«Educate children and it will not be necessary to punish men».
Pythagoras
We all have teachers who leave their mark on us. They are like true loves and friends: with luck, three or four throughout a lifetime. In my case, despite having studied in multiple centers (four schools, two universities and two institutes) and various autonomous communities (Extremadura, Galicia, Catalonia, the Canary Islands, Castilla y León; what happened in Madrid, whether in kindergarten or at the CSIC, doesn't count), having been in quite a few more classes and having a pedagogical curriculum considerably larger than average, the proportion does not vary. Like the rest of the students, I can count on the fingers of one hand the teachers who really influenced me. Because it is not easy to leave a mark, and even less so nowadays, when the teaching profession —perhaps the noblest that exists— is so devalued that respect has been lost.
From EGB I could cite several names, but if I have to choose one, I'll stick with Kimet. He taught me the value of archeology and medicinal plants, and not precisely inside a classroom, sitting at a desk, but outdoors, kicking the reddish fields of the Tierra de Barros region, because he was our extracurricular activities teacher. Thanks to his wisdom I can distinguish a Terra sigillata at a glance or heal a wound with the leaf of plantain. He told me for the first time about Socrates and hemlock and how goats could eat the flowers of the plant that poisoned the great Athenian philosopher. I can never thank him enough for all his teachings. He was the undisputed protagonist of some of my best childhood memories and nothing I learned academically can compare to finding Roman ceramics or coins, a Neolithic axe, the mouthpiece of a Pan flute or collecting countless medicinal plants, which we dried and sold in a memorable market as the culmination of the cycle.
I didn't start high school on the right foot. From an exemplary student I became an enfant terrible. I guess after so many changes, the last thing I needed was to move again (it wouldn't be the last), moving away from my environment and my friends to start over, again, from scratch. So I rebelled. And imagine what a rebellious teenager can do without the supervision of his parents. I started missing class. At first sporadically, but I almost skipped the last quarter. It is also true that I was bored stiff, ESO in that sense was an ordeal. At that time I was only interested in role-playing games, chess at times and reading. Language and mathematics classes were the last ones I abandoned. But in the end, I ended up going to the institute to sell packets and cartons of tobacco in the shade of the poplar where the bus stopped or in the nearby park. I became a drug dealer (or majalulo, rather, given my youth). It's not something I'm proud of, but it was a clear symptom of how lost I was. Even, when the business was uncovered, they even took me to the center's psychologist. It was useless. More than through his demerit, I was incorrigible at that time. One good day, tired of him showing me blotches on sheets (years later I would find out that I was subjected to the Rorschach test), I blurted out that I only went to his sessions because afterwards I could order the squid sandwich in the cafeteria, one of the richest, along with Ginory's, that I have ever tasted.
I failed 3rd of ESO, but, after being sent to move from the Peninsula, already installed in Tenerife (my first island), in the Los Cristianos institute, the last promotion of BUP and COU, I did quite well. And during the final year, I met Juando, another of the Philosophy teachers, who left his mark on me. With his grunge look and his ponytail, he was a different teacher from the rest, who would talk to you about the myth of the cave or lend you a couple of Pearl Jam records. And while most of the class struggled to take notes, trying to understand what each philosopher was saying, I limited myself to listening, to drinking in his words like someone sipping a long-awaited nectar. Because he was someone who made me doubt, who forced me to think and reflect and not to repeat a series of exercises like an automaton or a sheep in the face of an exam, which is what we did, for example, in the other subjects, preparing ourselves for the selectivity, like racehorses sprinting to get the maximum score and that the damn cut-off mark did not guillotine our university aspirations. What stupidity. And all because of the competitiveness that they instill in us since we entered the educational system. As if the academic end justified the repetitive methodology, when the result can be the same. Because I got the best grades in Philosophy and Physics (a 10 and a 9.5) from my center in the selectivity tests, but the didactic approach to obtain them was quite different: in one I enjoyed it like a dwarf and the other was a soporific hell.
