Today, Friday, being a holiday, celebrating the end of Ramadan, I am still a week off from the end of my contract at NTU - however, I had already yesterday surrendered my staff accreditations and their accompanying cards, and am currently unemployed. This situation, however, should be rectified by next Tuesday, whereupon another update will be given.
It was an interesting day, updating supervisors current and past, clearing my space once again, and shuffling off to parts closer to home than the far-flung West of the country. The somewhat extended weekend finds me mildly melancholy, and somewhat anxious.
Of the previous checklist, I will admit to doing the second badly, to which I will likely post an edited version here or on LinkedIn, and will follow up with some more posts on things I had been proselytizing on in the previous decade or so - when these will actually be done, I am uncertain. I had done a bit of the other three, but the last point is what tides me over from here to there, which is still in the next week.
Still many details to be worked out, but, luckily, some time is on my side. To use it wisely (more focussed than the last two months have gone, at least) is the best course going forward, for another month or so.
17 July 2015
05 July 2015
Isabelita O'Dell
Twenty-four years (and some amount of days) ago, I started my freshman year in Philippine Science, in the Diliman campus. Ma'am O'Dell was my Math I teacher, and would be my Math II (Geometry) teacher the following year. I remember that the impression that my classmates had early on was that she was a strict teacher (in fact, a friend had left the school for failing Math II), and even with her short stature (I think I was coming up to eye-level with her at that point), she could hold a stern gaze. Her heavily-accented English was carefully enunciated, but we would still get tripped up on some words (I remember we had a hard time with "cotton"), and I had, by the middle of that year, gotten the hang of hazarding an imitation of her voice, usually when demonstrating how she called my classmates by name, and me by "you" - to be fair, that was definitely no longer the case in sophomore year.
In both years, on days I had her class, it would be the last class of the day. I remember that in freshman year, we originally had three-hour breaks on Thursday and Friday, but she had allowed us to take the classes earlier so that the externs could get home sooner. I remember very fondly a day we had the proof of a single theorem in Geom class that ended up with one particularly bored individual throwing wads of paper all almost everyone else - and we had paid that person back in spades, despite the fact that Ma'am O'Dell had served as an inadvertent shield. In the aftermath, I personally felt ashamed to approach her, but classmates who did said that she had shrugged it all off and laughed.
Ma'am O'Dell had a keen, wry sense of humor, which we students occasionally got to see, and she had a warmth just below the professional surface. I had only, with the news of her passing, come to realize that her bearing and her attitude have been what I have been practicing - been trying to emulate - since I started teaching, at Pisay, and have served me well for all my teaching stops since. (This is counterpointed by the excited, almost manic, air I share with another sophomore year Math teacher of mine, Doc Banjo Bautista.)
The last time I remember seeing her was a year after I started teaching at Pisay. I knew that she had retired the year I came in, so we never had professionally overlapped there. She still had the humor and warmth I remembered from nearly a decade before - only that her grayish hair had already turned mostly white. I'm sure we were both smiling.
Of my mentors who have passed on: Sir Alex Alix, only years after I left for UP, with my maturity insufficient to sustain me at Pisay; Doc Jose Marasigan, who I was with during my grad assistant time at Ateneo, just a few years ago; and, Ma'am O'Dell; remembering her takes me back the farthest, to my most hopeful, to my most exuberant, exultant years, when possibility was still waiting for opportunity. I heard that she may have been characterized in the Aureas Solito film, but I have not watched it yet - if that is true, I will likely want to find a copy soon, again.
It is hard to say how I feel about her passing, when it boils down to it. That she is no longer in the world, for me to reconnect with at a future time, I cannot deny - there is sadness, but my memories of her feel like mint, like a breath of fresh air from a time past. I don't want to take a deep breath, to hold it in, but I know that I will feel it again when I do remember her, time and again.
EDIT: Adding a video from FB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTtgqghLNaQ
In both years, on days I had her class, it would be the last class of the day. I remember that in freshman year, we originally had three-hour breaks on Thursday and Friday, but she had allowed us to take the classes earlier so that the externs could get home sooner. I remember very fondly a day we had the proof of a single theorem in Geom class that ended up with one particularly bored individual throwing wads of paper all almost everyone else - and we had paid that person back in spades, despite the fact that Ma'am O'Dell had served as an inadvertent shield. In the aftermath, I personally felt ashamed to approach her, but classmates who did said that she had shrugged it all off and laughed.
Ma'am O'Dell had a keen, wry sense of humor, which we students occasionally got to see, and she had a warmth just below the professional surface. I had only, with the news of her passing, come to realize that her bearing and her attitude have been what I have been practicing - been trying to emulate - since I started teaching, at Pisay, and have served me well for all my teaching stops since. (This is counterpointed by the excited, almost manic, air I share with another sophomore year Math teacher of mine, Doc Banjo Bautista.)
The last time I remember seeing her was a year after I started teaching at Pisay. I knew that she had retired the year I came in, so we never had professionally overlapped there. She still had the humor and warmth I remembered from nearly a decade before - only that her grayish hair had already turned mostly white. I'm sure we were both smiling.
Of my mentors who have passed on: Sir Alex Alix, only years after I left for UP, with my maturity insufficient to sustain me at Pisay; Doc Jose Marasigan, who I was with during my grad assistant time at Ateneo, just a few years ago; and, Ma'am O'Dell; remembering her takes me back the farthest, to my most hopeful, to my most exuberant, exultant years, when possibility was still waiting for opportunity. I heard that she may have been characterized in the Aureas Solito film, but I have not watched it yet - if that is true, I will likely want to find a copy soon, again.
It is hard to say how I feel about her passing, when it boils down to it. That she is no longer in the world, for me to reconnect with at a future time, I cannot deny - there is sadness, but my memories of her feel like mint, like a breath of fresh air from a time past. I don't want to take a deep breath, to hold it in, but I know that I will feel it again when I do remember her, time and again.
EDIT: Adding a video from FB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTtgqghLNaQ
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