Teacher's day

this one goes out to all the so-called teachers I know.
and to all the real teachers who taught me something and will forever be a part of my life.

The first life lesson I remember is not a teacher, but from my kindergarten's principal, she taught me that the correct way to pass a knife is by putting it on the table and letting the other person take it, NOT by pointing the blade at them. What did she expect when sending a FOUR year old to get a knife to cut a teacher's birthday cake?
So, Barbarita, thanks for scaring the crap out of me enough to make me remember this for the rest of my life.

At the age of 4, almost 5 I started to read, not because I was a prodigy, but because I had my sister (age 6) teach me how to read and write. Yes, it is possible, she got back from school and taught me everything she had learned that day at school. She used to hit me whenever I didn't read the sentence in its entirety and made me write lines in the back of my mother's paintings.
So, Perla, thank you for putting me ahead of my peers and making my first grade teacher hate me for the complete year.

Next in line is my fourth grade teacher, when I was in her class I used to get so nervous that I bit my nails everytime we had a quiz, she told me that if I kept bitting my nails, my fingers would look like ET's fingers.
So, thank you teacher Isabel for making me have nightmares where I could see ET's body with my head on it. It was enough to make me stop.

Then when I was in Junior High School I had a teacher who was a math genius, he was terrible at teaching, but a genius. He was so nerdy and used to wear coke bottle bottom glasses and he would give his classes writing problems and facing the board ALL the time. I've hated math forever, but I will always admire his passion for it. I had to go back to school a week after graduation to pick up a diploma and I met him walking down the hall, he asked me how my sister (who was graduating high school at the time) was doing, I told him she was applying to go to engineering school, he got really happy and said he didn't expect any less from both of us, he said he had the brains to go to engineering, do a masters degree, or even become doctors I we wanted to.
So thank you teacher Mario for making me feel bad because at the time I was planning to do a major in English or languages and he obviously didn't feel that was good enough.

I always like to say I learned English by watching action movies along with my dad, we bonded over stunts and explosions, he always loved the plot and the suspense, I was paying more attention to the words and pronuntiation, okok, and sometimes also to shirtless guys on the screen.
So, thank you Bruce Willis for teaching me fluency and how to fucking swear.


From my college years, I started studying and finally found my home. I learned from great translators who were sometimes working two jobs at the time. When we asked them if it was easy to get a job as a translator these days they kept saying that if we looked hard enough we could get any job that we wanted.
Thank you teacher Maria Eugenia, Adriana and Gaby for making me realize I'd have to end up teaching at some point in my life with career I had choosen (but at the same time making me realize it wouldn't be so bad :D )


Of course there are many many more people who have inspired me at least once in my life, people who were my teachers and even people I have worked along with. And not only them but also students who have taught me that being in front of a classroom isn't as terrible as I once thought it would be.


Cheers
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