On teachers, remembrance and plowing in the sea

Here I am with the first best group of Art Appreciation I had had since leaving Mexico. Not the best pic, but nowadays we cannot trust the automatic shutter of a digital camera anymore. Those were four intense weeks ending on May 28th just as I was getting ready to be the student of the most difficult course I had ever attempted in my life....subject for another post.

Being a teacher is not easy...I decided I wanted to be one when I was 15 years old in Junior High School. We were a very polite and dedicated class, something younger generations are not much neither of one nor the other. I might sound as if I were getting old, and maybe is true. There are exceptions, like all these young men and women, but they are so rare that when you get a whole class like that they gleam as diamonds and must be treated as such: with care, knowledge and hard polish.

As a wise teacher used to say "those who are intelligent are able to learn from the stones, while stupids will not learn even if lectured for hours by scores of PhD´s" Seems that the main ingredient to make a good teacher is first to be a very good student, approaching the adventure of learning with the correct attitude. Then comes the second main ingredient: a passion for life. No matter if the subject to be taught is Math or Art Appreciation, a good teacher gets trained in the discipline inserted in life. As a human, nothing human must be alien to him/her, as the Latin aphorism reads. The third ingredient is LOVE...The whole Fourth Gospel of John is about that subject, so I´m not attempting to start here a thread on it. I will only say that if a teacher does not like-to-the point-of-love humans -starting with him/her- and believe that there is something redeemable in the bottomless pit, that career path will never work.

We teachers are -in the best and in the worst sense- followers of the Bolivarian description of what his life had been trying to liberate South America: "plowing in the sea". We get good at talking to walls....maybe that is why we do not mind to blog :) I swear there is not an ounce of narcisism in it, for it is quite frustrating to write knowing feedback will be almost inexistent.

Yet, we do what we have to do....I´ll be posting some threads about my own teachers. I wish I could remember about all of them, for they have contributed in one way or another to build what I am now -even the Physics teacher who flunked me in High School, forcing me do a survivalist "better my marks" if I was to avoid a rollover....I hated every second of it and now I am a sucker for mechanics...well, subject for another future thread.

Maybe as Dante, in the Divine Comedy, I feel I have reached the middle point of my life -quite optimistic, I reckon, for only God knows if it is so or not- and it is time to stop and evaluate. So the best way is to remember here those whose teachings are helping me now not to go under. Some are now dead...following this blog from another dimension...the others might get some comfort to know I´m saying "thank you" by trying to keep alive and shared the flame they passed on me.