Already in university, it would be unfair not to remember Margarita Santana and Inmaculada Perdomo, my wonderful professors of History of Science (Ancient and Medieval and of the Scientific Revolution), but if anyone takes the Schrödinger's cat to the water, it is undoubtedly Jesús Sánchez. Last Thursday, I found out that he had passed away, in 2019, through Salva and Samuel, professors in Las Maretas and Costa Teguise, in whose academic achievements he had a part, as a member of the thesis tribunal and thesis director, respectively, the last ones he supervised. When they told me the news, a deep sadness invaded me. Because Jesús Sánchez was my professor of Philosophy of Science in the third year of my degree and left an indelible mark. His classes were masterful. No photocopies, books, the blackboard or the projector. That man would sit down and was able to keep us in suspense for two hours, simply talking, with his deep voice and his encyclopedic knowledge. A good part of that year I spent working at night, in a 24-hour store, and even when I finished my shift at four or five in the morning and some of his classes were at eight in the morning, I tried not to miss any. I went without sleep, I didn't care about sleep and fatigue, just to be able to listen to him.
Because Jesús told us about literature, science fiction and expanded our horizons to infinity and beyond. He was an inspiring person, capable of stirring up your desire for knowledge. I remember a conversation on the bus, going up from Guajara to La Laguna, when he asked me how my work on Lakatos was going (I was the only one in the class who opted for this author, while my classmates chose between Kuhn or Feyerabend), recommending that I read Stanislaw Lem and A Mathematician's Apology, by Hardy, probably the best essay that has been written about the decline of a creative mind and the beauty of theorems. That's how Jesús was, a down-to-earth, funny guy and an extraordinary reader. I will never forget when he confessed to us, in the middle of a class, that he was going blind.
He always had irritated eyes, with large red bags, like bloody reservoirs, which he rubbed with the palms of his hands. That day he told us about his library, about the 7,000 copies, if memory serves me right, that he treasured at home. I couldn't help but remember the great blind men of history: Homer, Borges and, above all, Eratosthenes, also called Beta, who would commit suicide, by voluntary starvation, because of his blindness, because what is the point of life, for a great reader, if he cannot continue reading?
Part of his collection, the one specialized in History and Philosophy of Science (almost 2,000 volumes), was donated by his widow to the ULL on April 23, 2021, Book Day, and since then it has been added to the library's catalog, enriching the permanent collection, which already included the personal archives of González Vicén, Álvarez Rixo, Rumeu de Armas and the literary marriage formed by Josefina Zamora and Ventura Doreste, among other bibliophiles. The last time I spoke with Jesús was in 2010, when I began to read and investigate in depth Félix Francisco Casanova, the writer designated this year by the Day of Canarian Literature to whom we pay tribute. Because Félix, although he does not pronounce his name, also mentions Jesús in his diary, although this is something that very few people know. In the entries corresponding to Sunday, April 7, 74, and April 10 of the same year, he notes these paragraphs in I would have or had loved:
Sun. 7 - 4 - 74
Yesterday Saturday I went up with Ángel and Aure to La Laguna. OH! In a room of the Colegio Mayor we got drunk (Aure and I) with free Cubas. The room belonged to a very cool godo guy who spent his time looking through a kaleidoscope (he had one when he was nine years old, but he broke it to see the crystals). I told him that I also had tubes of pills that were precious kaleidoscopes. The room was lit by a red light and you could hear Donovan, Dylan, Santana. Ángel, the godo and Aure were drawing, I was writing poems. It was the hour of the «lupicán» (werewolf), the most beautiful moment of the day, around seven in the afternoon. We caught one this big.
10 - 4 - 74
Yesterday, again, Ángel, Aure and I were in La Laguna. We were looking for Ferdinando, the Art professor, but we didn't find him. We bought alcohol and went to the house of the godo of the kaleidoscope. We listened to BB King and JL Hooker. There was a Dalmatian dog named Yolanda, in heat. She would jump on us and if we locked her up she would cry just like a little girl. I went crazy, I went out the windows. The large crystals of the Colegio Mayor look like those of the «greenhouse».
Those drunken afternoons must have impressed Félix Francisco Casanova so much that he even composed a poem about it, written on May 3, 1974 in his notebook. But what really matters here is that that very cool godo guy, the one with the kaleidoscope, was none other than Jesús Sánchez Navarro, born in Villarrubia de los Ojos (what a tragic destiny, for someone who was going blind), province of Ciudad Real, who in 1974 resided in the Colegio Mayor San Fernando (where I spent four years of my university stage) as a doctoral student or postgraduate student, since in 1976 he would begin his teaching career at the University of La Laguna, until his retirement in 2015. Almost 40 years dedicated, in body and soul, to research and teaching, and a human and pedagogical legacy that marked many of us.
Thank you for everything, Jesús. Rest in peace, teacher.
