Discussions
HOW TO DO WELL IN SCHOOL?
Posted by visualinked • 7/22/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: ang ladlad partylist
DANTON REMOTO
ANG LADLAD, CHAIR
2010 PHIL. SENATORIAL CANDIDATE
1. Listen to the teacher. When the teacher repeats a point two times, red flag it and take notes. That means what she is saying is super important, that is why it is repeated twice, not that she already has Alzheimer’s (she will, 20 years down the road, after teaching young people like you).
2. Read everything thrice. The first is to scan the text, like an eagle surveying the field, before it swoops down for the kill. The second is to read slowly, marking important points on the margins, or underlining key words in the text. The third is to summarize the points in your head, in your notebook, or on the last page of the text. I tell my students: unless you have summarized the text in three sentences, in your own words, then you haven’t gotten it right.
3. Master the four skills. Being a teacher of the old school, I tell my students the four skills of language learning are still important. The four skills are not surfing the net, texting, watching MTV or reading classsics.com. The four skills are still reading, writing, listening and speaking. But because of the four so-called skills I enumerated earlier, some students no longer want to read. “Eh why pa did you go to school if you don’t want to read?” I ask my students in mock horror. Writing well, of course, means reading and rereading The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Listening, with the headphones of your iPod off, works best. And speaking, of course. When one day, I asked a student for his insights into Guy de Maupassant’s The Jewels, he answered, “Wala lang!” I said, “That is good. Therefore, your oral recitation grade is also wala lang!” Then he immediately cobbled together an answer that somewhat mollified his English teacher.
4. Budget your time. You are a student, right? Therefore, your job is to study. When I was taking graduate school in the US and we were reading 600 pages of text every week, I asked my classmates, “How do we survive this?” “Read the darned pages,” Boho from Harlem said, “then go to the gym three times a week — and dance in the clubs on Saturday nights!” And so we did. We read tomes on Islamic Mystical Literature, the Nineteenth-Century Novel, and Literary Criticism, then did the treadmill and danced at Splash in New York every Saturday night. In short, you study hard — and then you play just as hard.
5. Consult with the teacher. Your teacher has placed her e-mail address and consultation hours in the syllabus. Go and make use of these. If you get low marks in Composition class, or just cannot get why the old man Iona Potapov, who has just lost his son, begins talking to his horse at the end of Chekhov’s story, then talk to the teacher. With the patience of Job, I am sure he or she will explain why that sentence is a fragment, and you do not mix your tenses, and “occasion” is not spelled with two c’s, two s’s, and two n’s, that is why you got an F. And I am quite sure that your teacher will also enlighten you on the way Chekhov writes fiction as revelation, where the unsaid words and the absent gestures are as important — if not more important — than what is said and shown.
6. Use the library. I taught for 22 years at the Ateneo, which happens to have an excellent multimedia library. During the first weeks of class, I require my students to attend library orientation, so they will know how to dig in that fabulous archive of knowledge. I also tell them that the library subscribes to Time, Newsweek, The Economist, The Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune — the last two papers because I badgered the library to do so, 20 years ago. In short, the most incisive analysis and the crispest writing in accessible formats can be had, right there at their fingertips, via hard copies of the world’s finest periodicals.
7. Use your imagination. When studying literature, let your minds fly! Ravyi Sunico, my teacher in Philosophy, once said in class that the imagination has no boundaries. Therefore, let the wings of your mind and heart touch the sky when you read. When the French master wrote, “Monsieur Lantin was caught in the web of love,” do not tell the teacher that this means life is complicated. Hell-er! First, you answer that “web of love” is a metaphor that means falling in love is like being caught in a spider web. It reminds you of that time when that “fat dimpled spider” (in Walt Whitman’s wicked poem) comes charging along to eat the unwitting fly. In short, I add, my lips curving in a wicked smile, it is called falling in love because “at first, you are in love, and then you fall.”
8. Open your minds. You go to school to obtain a liberal education, especially in the Humanities. In the Jesuit Fr. Roque Ferriol’s book, that means “magpakatao” — being taught to be fully human. That means never being afraid of ideas. Freshmen jump out of their skin when they hear the word “communism” or the name “Sigmund Freud” discussed in their Literature classes. Eh kumusta naman? You tell me we will discuss Ninotchka Rosca’s novel, State of War, without talking about the class contradictions in society? Or talk about Little Red Riding Hood seducing the Big Bad Wolf in Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” without discussing that dear, dirty old man Sigmund Freud? Time now to forget your high-school class in Literature, where Sister Marionnete always pinned a moral lesson to every poem, play, story and essays taught in class, reducing the beauty of words to the silence of the lambs.
In short, enjoy your English classes. Have fun in the world of words. Read everything as if it is a love letter, which means reading between the lines. Or better yet, as my unforgettable teacher of the Modern Novel, Dr. Edna Zapanta Manlapaz, put it, read not only with your eyes and with your heart, but best of all, read with your genitals!
Which means reading everything at the gut level, at the level of the groin, where the vital seeds of life begin.
User Comments
-
CHEAT, CHEAT, CHEAT
-
do your damn work and participate in class-
you are sounding less and less like an asshole. DAMMITT!!!!
-
lick my butt!
-
now that's more like it. but unfortunately for you. I DON'T EAT CRACK
-
CookingAss
You are so funny -
oddly enough I did very well in school
-
-
I'm too lazy to read that, just like I was too lazy to stay awake during school. -
Don't go to class. Drink a lot. Have lots of sex with women (men if thats your thing). Go to the tests hung over or drunk. Ace them. Don't study. Worked for me anyways. -
So I wrote this huge response that I accidently deleted so I'll summarize:
1) Get to know your professors. I've turned in essays 3 weeks late and still received A's because I actually got to know my professors out of class.
