Salute, from Me to You

Let’s face it, we’re all heroes.

Everyone in this world will always have the chance to become an unsung hero. No matter how small or big, everything you contribute to others will always leave you one step better hero than others. In fact, everyone is unsung heroes if you would just open your eyes and see how much sacrifice people have made for others, like for once, a teacher.

Teaching is an honorable job, you take it or leave it that way. There’s no really much of an argument for that. The moment they send in an application to be a teacher, that’s when they deserve every honor they can possibly get.

You see, there’s this kind of teacher who loves to hang out with students but never teach. There’s also another kind of teacher who the students love, but never really cared much about the students very much. Oh, and of course there will always be that one teacher you hate no matter for what reason.

I know a teacher, let’s say the teacher is a she.

This teacher I know seems to get the hate for all the wrong reason. “She teaches too fast,” or “She always gives homework,” or “She gives too many exercise.”

Now, I wouldn’t be writing this blogpost if I hated her. In fact, I admire her as a whole person. You see, there’s no many teacher out there who’s passionate about their students. You can go ahead and see how many teachers out there who actually give damn about their students’ future.

So I sat down one day in her class as I wrote down my notes exactly in the two minutes she gave us to copy down her slide. The class was noisy, students were chatting everywhere, and only a handful of them actually cared for the teacher’s feelings.

She told us to be quiet plenty times already, and being the teenager that we are, it was in our nature to do exactly what she told us not to do. It was a wonder why she waited so long to finally lose her cool. She must have been so aware of the students’ annoyance that she felt like she needed to speak up.

These are the words that I remembered to write down as fast and subtle as I could as she let out everything at once (I would have written it all, but I couldn’t risk being found out):

“Be quiet! It’s up to you to not like me. But teaching is my passion, and not only it is my profession, you are also my responsibility here! This is all for your own good, and I understand that I can’t force you to like me. So please, let me do my job professionally. For those of you that really can’t bother, please at least be silent for your friend’s sake. I don’t want to waste my time here.”

She said it with more passion than I’m sure I’ve written above, but I managed to get the point.

The class was stunned for a while, and most of the students chose to shut their mouth for the rest of the class. The little speech she gave only spread more fire in the ignorance’s hearts, but it was stuck in my head. That was honestly the first time I ever heard a teacher saying it was okay to not like them. She said it, if she really needed to be disliked by her students, it was fine as long as she could keep her responsibility, and to be honest, that’s amazing to me.

If you ask me, I don’t think she deserves the eye roll and the whine. If anybody deserved a trophy, she’s the one. Lots of teachers must have given a speech or two in classes when they get too noisy, and they’ll always say the same thing: “You’re in high school now, it’s time for you to grow up.”

It’ll be our fault, case closed.

But with her, it’s a bit different. To her, it’s about, “Let me teach, this is what I want to do. I know there are kinds of teachers who come in late and barely give a damn, and I can be that teacher. Difference is, I don’t want to be that kind of teacher. Teaching is my dream.”

There are many kinds of unsung heroes out there, and if you ask me to name one, it’ll be her and every other teacher who teaches because they love it with their whole heart. It’ll be them whose passion is to see our success. It’ll be them whose dream is to see us reach ours.

So here’s to you.

Salute, from me to you.