This morning I was driving my car around my hometown and I passed by the old school where I had my elementary education.
When I was young in my elementary years, I was brought up in a society where the equation of intelligence, wealth, sanguinity, and memorization are paralleled. If you can memorize the Pledge of Allegiance you’ll surely get the highest grade even you do not understand what you are saying. Those kids whose parents are teachers would usually get the highest recognition in every school activities and would get an extra points on their grades. They are the singers, the orators, boy scout leaders, the leaders to sing the national anthem and raise the flag. If you are a son or daughter of a prominent family they would also give you a credit or recognition of such otherwise they can’t get a big donations to renovate the bathroom, exclusively for teachers' use. Unfortunately I am not on those categories, we don’t have richness for them to loot, thank God we don’t have relatives among those crocodile educators, and I don’t memorize things I don’t understand. So I end up as an ordinary student, whose name can only be heard when the teachers checks the attendance. I am just a nobody, and one of those from behind in dark corners.
I don’t like how these people from latrine slime in my community run the public educational system in our town, with guts to believe that the society owes them because they are the so called “Educators of the Future Filipino”. The fancy slogan would only deserve for teachers who teaches with fair, impartiality, and would not send his students in gardening instead of reading books. While she is so busy chit chatting with her fellow stinky colleagues dissecting life of other people. With my gullible mind I am too innocent not to have a liberal thinking that moment to analyze that we are doing is wrong. We are not suppose to do those gardening, we deserve to read books and not to till soil the whole day and looking for white stones at the river to decorate the garden. Every morning they would even ask us to pay for donations of this and that, payments for this and that. Sometimes my money reserved for snacks end up to donations because if you won’t give; "God will punish you, and you might end up in hell because selfishness" as what our teacher’s rhetoric speech would always conclude. I only have five pesos per day that year three pesos in the morning that you can buy a bread and a homemade juice in plastic and straw, and two pesos in the afternoon and I can only buy a gum or a candy. Some children were even given more than enough by their parents and they could buy more than what I have. I live my life so innocent that I don't even complain of what I have nor compare with how much my classmates have.
I thank my mother because after finishing elementary, she sent me to a private and big university in the city, for my high school. There, I would not live tilling the soil and spend the entire educational term in gardening. Unfortunately I had to leave home and would stay for several months away. I love that university because it is has wider campus world class library and it inculcates talent on every students. That is where I was coming out from my shell to share some God's programmed talent. It was the only time that I was able to perform oratorical speeches in competition in an elegant University Auditorium. I won several contests. As compared to that slime filthy stage of my elementary school where the usual people and usual names are performing, I have gone far from them.
I passed far from the main gate. I was searching for some good memories in my elementary but I can only remember my old good classmates. I never had an inspiration from teachers.
