08/12/2024
My red pen ran out of ink, but I still had a lot of papers to check, so, I looked for another one and continued checking without pausing even just for a little while to thank my empty barrel for the service it has dedicated its blood for.
I wrote checks and encircled numbers. I wrote scores and pointed out corrections. I continued doing what I was doing with my dead pen with a fresh tube of red ink. When I finished checking essays from 9 Johnson, that’s when I caught a glimpse of the limp plastic tube that used to be on my hand when I started checking papers that day, except, this time, it is empty. It is done. It ran out of purpose, and my heart was pinched when I realized that I didn’t even take some time to notice that because I was being used by the education system, myself, for its own purpose.
I am being held tightly, like how I do with my pens, by a department that had things to do using me as an instrument. Education must continue writing. Education must continue serving. Education needs me to do things.
When I use pens, I don’t think about how the pen feels while I write. I just think about what I am writing about. I don’t pause to give my pens a space to breathe or rest. I pause or rest because I want to, not because I think my pen needs to. When my pen seems to be showing signs of fatigue, just like skipping lines and failure to dispense ink smoothly, I just knock it against a desk and force it against paper, harder, to make that ink leak from the tube and onto the paper. When I noticed how my old empty pen was sitting on my desk, I related to it and finally gave it the respect it earned from being such a good servant.
It was one of the best pens I had. However, no matter how good it was, it will always come to a point when it will run out of life and just lose its purpose. We are all replaceable. We dedicate our inks to inspiring and educating, but our energy and youth and vitality are finite resources and we all grow old and tired and, eventually, we retire. Unlike pens, though, we have the power to choose to give our professions just enough of us so there’s still so much left for other aspects of our lives.
A pen is meant to write, but I am not meant to be only a teacher. I can’t give my everything to this profession. If I attempt to do so, I will be consumed, like a pen, to do what someone else (Education) wants me to do and not really what I want or am compelled by my own initiative to do. I have to set apart some ink to write my own story, the story of my family, the story I am writing with my friends and whoever my next significant other will be. I can’t dedicate my youth, my dreams, my energy solely to teaching especially since it is not as rewarding as the love and care that I experience with my other relationships: with my family, my friends, and myself.
In a profession that involves mandatory relationships with strangers, we are all bound to always be resisted by some kind of friction.
Some of my students would still have a lot of things to say against me and my methods even when all I was trying to do was to be a good teacher and a great mentor to them, promoting both reasonable discipline and fair assessment, paired with my hardwork, brilliance, and industry. Some of my colleagues will have something against me, sometimes, even for things I know nothing about. Only real ones know how not to listen to he-said-she-saids. The rest are simply workers assigned to the same workplace I was assigned to, and I understand that I need to be civil with them even when they sometimes consume me, too.
A boss of mine said, out loud, that I haven’t proven anything yet, especially in the field of robotics. She was expecting that since I am teaching in a school that had “ICT” in its name, I have all the resources I need to implement a robotics program. She said that in the presence of people who didn’t know me, but then, they did know something about me: That I am nothing but talk, according to her.
For a moment there, I almost forgot everything I did since 2018 for the Science program. I almost forgot how much I contributed to our school’s efforts of implementing programs promoting scientific, environmental, and technological literacy. She almost made me forget where all my ink was spent on with just a few words.
After a few tears, I tapped my shoulders and told myself how I can only do so much, given everything else I have been doing.
I told myself that no matter what she says, I know where my ink has left its trail of whatever little thing I can do to help my students. I am glad that despite all these pressures, I have the clarity of mind needed to pull myself back up again.
This existence has an endless number of pages but your life only has enough ink — youth, energy, vitality — for a couple hundred pages. Use your ink wisely.
PS. For those of you who have decided to dedicate your entire barrel of ink to this bureaucracy (not profession, in case you don’t remember the last time you touched a child’s heart and mind), nobody is condemning you for doing that, but, please, don’t ever make someone else feel inadequate just because they know how to properly allocate their inks.
