magazine I was associate editor of, that she gashed her heart and bled with every column she wrote. She is not bleeding here; she writes affectionately about a “lumbering” Maryknoll nun who, among her other valuable admonitions, taught the young Twee how to comb her hair, perhaps a metaphor for how she had neatly orchestrated her impressive life and career. George Sison, the astrologer and reincarnation reader, writes about a formidable teacher whom they called Mrs. Moses, at the first UP high school on Padre Faura, Manila, the essential liberal teacher that UP students idolize. George one evening in his Temple “regressed” me and saw that I was the favorite concubine of a Chinese emperor who ran away with a general in the emperor’s army. Fascinating. Parallels to my present-day suburbia lower-middle-class life? Secret. Then there are the “terror teachers.” TV news sensation Jessica Soho talks about the late media lion Louie Beltran, her journal- ism teacher in UP, who thought nothing of embarrassing, even humiliating, his students when he found their “ledes” ludicrous or their way of dressing execrable. Jessica plotted “revenge” when she became producer of Beltran’s TV show, but the lion overwhelmed Jessica, who though the most intrepid of reporters and news producers, remains, well, huggable. Dr. Reynaldo Vea remembers Dean Oscar Baguio, his thermodynamics professor, who made his students sign a contract stipulating that 1) if they wanted out of his class, they had only the first day of class to do so; and 2) once he opened his mouth to start the day’s lesson, no one could enter his classroom. “Terror,” writes Dr. Vea, president of Mapua, “is often in the eyes of those seeking the path of lesser resistance.” We should all remember that. As memorable are the literature teachers drawn by Antonio F. Moreno, SJ, president of the Ateneo de Zamboanga University; and Ruth Minerva Cruz, a hard-nosed businesswoman from
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