Sa Aking mga Kabata - Pilipino Express
Sa Aking mga Kabata - Pilipino Express
Sa Aking mga Kabata - Pilipino Express
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Something Fishy About Rizal Poem • Part 2 • Paul Morrow<br />
Rizal’s first teacher was his mother<br />
who taught him to read, but it seems<br />
that the emphasis was on Spanish, not<br />
Tagalog. According to his diaries,<br />
written when he was a student in<br />
Manila in the late 1870s, Rizal’s earliest<br />
memory of reading was when he was<br />
so young that it was “still difficult for<br />
[him] to climb up on a chair.” 17 This is<br />
the famous anecdote in which Rizal’s<br />
mother reads him the story of the<br />
moths and the flame, interpreting from<br />
Spanish to Tagalog. However, one<br />
detail in this diary entry that is often<br />
overlooked is that the occasion of this<br />
storytelling – Rizal’s earliest memory<br />
of reading – was actually a Spanish<br />
lesson. Young Jose was reading aloud<br />
for his mother from a Spanish book for<br />
children, Amigo de los Niños, but he was<br />
reading poorly, so she took the book<br />
and began to demonstrate how to read<br />
it properly. When she noticed that Jose was not paying<br />
attention, she stopped the lesson and began to read the story of<br />
the moths and the flame.<br />
Rizal’s early diaries also mentioned that before he entered<br />
school he received some tutoring in Latin from a former<br />
classmate of his father, but the man died suddenly, five months<br />
into the lessons. 18<br />
11<br />
Rizal at age 11 in 1872,<br />
the same year he said his<br />
imagination was awakened<br />
to avenge victims of<br />
injustice