A student teachers wish to have

My heart burst with joy upon reading Rina Jimenez-David’s column (Inquirer, 7/27/11) on what a teacher’s fulfillment is all about.

When a teacher like me is retired and begins to count the number of days left in her spiritual journey, indeed it is uplifting to read a testimony of this nature.

I have yet to hear a teacher who has become financially rich, for her wealth is of a different kind, it is wealth that she cherishes as she enters the state of being forgotten.

The gray hair and wrinkles on her face are the products of her unquenchable desire to educate schoolchildren who at the start could not distinguish the letter “A” from letter “Z.”

As the years roll by, the child metamorphoses into someone who blazes new trails to become what he wants to be and to achieve.

Noynoy Aquino, our president, is the Filipino child every teacher would have wished was her student. Who would not be proud of a student who looks back to his teacher of yesteryears and say “salamat po” for “what I am today I owe a part of it to you”?

—SALLY C. DATOC,

retired professor, PNU,

92 Bignay, Quirino District, QC