Open letter to [those pretending to be] my foes

I cannot tell the story of how I became a teacher enough times. It was such a natural thing: My grandmother was an elementary school teacher, she taught half Durango population to read, including me. I've just discovered that a great uncle of mine founded the School of Arts there too. But that's nothing. True calling doesn't come from our ancestors, nor has to do with blood (I know there are some issues with genetics, but...).
I decided to become a teacher some years ago. Not just right before I started teaching, though. I commited myself to it at the time I realized I sucked at it. There. Now you can beat me to a pulp if you may --Or you can stay and keep on reading.
Curiously, it didn't happen when the most restless student of a group admitted he had  enjoyed reading the Iliad --including the 'Catalogue of Ships'. Nor it does when some of my youngest students come by my office just to chat about their lives, and ask for advice. It couldn't have never happened when I felt satisfaction or was granted recognition, either. It was, for sure, when I became conscious of the education I had been bestowed. And I'm not talking about schools I attended to, nor the excellent teachers I had every now and then --I had terrible teachers as well. Nope. I'm talking about my parents, mainly.
They tauught me nothing about money, for example. I used to ignore the market prices of things up to the point that it has given me the worst previous days to payment, when my pocket runs empty without me having a clue where the money did go. Nowadays I am a little bit more conscious about how to spend every nickel I make, but I learned it not from my father, who secured by 10 hours hard working days and some times cancelled vacations so none of their children had to know what it was like to live on a roofless house, or have just one pair of shoes throughout the whole year, which he did in his childhood. I didn't learn it from my mother, who never  gave me money to spend at school, because she had already fed me so well I wasn't hungry until I got home. I was never --and only I have been like two or three times in my adulthood-- overconcerned about money. However, I know there isn't a thing such as manna. They taught me that almost everything has to be earned, from food to true friendship, and to value things according to the effort or time invested in getting them.
They taught me nothing about laziness, clumsiness or distraction. They were absolutely severe about how I should and could spend my time, even though it was free time: the command was to never get bored, or feeble-minded. Happiness, my father told me once, is the only guideline I am supposed to follow. Wasting time is the worst sin.
But most of all, they taught me nothing about passiveness. My father is a cardiologist, so you go and figure how much he likes to live a quiet life, without being bothered at 3 am with emergency calls. My mother taught me almost everything I know about how many ways there are to demonstrate love and sympathy. They made me believe in righteousness, honor and virtue. They made me acknowledge there will always be people to help when in need, and that there is always somebody who will be there for me.
However, the hardest lesson I've learned from them --and has to be re learned over and over again-- is that shortcuts may, most of the times, lead to dead-ends, pathways we chose that head us to nowhere. Such a waste of time, in the end. Great effort is the only way we are able to reach the things we desire the most. The effort we put on an aim is proportional to the satisfaction it brings when we reach the goal, which sometimes is not that clear at the beginning, or may result in some other thing we hadn't expected. But if we do things right, the outcome is always a win. Achievements are only the result of great struggle, and the first enemy we have to defeat is ourselves.
So, dear foes, I'm writing this to you -- and that is to say, to myself-- as a reminder that I'm not a perfect teacher, perhaps not even a good one, but I know I'm in the right path to get there, someday. Thank you for letting me acknowledge it.
Yours truly,
P.