Teacher's Day: Teacher Tonee

Today's the Teacher's Day and I can't help but recall the teachers I've had. They helped form my individuality and contributed a lot in my growth. I have such high respect for teachers because it's not only a difficult job to do but a noble task to form the minds of the people especially of the youth.

Let me talk about one of my favorite teachers, Sir Tonee.

Sir Tonee is part of the handful of individuals who influenced me during my young life. Primarily, our Math teacher in my third and fourth-year high school classes, he became our class adviser in my fourth year class.

We were a rowdy lot. A lot of our high school teachers found our class a challenge to handle. Not on the academic side of our school endeavors but more on the attitude aspect of it. We had an oversupply of smart-alecks in our class. I think, probably a combination of high intelligence-teen-age hormone overdrive did those.

Anyway, Sir Tonee gave what other teachers could not give. Challenges. While other teachers taught how to memorize, Sir Tonee did otherwise. He challenged us to stop and think, to analyze, to believe in ourselves, to seize the moment and to be happy with ourselves despite our shortcomings.

Math subject was not an easy subject to teach and more so, to learn but he made it easier for us. I didn’t know how he did it, but during those two years that he was my teacher, Math became one of my favorite subjects when I hated it the most prior to his class.

He also became our mentor. We were considered as the worst and the best batch in the school’s history. Worst for having the most numbers of problematic students (proof was the several occasions that police assistance was needed) but the best because a lot of these problematic students are quite smart and multi-talented. While other teachers gave up on our section, he encouraged us to become more active in other school activities like the school choir and dance group, to get into quiz bowl competitions and other activities that made us appreciate ourselves more.

More teachers came and went after I graduated from high school, but Sir Tonee remained one of my favorites. I saw him last December during our school reunion (the first ever that I had attended) and I was really happy to see that he remained the same even if his illness was making his life difficult.

I heard that he had just retired. The students of my school missed out on one very good teacher that could’ve influenced them positively.