Yesterday was the last day of classes and that means the beginning of the Christmas vacation that we teachers and students get every year. And that also means that I would be finally getting some break from the hectic schedule I have had in the past weeks and that’s a very nice and refreshing idea.

Not that I am complaining. I love my work. I reckon educators are among the noblest in occupation. And besides, I had always prided myself for almost always wanting to have work at hand and have my hands full and do abhor to be doing nothing and getting paid for doing nothing, in contrast to NBA stars, to be doing what they do best and still be getting paid very handsomely for it. We all desire to be like that, don’t we all?

But just to sit around and getting paid for being that is just not my style. Although I have a feeling that it is just the style of some if not many people in our midst.

My work motto was “I work best under pressure”. Although I must admit that it’s not an original motto of mine. When I was an editor in chief of a college publication back in my college days, I once had found myself interviewing this lanky and fair bespectacled lad who had applied for a position in the school publication. I asked him that since he was an accounting major as I am, and that I know how hard it is to be one, could he handle more work as a news reporter? He had said so gallantly and so confidently, like an unbending soldier, that indeed he would be able to handle that and that if he could describe himself, he had said that “he works best under pressure”.

I was awed of course by his answer and plus the way he spoke it in flowing English, I was ultimately impressed. So in short he was a shoo-in.

I kept thinking about that motto, or principle, or dogma or whatever that kind of thing is termed as. I even had some feeling of envy on why I didn’t thought about that for myself as it came to me as an original idea. I thought a little that he was a humbug (His name by the way is Mr. Jason Teng and he is a CPA now). What if I put him in a pressure cooker, could he work the finest? Now that’s just kidding on my part.

But I hope he won’t mind if I’d be using it to describe my work attitude. In fact I had already used it once or twice before just to impress somebody.

But hey, with all the pressure from work I had most recently, I’d be careful in declaring that motto. So I guess I have to say, “I work best even without pressure”. Now that sounds better.

Already, a record of some sort had been made with the first “Black White House” ever in history to which President-elect Barack Hussein Obama could just become the first ever political personality of African descent to rule a most powerful nation throughout the history of the world. He’s the first at that.

Or I might be a bit mistaken.

Prominent black rulers have been noted in the past like for example the Black Pharaohs of Egypt who had conquered the Nile after venturing from deep Africa in 728 B.C... Also referred to as the Nubian Kings by many historians, coming from a location that is now present-day Sudan, these African conquerors had made great impact in Dynastic Egypt, reuniting the often tattered kingdoms that had been devastated by petty territorial warlords aiming to control power over the fertile Nile Valley.

Another black personality was Haile Selassie I, the Ethiopian emperor who had gained cultic adulation from not only among black people in Africa but throughout the world, he who had been believed to be a descendant of King Solomon and even referred as a god-incarnate. Emperor Selassie was a defining figure in the entire African history. His followers have been called as Rastafarians.

And And then there was Shaka Zulu, Africa’s most-well known warrior and ruler of the great Zulu tribe in southern Africa. He was well-known for innovating very clever war tactics that even with just a miniscule army of tribal fighters, he was able to conquer and reunite the entire southern hemisphere of Africa, sometime in the early 1800’s.

Or perhaps, we could include Idi Amin, the Ugandan military dictator, often feared and dreaded by his own people, among the lists of well-known African rulers. But he was such a notorious guy that he shouldn’t be noted at all in any list.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn went to his final sleep in accordance with his own desires, to die in summer and to die at home. Perhaps, as great as a writer that he is, it is but fitting that in his very final moments, he had gotten what he wanted --- what he desired.

But Solzhenitsyn did not had such luck all his life, being a sufferer of labor camps during the Stalin years in Russia, where to such torment that he had experienced, he had seized the inspiration for most of his written works, mostly so poignant and so honest, detailing without any hint of hesitance most of the time, the boundaries of human agony that slave laborers had suffered in Russian labor camps, and for that, he had garnered his one moment of glory, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 for his novel “The Cancer Ward”.

Yet, the great modern Russian writer owes much of his fame to the very comprehensive and absolutely masterful “The Gulag Archipelago”, a whole narrative written in three series from 1973 to 1978, and I know this for sure for I had my hands on the said book when I was a young college student more than a decade ago. I was so very awed and overwhelmed by the expanse and candor of Gulag; the efficiency of the Solzhenitsyn’s skill and method had been so profound that while I was reading it (although I haven’t got to finish it), I had felt as if I myself was thrown into those Russian labor camps that he had tried to specify, feeling the coldness of malice that lies in them, the rust of terror that had terrified the prisoners so malevolently, with fear and sorrow penetrating towards the bone, as slime and filth permeates all over like wafting demons in the air, and so pervasive the decaying smell that had surrounded the unfortunate souls caught in that quagmire. Solzhenitsyn was one such writer --- a very rare one --- to be able to let the reader enter the dimension or sphere of reality that the writer is presenting and propositioning, and eventually to be caught without any qualm into the truth that lies behind them, like being caught in an ever encroaching web of poignancy.

Definitely, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is one of my most favorite writers of all time, along with other great Russian writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Alexander Tolstoy.

Merry Christmas to one and all, and Happy New Year too. If your year were good this year, there’d be no reason why it won’t be so much better next year. It would be, I am sure.

This greeting goes to all my blogger friends and to all my blog readers out there. Holiday greetings to one and all.

This would also serve as some sort of apology as to why I have not been blogging as frequent as I should be. I’ve been so busy with my new vocation as a University lecturer. While I thought at first---since I would be just a new entry into the teaching staff---that I wouldn’t be immersed into more demanding tasks and work schedule, I was a bit mistaken. Teaching is not like many other occupation where the initial phases would be more on orientation processes, taking on light tasks and schedules, saying hi’s and hello’s to everyone in the office. In many ways, the initial phases of teaching is one of the most critical point in the overall approach to the job, sizing up the classes in terms of number and in terms of the amount of preparation needed, where too much becomes ultimately unviable (as learning would not be fulfilled to the hilt) and too little of it would mean lackluster instruction. It’s like walking on a tightrope I felt sometimes there.

It was of note how “academic freedom” meant that a teacher virtually has total control of what he or she has to feed the students, in relation to the title and scope of the subject course, and by this, I had to scramble for materials, doing intensive and extensive research in such a short window of time and opportunity. It was of much luck that despite I am just a newbie in this profession; I was able to collate and compile much of the needed materials and information that I needed to fulfill my lecturing tasks.

It was I think of good opportune that my short but very memorable stint as guest lecturer in the past, particularly in the Alternative Class program of my other alma mater, Ateneo de Zamboanga, had somehow helped me in giving important prior perspective on the business of teaching, providing me insights and helpful experience for such. That at times, I felt like I have just slid from one phase to another, that I am in my own water and have always been there, and have just gone for awhile and then returned in the end.

And in the short period that I have been in this job, I am been exalted that it becomes somehow a wonderful experience for me to become part of a student’s education and growth, and ultimately in his or her future success. It is a wonderful experience altogether. I have the most gratitude to my colleagues in the workplace for being so welcoming to my presence and have provided me great support in the time that I am just learning the main tasks of teaching like an infant, still walking unsteadily, still striving and struggling somehow. I thank our dean Prof. Eddie Ladja for this, King Sali, Sir Perry, Sir Saymaran, Sir Kams, Sir Al, Dams, Choy, Ka Dayyang, Ustadz Bulkhari and Ustadz Tanjilul for treating me with all kindness and friendship that there could be had.

Merry Christmas again to one and all. I’d be back to regular blogging once this “adjustment” period is done and over with. More power to you all.