PANDEMONIUM

A teacher of twelve years went flabbergasted to find herself in the quandary of how to keep things in normal condition in a pandemonic second year high school class who are even worse than her college students in ten years past. Sadly, I am this teacher. Noise is not the issue, of course. It’s an elementary problem compared to this one. Majority of them see to it that I blow my top—that is, in all my consternation, by mimicking me, laughing out loud when nothing is funny, inciting each other in engineering one commotion after another, and many more scary stunts I am afraid I have to live with or die on.

A decade or so of meeting different kinds of students, inspired or wired, this is what I am sure about. I remain imperfect as a human being. I remain subject to the Greatest Teacher of all time. That in all this business of imparting knowledge to young minds, I look up to Christ in his great patience and in his sense of justice in how he treated his students.

With indignation, I once mulled over how to slash their toungues and smash their heads in that bloody four-walled room with grades redder than red and quizzes with immense scope they would walk the walls to the ceilings to find salvation of their souls in this institution they call bright.

Worse, I think of martial law more purplish in bruises and bumps than the 1972 Marcos’ creation. Well, what can this poor teacher do? I can always do a Nero act but things are different now. Centuries ago, it might have been arts connoisseurship to see human anatomies raked to the arena floor or have them get drenched with gasoline and get lit as torches in this bulwark of learning and caring. Come to think of it, it might have satisfied my human hunger of retribution.

But nah, I may not know exactly what bitter medicine to throw at these students’ wailing mouths for now, but I know my Teacher will not do any one of the above, so why would I? I have not been a perfect student either to my Christ as to learning His ways after more than three decades of being his protégée. So perhaps, another heave in the midst of this pandemonium will send me to Cape Hope. We'll see.

Right at this point, I can only pray. And pray with so much fervor and courage. That all things will not just come to pass but will likewise come to terms with peace.