself to survive in a poor economic status. Fourth, my set of friends embedded a kind of dignified academic culture which also moulded me of which is not the same with others. Lastly, my second home in my adolescent days, most especially in the secondary level was a known national top brass school of which I was deeply moulded into what they envision their students to be. Once I went to college, the discipline had already been embedded into me and that made my academic life a not so hellish life. These are the things that I did not see and these biases made me push my students real hard in my highly experimental first semester.

                Moreover, I believed that I was capable so many subjects to teach, but then I saw the reality that I can only teach a portion but not an entire semester. I know I am a master of my own field, but I have overreached to other matters that were not really my forte. Thus, substandard I was when I was assigned to subjects that I am not really good at. Although, I admit, that I can understand, but it is a different thing once I have mastered compared to a thing newly learned.  I am not saying that being a master makes one immune to the scrutiny of so many questions, but in the end, doubt ate more than satisfaction of having relayed something. Doubt settles more, because there is no assurance yet of mastery of the subject. I know, I have my own lapses and my first students suffered the error of the bloated me. Strategies were not really into my scheme and I took them for granted and I thought that a rhetorical lecture would suffice, but I was wrong. I was so monotonous with my strategies that I bored them and do not forget, mostly of them are not that receptive to that kind of discipline. In cases in which I too was tired, I just picked random activities and have my students perform things which are way out of the class topics. I admit, I ran out of things to say and activities, so I went to the desperate moves into killing time, unproductively. I admit, there were things I let them did, that I failed to connect to the lessons, or just let them did things to feel alive and then nothing was really of the matter that made it relational to the subject.

                That first semester was hell for me, for I was not effective in Rizal and Psychology. What was worse was that, the students may have seemed to adore me, but the subjects were not given justice. I failed to give it justice. I remember letting my students in Rizal did absurd and unnecessary dramatization activities that were way off topic. Moreover, my psychology class was highly Freudian and nothing more. Almost all topics were Freud, and yes and the conservative ones refuse to embrace and listen to Freud. My Philosophy of the Human Person was chasing the syllabus and I have given overly detailed discussions which left my students dumbfounded by the fact that I can fill a blackboard with a 1 hour 30 minute monologue to the deaf. My logic class lacked supporting activities. Worse was my Philippine History of which I had nothing imparted to them other than why the Spaniards were here in Philippines and no other details and I was so stupid to have included Nietzsche and Dead Poet’s Society into that class. Fuck hell I am ashamed of my sins. My Humanities class was an imitation of my theatre arts class in secondary school, but it was a little bit problematic for me because such kind of art is not embraced by a kind of institution that I am working, although many of my students were indeed positive about the sessions we had. I have failed a lot and I told myself, that yes, some of them deserved the failure, but I was not in the best position to do so with regards to what I have done. Much was a thing to be ashamed off in my past years. However, it finds comfort to have known people who did continue supporting me, I personally do not know what they see in me, but I told myself they were indeed a great balancer for my sins. Then again, these sins were indeed a thing to ponder and not later than that, I received my rejection to continue my work. A just reward for a ridiculous toil. Although, the decision is tethered with dirty politics, but that dirty politics found a hole to legitimize their decision. I gladly accept my rejection from the standpoint of my sins.

                Much after that, I carried those errors in my mind and told myself that I can rectify my name and give justice to my profession now in the new institution I am tied into. I carry within me everyday the shameful and horrifying memories of my early years, to motivate me to become a new man destined to set things right. Raising a form of mastery and at the same time raising awareness of what kind of students I am facing. My students right now are feeling the Archuleta who had been in remorse with his old self and with the injustice done to the many students before. The Archuleta who stands in their front is a man vindictive of the sins of his past. He treats himself as his own enemy and an obstacle to overcome. Yes, the Archuleta of the now presses more and pressures more, because he feels legitimized to do so, because before he imparts, he seeks peace within himself so that he can and with justice, deliver what is ought to be given. The Archuleta they are seeing and experiencing is the Archuleta who is dealing with his phantom pain. He delights in reminiscing his sins so that he delights in taking the fullest extent to admonish himself to find his greater self. His greater self cannot be shown if he does not bask in his errors. That is the true spirit of dialectics. Rizal, Philippine History, Philosophy of Man and Ethics. Contrition to absolution!