Skip to main content

Hello, professor!

Image
By
"Hello, professor." I say it as soon as someone crosses the threshold. I say it without thinking, like breathing. But behind these words, there is time, a journey, a memory.

It was at the Hospital do Servidor Público de São Paulo that I first learnt to truly see teachers. They would arrive carrying invisible notebooks — not in their hands, but in their bodies. Their necks bent from years of looking down at lesson plans, their shoulders heavy with the weight of knowledge given away day after day. They would sit before me, their minds full of wisdom, their spines full of pain. And I would listen. And I would learn.

Perhaps that is why I never stopped saying "professor." It does not matter who you are or what you do. Life itself is a classroom, and every person, knowingly or not, is a master of something. The body teaches through its aches, silence teaches through its absence, even pain imparts lessons — whether we ask for them or not.

And so, the word stayed with me. Not as a mere title, but as recognition. A way of saying, I see you. A way of acknowledging that there is something in you, something unique, that deserves to be heard. Teachers — those who bear the title — are rarely called so enough. So I call them. And I call everyone.

When you hear me say "Hello, professor," understand: it is not just a greeting. It is a gesture towards all you have learnt and all you still have to teach. Because here, in this moment of consultation, it is not I who heal. It is we who learn.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accounting for the Invisible

By
It is once more that time of year — the season for gathering documents, for preparing the annual offering to the revenue gods. Tedious, draining, bureaucratic. Yes, all of that. But it is also a curious interval of observation, a quiet adjustment of memory’s lens. After all, the past year — or at least its more tangible husk — lies partially inscribed in these papers. I say partially, for what is captured on the page is a witness of uneven fidelity. Absent are the details, the reasons, the delicate chain of responsibility. The numbers are all there: the income, the transactions, the movement of capital. But backstage remains hidden — the weight of effort, the hush of a conscience at peace. What is left is a pale suggestion of something more vital — this elusive current we call money. Energy transmuted, but only faintly traceable. A flicker of something once vivid, now flattened by ink and deadlines. And so I sift through the papers. Not merely to comply, but to remember. To...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Strength Truly Means: A Letter to Men

By
There exists, hidden in the quiet undercurrents of our culture, a grand illusion: that manhood is synonymous with silence, that strength demands the concealment of pain, and that the measure of a man is his ability to endure without faltering. Such ideas pass through generations like whispered codes, accepted without question, repeated without reflection. And yet, when held to the light of reason, they wither like old parchment, for they are not truths, but relics of fear. It must be said — and said without apology — that you are allowed to speak of what has wounded you. To give voice to pain is not to surrender to it, but to name it, to limit its dominion. Silence may seem noble in the moment, but over time it hardens into a cage. Words, carefully chosen and honestly spoken, are the first instruments of freedom. You are allowed to weep — not as an act of collapse, but as a testament to your humanity. Tears are not the language of the weak; they are the body's recogniti...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Malicious Rejection of Education

By
There are moments — quiet, unbidden — when one pauses and wonders: how did we come to this? After centuries of inquiry, of minds that charted the unseen and hands that steadied the fevered, we now find ourselves in a peculiar and disquieting place. A place where truth is not refuted for want of evidence, but rejected for daring to inconvenience belief. The antivaxx movement is a malicious rejection of education — not a lapse in understanding, but a deliberate estrangement from reason. It perplexes, not for its novelty, but for its brazenness. This is not the soft silence of the uninformed; it is the clamour of the wilfully blind, adorned in the rhetoric of liberty and cloaked in a defiant performance of scepticism. Vaccines — the elegant product of scientific rigour and logistical triumph — are cast aside in favour of speculation, rumour, and the seductive pull of conspiratorial thinking. To refuse a vaccine is not an emblem of critical thought. It is, more often, a retreat...
Post a Comment
Read more