"PRISON-BREAK" STUDENTS AND THE LIKE- BALM FOR MID-LIFE BOREDOM

Teaching is invigorating.It never fails to bring back the color of youth to my dry skin cells. True, the nightly sores in the back and legs, even in the aging eyes are still there, not counting the usual sore throats after a month or two of going back to my first love--teaching, that is.

It's not teachers' day today. And yet the returns I get from the look of education-hungry young students are incomparable to what any patronizing student could shower any teacher. Unlike what scores of friends would say, teaching does not age. Not me, that is. On the contrary, it adds years to my "past the midlife" boring existence. It is akin to taking a scarlet afternoon walk by a shore line stepping on but not minding the rough sands and broken shells along the way. On the contrary, playing with them with my toes could be fun.

I was full of energy the first day of class. After going around good-paying companies, here I am back in the arms of teaching.

I embraced the almost 50 something kids each class in an almost dilapidated school room in a "Prison Break-like" four-story school building. You are free to imagine the cells that Michael Scoffield and T-Bag were in. The noise and the number of roguish rascals of the prison cells and my class rooms are strikingly identical. Definitely, these didn't fail to send my entire physical self to bed feeling mangled up that first night. But nah, the joy of embracing the whole teaching career again after a good while is brimming from inside me going out spewing fireworks in all directions. I was practically smiling to everyone. And as expected, students who were used to the dour, stern teachers who either decide to put on Mr. Cooger's scary tactics or Arnold Schwarzenegger's old tricks to nail them immobile on their seats were surprised to see a smiling apparition in front of them. Hah, and I didn't understand why they were likewise smiling the whole time I was there. We were like mirrors of each other.

So they say, teachers are never well-compensated in this third-world country. As for me, I am already teeming with so much returns. I am practically simmering, wanting for more of this.