opinion

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Jackson, Blues power

The evolution of a dream:
on becoming a teacher
by Silvio Sirias

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

Manuel Puig

As an adolescent, living in Nicaragua, I went through a phase that lasted a couple of years in which I wanted, with all of my heart, to become a Catholic priest. I’m sure that has a lot to do with why priests figure rather prominently in my fiction.

Back then the rites and rituals of the Catholic Church mesmerized me --- and I spent hours fantasizing what I would look like in a cassock, and my head was filled with visions of me celebrating mass in a church bulging with reverential parishioners. During those heady days, I could not imagine a more noble cause than devoting my life to helping the faithful along the path to spiritual wholeness.

But my dreams of becoming a priest evaporated the moment girls became fascinating and radiant beings.

Years later, as a college undergraduate, I saw myself as a social activist, helping to save the world. Thus, as anyone can see, becoming a teacher was the furthest thing from my mind. (I do admit, though, that as a junior in college I started to indulge myself with the fantasy of becoming a college professor; but at the time that dream seemed impossible.)

It literally took an act of war to get me into teaching. This happened in 1978, when I returned to Nicaragua after completing my undergraduate degree. In September of that year, after a devastating and bloody two-week uprising against Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s regime, several American teachers at the American-Nicaraguan School --- who had come to Nicaragua expressly to teach at that institution --- packed up their belongings and fled the country. In dire need, the high school principal offered me a position as a long-term substitute and, being jobless at the time, I accepted.

I discovered at once that I enjoyed being in front of a classroom. Helping young people to learn was as rewarding as I imagined celebrating mass would be; and although I lacked formal training as a teacher, I found out that I had a knack for the trade.

Still, in spite of that gratifying initial experience, it would take quite some time for me to find my true niche as a teacher. I returned to the States in July of 1979, twelve days before the Sandinistas ousted Somoza, with the dream of someday attending graduate school. In California I bounced around for a while, teaching English as a Second Language and then sixth grade, before I decided to abandon the public school system to go back to college to get a master’s in Spanish.

From the first meeting of the first college class I taught as a graduate assistant I knew I had found a haven. And that’s when my formal training in education began in earnest as I took course after course in applied linguistics to learn how to best teach students the intricacies of language.

And now, many years later, and living in Panama, I’ve come full circle --- I’m back in high school classroom, admittedly a little out of my comfort zone and sometimes feeling as if I’m starting all over again.

But that’s what I love about being a teacher --- as I help others learn, I’m learning myself, something new each day.

And today, in retrospect, I realize that my adolescent desire to become a priest was not too far off the mark. I now understand that because the teachers who most inspired me were priests, I leaped to the assumption that I wanted to join their brotherhood. And in a way, I did --- like them, although I didn’t become a man of the cloth, I ended up becoming a teacher.

Silvio Sirias lives, writes, and teaches in Panama. For more information visit his website at http://www.silviosirias.com

Also in this section:

Bernal, Panama and China
Falun Gong, Should the world boycott the Beijing Olympics?
Leis, The privatization of air
Carpio, Disaster reduction: made in Japan
James, Disaster relief in the Caribbean Basin
Pilgrim, Don't roll the dice on decent values and their opposite
Sánchez, Venezuela turns its attention from MERCOSUR to the Andean nations
Reporters Without Borders, Cuba arrests six journalists in 24 hours

Jackson, Blues power

Sirias, Becoming a teacher