Best Teacher I Ever Had
During my last year in high school, this was in 1979, I lived in a town that had a population of about 15,000, it is located in one of the larger valleys in the country and it is close to the Caribbean coast. Now the only way to get to town was via a very poor and dangerous dirt road, very narrow, and it wound up and down mountains, it was even called “la culebra” (the snake), there was a banana company railroad, but this mode was incredibly slow it took about 12 hours for a 60 mile journey and of course you could fly, we had a bi weekly service.
Well the high school I was in was out of a music teacher and nobody wanted to go there but somehow the school’s principal was able to attract a guy from the south of the country to come, he also had to give him the phys ed class because that way the pay was much better. He also was married to a teacher and the principal was able to get her a job in the banana company’s headquarter which had a vocational school, also paid for his house. Now I’m talking that this guy was receiving somewhere around $800.00 a month, just think the minimum wage was about $50.00 a month back then. And on top of that he got a job with a music group, he played the trumpet.
Well it turns out this guy was half crazy, on his first day of class in every classroom he started out by drawing a diagram on the wall and stating this is a Fermata, so of course he was immediately nicknamed Fermata.
This is what he called a Fermata, I had never checked this out before, he was actually partly right.
We, of course did not receive music classes, but we did have phys ed, and he would just show up for that hour and talk, well at the end of the first exams he gave everyone at school a note of 100. So we just thought this guy is great no problem with him. But at the end of the second one he gave everyone a note of 20, which evened us out because the passing note was 60.
I remember one time he got the guys in primer curso (that would be seventh grade, which is the new guys) to play hide and seek, now at this time behind the school there was just the stadium and beyond that it was just bush, so he got the 5 biggest guys and told them “Ok, I want you to go out there and hide, but hide real well because if we find you, you get a big fat 0, if we don’t find you, you get a 100. So the guys went out and went into the bush and hid as well as they could, Fermata in the mean time, this was around 1:00 pm, told the other guys OK, let’s go home.
One of the kids asked him what about the guys who are hiding? And he said “Fuck them, they can find their own way home”. So when it was around 7:00 pm the guys who were hiding realized nobody was looking for them and they did go home. That showed them never to believe in a teacher who used guayaberas, boots used long hair and had a goatee. I believe it was a life lesson.
He was also a vegetarian, and one time for some reason we had to go to his house, now he was a miserable SOB, he was the one who took both his wives and his checks and put the money in the bank, she was only given transportation money, well we were there when she came out and told him (I guess to embarrass him, maybe make him change) “Manfredo, I havent eaten all day, I'm hungry and there's nothing to eat in this house”.
To which he answered: "But honey, you're crazy, that mango tree is full of mangoes, you don’t eat because you don't want to.”
But he was OK, at the end of the year not a single pupil at that school failed either in music or in phys ed, and we never even ran a single yard.