So, please give me a chance. I’m trying my hand on this thing called “personal style blogging”. I know the photos are at their rawest, unedited form. I have yet to learn taking those outfit posts I’ve seen in fashion blogs in blogosphere.
Here is my first outfit post on my teaching clothes. Just a test post. 🙂
This is how I look like when teaching Philippine History every Tuesday and Friday afternoons in a conservative college in the metro.
When I first taught in a university, I was 20 years old then and I hated how conservative my Mom was when it came to teaching clothes. I had graduated from a state university that is known as the “bastion of liberalism” here in the Philippines (the University of the Philippines Diliman) and, of course, a dress code was almost close to non-existent. Some professors would come to class wearing slippers, shorts and a shirt, much to my mom’s dismay, while some students went to school wearing the skimpiest of shorts or the weirdest outfit. The mentality in Diliman was that your brains and your acads (academics) were more important than what you wore. It was the substance rather than the form that was important, as they put it. I had a lot of learning and growing up to do back then. I can still see my mom trying to hide her “horrified” look when her eldest daughter came home every semester break wearing short shorts and flip flops to the mall or to family dinners. I knew she tried hard not to make a comment at that time though her face still said a lot of words. Mommy, thank you for being so patient! 🙂
Now that I’m teaching again I realized that there was wisdom in what my mom constantly hammered into us about modesty, respect and style. Being stylish does not necessarily mean showing off flesh or all the blings in the world but it’s about mixing and matching and dressing appropriately. As my dad told me, it’s about respecting and honoring your audience, that means my class, even in a minor thing such as a teaching outfit. In my parents’ opinion, how you present yourself is already a peek of a bit of who you are. Propriety, propriety, that’s what they keep telling me. And today, I guess I’m already ready to listen to them.
Gone are the days when I would go off to class wearing something inappropriate {like an ultra-fit and clingy shirt dress} just to spite my mom and her conservative style. Back then I was a few pounds lighter and I kept pushing the dress code limits of the conservative, Catholic university where I once taught. This university was a far cry from the liberal University I had graduated from. It was quite a culture shock for me to go through the doors of the school with the guards checking the length of my skirt or see if my blouse was too sheer for the students’ sanity. I enjoyed breaking a dress code or two while I was there. Yeah, so much for being a role model, huh. Oh, the folly of youth…that’s what comes to my mind when I think about those days. 🙂
Now, I am learning to take her advice but add my own twist to it. And with that, our styles have melded and the teaching wardrobe has stopped becoming the “mom-yen war room”. Today, I understand that boundaries and dress codes are there not merely for your own benefit but for others’ sake. 🙂
How about you? Have you tried resisting conforming to your mom’s style when you were younger?
One Thing 