I said, I came from a generation that sought out, obeyed and revered teachers in and out of the classroom. It’s just that my “Joe Luna moments” were most dramatic, all right, traumatic (by the way, “all right” is always two words, he’d say), if not cinematic, and thus perfect for retelling and retelling. I would not have become a journalist if not for the bohemian and multiawarded documentary filmmaker Bibsy Carballo, my journalism teacher at St. Theresa’s College (which incidentally produced more writers and journalists than politicians—and that’s no irrelevant point). Bibsy was able to pull us somehow to a world that could be far more exciting than the rallies and pickets of that turbulent time—the world of the printed word and the pursuit of the big story, the scoop. When you try to teach kids today a lesson or two, you get the feeling that they regard learning as merely optional —take it or leave it. Your voice of experience is just that—a voice —which could be drowned out by their iPods .
Taking us under their wings were Bibsy and her colleague, newspaper editor Margot Baterina (whenever Bibsy took her annual round-the-world trip, Margot would sub), and her UP friend, our speech and drama teacher, Sir Lino Brocka. (We didn’t know then that “Sir” would become the Lino Brocka.)
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