Antonio C. Abaya - My Teacher, My Hero

My column for today was originally meant to dwell on The Next Disaster â€“ such was its tentative title â€“ but today October 5 is World Teachers Day as declared by the UNESCO.

I promised my friend Chito SobrepeÃ±a, chair of the Metrobank Foundation that I would write about a teacher in my grade school, high school or college days who made a difference in my life. And I promised Chito that I would submit it in time for the Foundation's 2009 Teachers Month campaign to focus the public's attention on the theme of My Teacher, My Hero.

In my case, it is as clear as sunshine that the teacher who made the most profound difference in my life was Fr. Luis Candelaria, SJ â€“ Fr. Candi â€“ who was my teacher in first year high at the Ateneo de Manila in the school year 1947-48.

To put matters in sharp focus, I should mention that my grade school education came from a mish-mash of different schools of differing standards, made inevitable by the dislocations caused by the outbreak of World War 2, the Japanese Occupation and Liberation by the Americans and Filipino guerillas.

I do not have any vivid memories of those times, but it must have been during the school year 1941-42 that I was in First Grade, at the Holy Ghost College on Mendiola, where my elder sister Fely was enrolled. I recall occasional air raids then, presumably before the Japanese army entered Manila.

I do not even recall if I actually finished First Grade. But I know that my Second Grade was spent in a public school, the Lincoln Elementary School on EspaÃ±a, about ten blocks away from our house at the corner of EspaÃ±a and CataluÃ±a streets. That must have been school year 1942-43.

For reasons which I did not understand then, Lincoln was renamed Dagohoy Elementary School, and we were taught Nipponggo. I recall that my parents were visibly amused that my highest grades in Second Grade were in Nipponggo or the Japanese language, which I have since totally forgotten.

But whoever was my teacher then, she (they were all females, I recall) seems to have tapped a latent predisposition for foreign languages. In my late teens and early twenties, I taught myself varying levels of French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch and Swedish, a facility made easier by six years of compulsory Latin during high school and college at the Ateneo de Manila..

Later in Northwestern University, I enrolled in a Russian language course. During the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviets in 1956, I tried to teach myself Hungarian â€“ as an act of solidarity with the Hungarians - but found it too difficult to continue. Hungarian â€“ like Finnish and Basque â€“ does not belong to the three main branches of the Indo-European family of languages - Romance, Germanic and Slavic â€“ with which I had had some familiarity

By school year 1943-44, things seem to have normalized. My sister went back to Holy Ghost College on Mendiola, while I went to nearby San Beda College for Third Grade.

Again, I do not recall if I actually finished the school year, because the family moved to my father's hometown â€“ Pagsanjan, Laguna â€“ for the duration of the War, during which we did not attend any school.

We escaped from the embattled and increasingly cruel Japanese occupiers in Pagsanjan in March 1945. I recall that we celebrated my ninth birthday in the middle of a forest somewhere between Pagsanjan and the recently liberated town of Pila, from where we took a batel or fishing boat for Calamba, and from there an open cargo truck back to our undamaged house in Manila.

In school year 1945-46, I was enrolled in another public school, Juan Luna Elementary School on CataluÃ±a, less than 50 meters from our house. Probably because of the dislocations caused by War and Occupation, several classmates and I were accelerated from Fourth to Fifth Grade, apparently so as to equally populate both levels.

The following school year, 1946-47, I went back to a private Catholic school, where I finished my Grade School education, such as it was. I will not mention the name of this school as it will just create more enemies for myself. No, it was not De La Salle. Suffice it is to say that I learned absolutely nothing in this school, except how to make codigo to cheat in exams.

Which is why I was totally unprepared when I took the entrance exams for the Ateneo de Manila high school for school year 1947-48. I flunked the entrance exams, which was essentially an IQ test which, I now recall, required a passable command of the English language. But since I learned nothing in Sixth Grade, least of all English, I had no idea what the entrance exams were all about.

My mother had to cry and beg for a second chance for me before the Filipino Jesuit â€“ a Fr. Baltazar, a stern and unsmiling taskmaster â€“ in charge of admissions. But her tears were not in vain Fr. Baltazar relented and allowed me to take the exams a second time.

My parents hired a tutor â€“ Mr. Gonzalo Aniban, an Ateneo grade schoolteacher - to prepare me for my second chance. This time I passed. But only barely, because my command of English had not improved appreciably.

What better proof of this than the fact that during my first three months in the Ateneo, I flunked in all my subjects, receiving 60 to 65 in everything, the passing grade being 75.

I was in an impenetrable fog during those three months, as I had been during my entire Sixth Grade. I understood nothing and learned nothing, and I was not interested in anything.

But somehow â€“ and here I am not aware of any specific event or pedagogic method that can be described as a turning point â€“ Fr. Candi took a special interest in me and seemed as if he had made it some kind of personal mission of his to turn me around. Suddenly I was intellectually alive, as if a light bulb had been turned on inside me or above me, as in a comic book cartoon.

And whether it was the parsing of an English sentence, or the account of a battle between the ancient Greeks and the Persians, or the significance of an algebraic equation, everything became interesting, understandable and easy. My grades shot up from 65 to 95, and I became a totally different person, mentally and intellectually, from what I was in Sixth Grade.

Fr. Candi is still around and reasonably healthy, in his late 80s. I had a reunion with him last year, after not having seen each other for some fifty years. But I should have asked him what it was that he did to turn me around. To him, I owe my intellectual awakening. He is truly My Teacher, My Hero. To Fr. Candi, my everlasting gratitude.

But aside from turning on the light inside me, the Ateneo taught me something else, more valuable than learning to read and write, and that was, to have a sense of right and wrong.

I was 11 years old and had come from Sixth Grade during which I understood nothing and learned nothing. Except how to cheat during exams. In moving to the Ateneo, I stepped into a different culture.

In the Ateneo high school of that time, under the deanship of the Irish-American Fr. John P. Delaney, the honor system was the operative policy. That meant that when it was time for quizzes and exams, the teacher distributed the questions, then left the room, returning only to pick up our answers at the end of the hour.

Somehow, simultaneous with my intellectual awakening, this made a lasting impression on my 11-year old mind. I understood that I was being trusted and therefore I could not and should not break that trust, no matter what. Not because it was a mortal sin to break that trust, but because it was the honorable thing to keep and honor that trust.

Although about 70 percent of the class chose to cheat, some of us chose not to. And I for one have not knowingly cheated or lied or done anything dishonest ever since. Except for one single traumatic occasion when I was 13, about which more in a future article.

My Teacher, My Hero. My School, My Moral Compass.

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