Having a terror teacher builds character. It trains you not to be intimidated by autocratic people.
In college Louie Beltran was the well-known terror. All journal- ism majors had to take his courses, Journalism 101 and 102. He practiced the technique of golpe de gulat . On the first day of class, when everyone was so well-behaved, he said, “What gives you the right to be here? Who told you that you shouldn’t be in social dancing?” We were so shocked, we didn’t think we’d be treated like that in UP. I had a classmate who got yelled at. “Which high school did you graduate from?” My main worry was that he would ask me the same question. Fortunately, I came from a private school in La Union, because if I had to say “Mababang Paaralan ng…” I knew he would make fun of me even more.
Having a terror teacher builds character. It trains you not to be intimidated by autocratic people.
In class we had to learn the different kinds of lede. The staccato lede, bullet lede, and so on. He’d yell, “Timbungco! To the board!” He never addressed you by your first name, only by your last. So the student would write his lede on the blackboard—the first five or six sentences of his story in chalk on that long, long board. Beltran would go, “Timbungco! What is that!”
“Sir, it’s a bullet lede.”
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