Everything I Learned From High School

Initially appeared on doktorko.com 11/2/2005.

When i was in high school (at Zobel - Animo La Salle!), i fancied myself quite the smart aleck.  Although i was a member of the so-called "Honors Class," i was a royal pain.  My attitude was horrible: i would ignore my teachers' lectures, make fun of their probinsyano accents, and slack through my classes with wild abandon.  I would read adventure novels instead of textbooks and watch TV on a school night.  I would memorize guitar chords in favor of facts and figures.  But still i coasted through high school with flying colors.  I would cram a Quarter's worth of readings into the night before the exam and still manage to eke out a high grade.  I would engage my Science and Christian Living teachers in heated debates about their subject matters - and still come out smelling like roses.

In sum, i was not a student that my teachers liked at all.  Every year - without fail - one teacher would pull me aside and tell me that i had great potential... but that i had to clean up my act.  Through the grapevine, i heard that my teachers hated me, that they thought my girlfriend (who is now my wife) was too good for me, that i would get her pregnant and ruin our lives forever.  Well, this served as reinforcement, and the more i felt their seething hatred, the more of an @$$ho!e i became.  Hate begets hate, after all.

(To be fair, they weren't all bad.  Some were actually pretty supportive.  But there were enough bad apples to spoil the lot, so to speak.)

Eventually, i graduated from high school, went on to DLSU, and finished Medicine.  That should have been the end of that, but whenever i thought about my high school teachers, all my youthful angst came rushing back.  I started seeing red and felt fire burning in my veins.  It made me want to piss in their coffee cups and kick their faces in.  All those years of putting me down and trying to rein me in - well, who has the last laugh now?  Who has the MD degree and will be making more money than you've ever dreamed of?  Answer me, you [expletive deleted]!!!  I wanted to go back there, storm into the faculty room, and start screaming at them like a bad soap opera.  For one reason or another, i never actually did it.  But it was always a secret desire that burned within me.

However –

Before coming to the US, i taught Anatomy in my alma mater for just over a year.  It was then that i understood how my own teachers had felt. It was then that i realized - clear as day - why they were so negative towards me all those years.

Standing in front of a hundred students with a meticulously-crafted lesson plan and train-of-thought, you dread those little distractions that divert the attention of the class away from you.  You hope that you know enough to teach these young minds - that you actually know enough that you'll be able to answer their questions when they pop up.  You admire the brilliant student who is able to answer all your questions - but you're also a little afraid of him because you might not be able to answer all his questions.  You're afraid that you'll slip up, that the little chink in your armor will be exposed, and that the students will lose respect in you and label you tanga.  And whenever the smart aleck speaks up - you hate him just a little more than before and try to put him down to impose your authority, to show him that it's you and you alone who are in charge.

We think of our figures of authority in terms of archetypes; not humans, but rather immutable icons with only one facet to their personalities.  The Congressman as Manhik-Manaog, the teacher as Miss Tapia, the Medical Consultant as - well - a Medical Consultant.  As up-and-coming youngsters we try to impose ourselves, bending others to our will; everyone else is dumb and irrelevant, i'm the only one that matters.  It's easy to feel oppressed, like the world has wronged us somehow, that people need to understand us and not the other way around.

But as we grow older (and hopefully wiser), the shoe gets put on the other foot.  We watch the new up-and-coming younger people impose themselves and try to bend others to their will, thinking that we are dumb and irrelevant and that they are the only ones that matter.  At once we admire and cringe away from their terrible power and arrogance.  Then - and only then - do we realize how narrow our worldviews really were.

So what i really learned from high school (and perhaps the better part of my early life) is this: that we are all human; that we all harbor secret hopes and fears; that no one - no one! - is immune to insecurites.  No matter how brave the front that we put on - for our students, our clients, our patients - at the end of the day, we all come home battered, broken, and spent.