MY TEACHING LIFE

MY TEACHING LIFE
Neil Romano Manaog
30 August 2005

If real love is sacrifice, no profession in the whole
world best illustrates this adage but teaching. Yes. I
must have been so inspired by this maxim because in
many ways, I have been living the principle myself. I
have been teaching in grade school for more than a
decade now, and all I can say is that the joys of
teaching are indeed numerous and priceless.

I both understand and appreciate the nobility of the
teaching profession. When you teach, you educate
people in wonderful ways—including educating yourself.


A teacher’s class is the microcosm of the bigger
society where real life happens.  For one, I have been
teaching tae kwon do to grade school pupils. And they
learn a lot from our bonding and partnership. They win
awards and we get to travel to places, especially
during national Palaro. Through their own efforts they
get more exposures and experiences. Through these
experiences they get more opportunities to explore
themselves and the world. Nothing could be more
rewarding to me as a teacher than that.

When you teach, you get to touch the future too. In
other words, you are the most privileged person on
earth because you get to witness the various
sensibilities that come to your classroom, the very
picture of the future.  You are not just the fortunate
witness of life, so to speak; you can also be help
determine what it’s going to be like. My third-row
student right now whom I admire for his leadership
potential can very well be that politician or business
magnate who will approach me one day to talk during
their class reunion. Nothing else could be more
fulfilling than that.

But I am teacher because I am inspired by teaching
itself. I admire its nobility. I myself live the pains
it entails. There is no better proof for such
admiration than the fact that my wife—who is also a
teacher—shares these sacrifices with me. Both of us
sincerely devote our lives to teaching and teaching
with sense. Every single day, we get up early with our
kids to teach and have our kids taught in our own
schools. We believe in what education can primarily do
to our kids’ future.

Every single day my wife and I get to realize the
sacrifices we have to make for our children. We always
have to make to ends meet.  Despite the perennial
financial difficulties, we deeply realize the value of
what their future can hold for them have they been
properly educated and bred, so we try harder to
sustain them with our income. We would want to go out
of this country to teach but we believe there is time
for everything. So I think we are leading towards
nobility because we are our own examples of what we
preach, of what we teach. We sustain our lives with
our principles of what heroism is like.

For me, teachers are not just martyrs; they are also
living saints. Every single day, they present
themselves to the world, sincerely, but for the world
to ignore, misunderstand, or even scorn. This is
enough for us to go on and remain as teachers. We
teach because we want to learn. We learn because we
want to live.

I am happy I am a teacher. No other endeavor can make
a lot of sense