When I was going to undergraduate school I preferred to take a seat in the back of the classroom. You could call it part of my preferred modus operandi (MO). The back of the classroom presented a much safer, more secure place to passively observe and to not actively participate in every verbal scrap and discussion. At 13 rows deep from the teacher’s podium my profile or silhouette blended easily and disappeared with the nondescript back wall.

Fortunately, the teacher could never focus her bespectacled eyes that far back, I didn’t think. All she must have seen of me was a blur. I sat quietly still most of the time, matching the inanimate furniture and the overflowing bookcases with their stacks and piles of unfiled Manila folders. I rarely got called to answer a question, to explain, let alone to defend a position. One thing I could do though without much strain was to observe the teacher, gather raw data and although the results I have attempted to catalogue were not scientific by any stretch of the imagination – well, they made for good tid bits and fodder for school anecdotes.

Being figuratively invisible had its benefits as well, the best of which were made manifest during certain times of the month. Our teacher would go through what seemed to my innocent mind as strange, inexplicable cycles. At first I blamed the lunar influence or some planetary misalignments. Then I graduated to suspecting that perhaps her home life was in a kilter thus impacting her love life and among other things – even her sexuality. Finally and just in time I learned about feminine cycles and the term Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS). What a revelation! That, in and of itself, explained most of what I observed as aberrations.

Her daily routine was patently accented with glorious peaks and deeply lugubrious valleys. Her mood swings were drastic if not dramatic, with bouts of histrionics interspersed for effect. I considered one good thing about her moods, specifically her varied gesticulations and presentations. Her repertoire was always delivered in analog – never in digital. Can you imagine if she was able to switch to digital mode? She would have produced nothing but flat lines. And that would have been the death of the class. Thank heavens for small favors.

When she oscillated on a high excursion things hummed. She would even venture to explain concepts using parallels, analogies and her famous triangulations – to the point where I would begin to think she must have thought we were all morons or just a huge crop of toadstools sitting there in her classroom.

Ah, but later on, I concluded that she just loved to hear herself talk. Might our teacher perhaps be suffering from some form of mild narcissism or self-love? I felt pity for her husband. “The poor sucker,” I’d manage to ruminate. “If I were her husband – heaven forbid – I would definitely have put the kabash to that kind of self-idolatry in a heartbeat! Pronto!” Isn’t daydreaming grand?

But when her energies bottomed out she became hard and almost impossible to deal with. At such times her back-up batteries would automatically come on line making her visibly jumpy, sarcastic and subtly paranoid. This would ultimately mean more tests given on the fly, blitz quizzes, and more assignments for us. I have a term for this kind of reaction toward the class: “Trickle voltage” – she would take it out on the class all in the name of academic excellence.

Our teacher was a sharp and meticulous dresser. She must have had her own personal dress maker, or access to one. She had her own hairdresser for sure judging from her neatly coiffed hair and baby bangs. She donned a new dress every two weeks. These were ensembles, not just dresses, I was corrected by some of the girls in the class who were into haute couture. Teacher had some dresses that sported very daringly low cut neck lines – where the base of her perfectly sculpted breasts were clearly pushed upward with both mounds gathered and shepherded toward the center of her sternum, uplifting and increasing the total visible volume while eradicating any sign of the dreaded sag factor.

She wore matching jewelry – earrings, necklace, bracelets, ankle ornaments and other baubles and beads as they were called for. Not to be outdone were her fingers replete and heavy with gold rings laden with bright stones that looked like miniature ice cubes. Her wedding band and engagement rings must have set her husband back a few thousand dineros.

Teacher always wore high heeled shoes, the color and style matching her clothing ensembles. Her beautifully defined lower leg muscles attest to that. She was tall for a Filipina at 5 foot 7 inches. Complimenting her height was a well proportioned waist to hip ratio, giving her a figure, all 115 pounds of it, that favored hip-hugging skirts. I often wondered, as most of the guys in the class must have, how she kept the tautness around her hips relieved. I got my answer quickly when I spotted the nicely placed skirt slit that to me appeared breath-taking.

There’s a famous saying that goes, “Beauty and brains seldom go together.” In our teacher’s case that rule does not apply and she took advantage of it fully specially whenever she would walk or amble across the room in a slow, deliberate almost dancelike gait. She was statuesque, beautiful, intelligent, lovely and brilliant.

But how was she in the private confines of her home? That I couldn’t tell you. I can only speak from my vantage point in the back of the classroom and I am glad to tell you that my observations though passive bears much truth. That is the way I want to remember our teacher. . . . resplendently dressed and confident in her pedagogic splendour!