Reunion with my basic teacher

A few days ago, I pulled a gray hair from my head. This is the third time I’ve done it. This is the third time I’ve pulled out curly white hair, which warns me that time will materialize in my dark hair. The same week also marks the twentieth anniversary of my arrival in Chile. At what moment? If twenty years is a lifetime, I think. We came from Colombia with my mother in 2004. The reasons were multiple: We had a family kidnapped by the ELN, my parents separated, their salaries were not enough and my mother fell in love with a Chilean. Fear, need, and love should never be in the same equation, but they often repeat themselves.

Santiago welcomed us one January, but for me the heat of the Chilean summer was not enough. The first few days I was cold and wore sweatpants and long-sleeved t-shirts. The city smelled of burning tires and quickly the melted butter supermarket became one of the greatest pleasures with which I ended my afternoons.

When you migrate as a child, fleeing something, only with your mother, there is a limit of authority with the adult that quickly fades. The relationship takes a direction that is no longer vertical. In a place where you don’t know anyone, mother stops being mother or you stop being son and become partner. Silent, diligent, attentive, you are responsible for providing solutions and not problems. We rarely saw each other because she worked a lot. So I had responsibilities like knowing how to entertain myself within the confines of this small downtown apartment, making lunch, hopefully not watching too much TV, dusting, and keeping things in their place.

I started school in March and barely understood Chilean Spanish. Fast, sometimes shy, sharp and full of diminutives. Classmates were curious and asked you questions: Where are you from? Are you coming back? Why are you talking like that? Where do you currently live? What does your mother do? What are you eating? And they never finished, they always discovered new doubts. I also remember the figure of the director: Elba. A woman of average height, who on the first day in a pistachio green outfit asked me to introduce myself in front of everyone. She was a professor of natural sciences, so everything I know about protons, electrons, neutrons or the Golgi apparatus, I learned from her. If this knowledge has been distorted along the way, that is my responsibility.

Elba was disciplined, but warm. She was always well dressed, she smelled good, she never let go of her handbag, and under her arm she carried the huge textbook covered in checkered fabric. He took us to the science lab, organized us in the courtyard for events, and during class councils he made sure to create instances in which we all spoke. He had the right level of seriousness that calmed you down: If you walked up to tell her you had a stomach ache, she would put her hand on your forehead to see if you had a fever and send you to the infirmary, but first she made sure to tell you that everything would be fine.

In October of that year, just before going to Fantasyland for Halloween, I got sick. But it was another illness: I had a sadness weighing on my body, a desire to kick, cover my face with my hands and never get out of bed again. The first shock hit me inside the room. I was later diagnosed with adjustment anxiety disorder. Moving to Chile was more difficult than I imagined and in the same week it was decided to close my school year.

Without really understanding what was happening to me, I remember the boredom, fear and loneliness I felt in my room watching the morning show on television: a man talking about the ghosts who lived in the museum Quinta Normal, a woman parading ordinary ladies to tell them how to dress, and my favorite, recipes. And so, I spent over four months in bed.

The only person who spoke my language was her: my director. Elba visited me several times. They were short visits, but they meant everything to me. It was as if a traveler was telling me how the real world continued, a world I couldn’t see, because depression seemed like a parenthesis. As if we were suspended from reality. Social media didn’t exist like it does today, I didn’t have internet or computer at home, so she told me my friends missed me, they sent me greetings, she brought me messages and a list of books she thought might be good to read, in the summer and he was one of the few people who managed to drag me out of my cave and take me to the square to take an ice cream. He even bought a diploma at a bazaar and filled it with his own handwriting: “Fourth place, congratulations on your performance. And he rewarded me. That summer, he also assured me that everything would be fine. Like my padding hurts.

I started classes again in March.

Elba remained my homeroom teacher, at least until eighth grade. Afterwards, he only did chemistry with us, but he was probably the one who got to know us best. When we graduated fourth grade, we became friends on Facebook. There, I discovered that she loved to sing, that she played the guitar and that she loved folklore. We messaged each other several times: for birthdays, for vacations, maybe for the earthquake, and when I started posting what I wrote in newspapers and magazines online, she celebrated them for me.

In a week, it will be twenty years since we met. And we meet. She is no longer a teacher, she is retired. Now I am a teacher and I give journalism lessons to young people between eighteen and twenty years old. Her life now, in a house near the sea on the central coast, is divided between singing lessons, gymnastics, literature and walks on the beach with her husband. I couldn’t stop calling her teacher, let alone knowing her. He opened the door and behind it appeared a huge garden of bougainvillea, hydrangeas and lavender.

The same haircut, the same reddish tone, the same smell of candy, the same gesture. She is 75 years old and it seems like time has stopped for her. Just a few wrinkles appear near his eyes when he smiles. This time we talked about her life and I got to know the woman more than the teacher. She studied at a public high school in La Cisterna, she decided to become a teacher because she really enjoyed teaching her classmates. When she was at the pedagogical school, she was already married and in recent years, when the dictatorship was installed and free education was abolished, it was almost impossible for her to pay. But he did it by juggling.

As a child she wanted to be a nun and at sixteen she fell ill – she doesn’t know the diagnosis – and lost her hearing in one ear. Now he admits to me that he often smiled at me because he didn’t understand my Spanish. We both laugh. And although at one point she wanted to be religious, she no longer believes in God, “it’s hard to stop believing, especially because it’s more comfortable to have something to hold on to.” Anyway, in the evening, I try to say thank you,” he told me.

He calls me by my full name. As if he was making the call. People talk about me at eleven years old as if I were another person, someone who is not in the room. I’ll keep that description to myself. “I was the happiest woman when the children were participating and learning. When you are in front of you, teaching, you see in the children’s eyes when something makes them Click onwhen they understand it, and it’s very satisfying,” he says.

For this visit, he prepared a blueberry kuchen, set up a pot of tea, ground an avocado and, in a pressed bread machine, crushed hallullas with cheese and ham. We sat on the terrace to eat. Her husband and my partner were chatting, while my dog ​​walked in the garden. He told me that the worst thing, and he told me in a low voice, as if he were telling a secret, was the representatives’ meetings.

“There is a very terrible thing that seems to me, is that parents first ask their children how was school, before asking how are you. There is a very harmful focus on success, more than on happiness or well-being,” he diagnoses.

We talked about the Penguin revolution and he apologized to me. I kept thinking, because at first I didn’t understand. This reminded me that one day I had participated in a mobilization looking for food for my part-time classmates and that another very stern teacher had told me that she had been disappointed. by me. “I walked into the staff room, I didn’t say anything and I regretted it, I was very sad, people are free and I expected no less from you. You have been a great support. I beg your pardon” , and a few tears were shed. We are kissing. I told her that I felt better at school than at home, and that if I survived the dizziness of evolving in another culture, it was partly thanks to her. I tell her that I’m trying to be understanding with my students today and that when I lose my patience, I remember her.

“It is difficult to try to contain children’s anger or frustration. If I had to advise new teachers, I would tell them to look for new ways of teaching, not to limit themselves to what only books say. Let the forms be questioned. And teach students to question them too. If they feel frustration, use it as a driving force to be part of the change. said.

Gabriel Mistral already said it: always teach with attitude, gesture and word.

We said goodbye with the sea in the background and the smell of eucalyptus from the Valparaíso region contained us as we said goodbye. “We must not waste time. “Worry about being happy,” he told me before giving us a big hug. I react like an eternal student trying to take note of what he said.