Peltier in Prison Writings wrote that guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies. I do not know if I agree to this with all my heart. I feel guilty for being absent from my classes in the university where I moonlight as a college professor. I teach education courses to soon-to-be teachers like me, and I think what I did was not a very good example to my students. I was absent for almost two weeks because I was very busy with my high school duties. Our graduation is already next week. There were just so many paper works to be accomplished. The faculty room was busy too preparing for the graduation ceremony and program. I told my students I was absent, plain and simple, because I had so many things to do and yet I had so little time to accomplish them.
I was not lying and this was not what I was guilty of. I was all embarrassed by the fact that I might have been misconstrued as somebody irresponsibly lazy. If I have too many work to do, too many concerns to attend to in high school, then why in the world did I take additional teaching loads in college? My college students might have think of this, but I knew them much better to be this shallow. How about the other students not under me? Now, I'm becoming more paranoid. Not that it would matter so much, but I just do not want people to misjudge me. I have been misjudged countless of times by people who were not as tactful as they should be. It was indeed very embarrassing every time.
It was very embarrassing every time, not on my part but on the other person's part. When I have not done anything wrong, when I have nothing to be guilty of, I tend to be so frank with my thoughts and words. Whoever wrongly judges me, surely gets my wrath, and I am so good at belittling and berating people I am irritated with. I compare everything to playing baseball. I must always have the first base, the first say, so I will arrive first in the home base, so I will have the last say too. I hate people who do not think first before they open their mouths. They always get my ire.
This is the egomaniac in me speaking. Because I do not judge people, I do not also want to be judged, much more, misjudged. The college students under me were happy to see me back. I would like to believe that they see me as their older brother, not just their mentor. I tried hard to be one of the best teachers they have. Mostly what I had taught them were based on my ten years experience as a teacher. I have always been candid in saying that there are just things a teacher experiences later in his work that have not been written yet in the book. For a teacher, I told them that the best teacher is experience. What I have been telling them were born out of my passion to learn more about my students, their dreams, their eccentricities, and the things that make them cry.
I am not guilty because I was absent for quite a long time. I was embarrassed though thinking of what other people might have been thinking about me. This is paranoia and I think I just have to let go of this. When I first saw some of my students today, all this guilt, all this paranoia and everything in between were all unfounded. I was just as happy and relieved seeing my students welcome me back. My discussion with them went on very smoothly. It would be the last for this semester. As I am blogging though, I realize that what was actually bothering me was not the guilt but rather I was just too proud to accept reality that people may not have thought me as perfect as they would have liked me to be. Here comes back the egomaniac freak prick!
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