Jessica Zafra, humorist, travel and short-story writer, does not have to go too far from home to identify her favorite classroom teacher—it’s her own mother. Now you will understand how Jessica, who dreams of “world domination,” had this idea planted in her mind by a teacher-mother who would ask for a parent-teacher conference “if my grades did not go up from the previous quarter’s,” and if they’d gone down “World War III would have broken out.” Joy Buensalido’s ideal teacher is also her mother, a public-school principal who “overprotected” her but also “overmotivated” her to become what she is today, one of the country’s most successful PR practitioners. Girlie Gruet, corporate communications and marketing consultant, writes about her own aunt, a teacher at a public school in Quezon City, who, going beyond the call of duty, did home visits to her troubled, erring and straying students. No teacher does that now, laments Girlie. The mentoring influence of elders at home is none more marked than in the poet and visual artist Elizabeth Lolarga’s nostalgic remembrance of her Lola Purang in Baguio. Grace Shangkuan Koo, associate professor of educational psychology at the University of the Philippines, also keeps her memories close to home, especially those of her Chinese schoolteacher in Chinese classics, who taught her the importance of “preparation and thought,” and her other teachers in the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong. Prima ballerina Lisa Macuja-Elizalde talks about her Russian ballet teacher Tatiana Alexandrovna Udalenkova, who pounded into her the implications of trudno and bolno . Most people don’t know that food critic and cookbook author Michaela Fenix had a theater background shaped by her mentors, the legendary Maricris Tabora and Conrad Parham. Barbara “Twee” Gonzalez, who I remember saying to me, when she was a columnist in a
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