Estoker by Claudio V. Tabotabo, MA (February, 2006)

Spending long years in the academe provides me opportunities to meet people. Unfortunately, only a few I could bring to my ideals who have dedication to their academic life. I must be branded arrogant to say, but in this period of extreme materialism, only a few have the faculties of understanding. People are busy acquiring things that only fulfill the practicalities of life while a vast area for the cultivation of the personality is overlooked.

So great was my rejoicing when I found myself in a department with an atmosphere of academic development. There is a chance to read books, to write and to converse with the liberals. Liberals to clarify in this paper refers to the professors of arts and the humanities.

I said academic development because this is the department populated with academically inclined few. Among these few I wish to highlight is the head of the department who is notably an armchair traveler. He is always seen with a book on hand.

While working as office staff of the Philippine Senate, he worked hardly for his graduate studies which he eventually finished in 2001, at MLQU in the degree of MA PSYCHOLOGY. Finishing a graduate study is not the point to be discussed about. He worked in an office that is the object of everybody's illusion. Everyone dreamed to work in the senate while he himself was thinking to vacate it. His desire to be in the academe was burning and it went as he designed, leaving the Philippine Senate and entering in the academic institution.

It was at TIP Manila where his dream began to realize. He became administrator after few months of plain classroom professor. Now he himself designs syllabi, distributes teaching loads to teachers at the same time does his beloved job, to teach. So indeed he has the work of a pure academician.

But everything did not end there. His exposure to the academe made his graduate degree a small thing for him. He was still hungry for a higher degree that finally put him in a post graduate studies. He is now in the finishing part of it. Sometime this year a young Doctor of Public Administration shall be named at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.

The TIP like other schools of Manila looks at the talent and enthusiasm of young blood so that today who runs the schools are young professionals. Old school masters cannot ignore the fact that the young shall outdo them. "The old shall give way to the young so that there shall be promotions." It's what the old navy said to the young Edmund Dantes in the Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas.

It is the fashion of the time. But part of the fashion is the lament of the old masters on the weaknesses of the young to earthly demands. The old talk about wisdom, the young talk about fortunes. The situation of the schools of Manila exemplifies this claim.

However, the old are also aware that among this crop of technologically minded school administrators exists unnoticed a schoolmaster who can see beyond the physical dimension of a thing.

When everyone was restless for promotion, he is calm peering down at his newly acquired book, a novel. When everybody is copying, he is writing his own article for the department's paper. When everybody is prodding anger at his subordinates, he is laughing with his friends. It is the meaning of what they called serenity, the capacity to do things when everyone surrenders from doing.

There was a series of lay off of faculty members on the ground that teachers are not qualified to teach after teaching more than 10 years. Mr. Estoque devised a system that saved his faculty members. He promised the school that all the faculty members who have not finished a graduate degree and such due to end the contract, shall enroll in their respective graduate studies.

The teaching load was not enough to everyone. The department chair distributed it equally to one another, the situation that sometimes put him in danger. But he was there brave enough like the Spanish fighter stoking the advancing bull that gives him the right to be called stoker