2) Learn to use booknotes/cheatsheets. They will help you learn 10x faster just as long as you don't use them as a supplement to actually studying.
3) Participate in study groups. Sometimes you don't have time to study everything yourself. Study groups allow you to not have to.
4) Prioritize your time. I was a procrastinator, but I always gave myself time to finish projects and finish them well. -
I think...
And this is just my opinion - that writing this snippet of Danton Remoto's Blog piece - should be directed to Danton's blog:
dantonremoto2010.blogspot.com/
as it is not part of your actual blog.
Instead of copying the work of someone who is actually an AMAZING person - you should write what you think of it - whether in Tagalog or in English.
You should not promote your own blog through the works of others.
However - since you did give credit to the commentator of this dissertation - you do deserve kudos for making it spread further - but unfortunately did not provide the linkage.
For those of you who do not know what This situation is I'll explain it:
VisualInked is Gay - and has a very Gay Blog that has snippets about Gay issues everywhere. I'm not sure if there is actually any writing that belongs directly to VisualInked, there may be, but most of it appears to be snippets from places around the web.
One of VisualInked's list points is on Danton Remoto - who is the FIRST openly Gay person to be running for a Political Position in the Philippines.
Where Pinoy (Female Impersonators) have ALWAYS been acceptable and loved - the mainstream society where political involvement is required have long stifled anything that remotely appeared Gay/Lesbian/Bi or Transgendered.
So Remoto's incredible run for Senator as a VERY Distinguished man - except that he is OPENLY Gay - is nothing short of Incredible in it's own right.
So - again - I say that this is a good piece of writing - it should have been linked to Remoto's site and not placed without it. -
Sleep with the teacher.
Make friends with the Asian kids - they know how to study hard and are normally experts in maths.....they even know how to work those scientific calculators.
Oh and listen, sit up straight and pay attention-
Make friends with the asian kids? You would think that this is a positive stereotype huh? Just ask the asian kid who was put on the competitive math team because of his race, but who didn't even know the difference between a numerator and a denominator. Do you know how much pain you put people through with these stereotypes? How dare you!
-
Better than the stereotype around my campus.
All asian kids sell ecstasy. -
Oh you picked up on my sterotype well done - please don't be offended I was simply putting the stereotype out there.
And Incase you hadnt noticed i was making fun of myself
-
-
I am the last person to ask, I never did well in school and hated the thought of even attending.
-
mwahahahaha ! I didn't do well in math unfortunately. I did good with oral reports.-
Need I comment on that one?
-
No, I thnk not. We get the picture.
-
LOL Sam no! It's too late, I could not edit it.
Let's just say i enjoy being in front of the class doing reports. I am really shy but I like it when I act like I know everything and then people would just nod their heads in agreement
-
I was good at finding the most amusing aspects of each subject - finding the most obsene poems in the books given to us in english and doing a report on them. Taking joys in reading and adding to graffiti in the work books given to us in science, and picking the little blue mushrooms on the school field during P.E
-
-
Hey i used to do that too. But what i usually do is that i let my classmates read them and derive joy from their expressions....you know 'the good parts' in books.
-
There is a famous NZ poet called Sam Hunt, who's known for his distinct voice and rhythm in which he reads his poems, he's also known for being a bit eccentric too - we had to study his works and low and behold he'd written a poem simply called "f*cking" the body of the poem was about how the act feels and how its even better when on certain drugs. Well It ended up that we had to give our presentation infront of an audience.....so I picked that one. And there was nothing that the teachers could do about it because it was in the books that they had distributed and told us to study.
Believe it or not, with my best sam hunt impersonation I managed to get a few standing ovations from the audience. -
Quiet interesting. The teachers must have been red on the faces.See what research can do.That's freakin' hilarious.
-
They were a bit, but they were fair in giving me the marks I deserved - the work I was set had been done regardless of the content
-
Congratulations for doing well in school!
-
Well actually I didnt Im afraid - most of the subjects were marked 100% on the final exam (of the whole years work) rather than being marked on assignment completion during the year.
So yeah, although I consider my memory to be extremely good im just hopeless and get too nervous during exams -
There's this one guy( a jock) who never let me into his group. and he kept kicking my backseat during a science exam. I ignored him.hahahahaha.
-
I got that in maths class - except I reacted.
Funny how the teacher only does something when the victim of abuse knocks out the tormentor
-
-
ya'll are silly -
Believe in your classmates' intelligence. -
From my experience, this is how to do well in school:
1) Surrender your dignity. So what if your mind is like a fucking sponge and you learn the curriculum the first time it's explained to you? You're still expected to do your damn homework just because Little Johnny Mediocre needs the repetition and review to get painfully simple concepts through his skull, and will be punished harshly for not doing so even though you ace every test without effort.
2) Surrender your personality. Administrators hate people who stand out but don't kiss their ass. Especially don't admit to atheism, conservatism, liberalism, or any other -ism at any point throughout your K-12 career. It will only be used against you.
3) Surrender your individuality. It's a misdemeanor for any K-12 student to question authority for any reason. Did the substitute teacher just tell you to do something inane because they don't understand computers? Too bad, do it anyway.
4) Surrender your expectations. You want to learn calculus, physics, organic chemistry, C++ programming, or any other such interesting subject? Too bad. Not only will the schools not offer these classes, any classes they do offer will be so loaded full of standardized testing that you will walk out of that class knowing barely anything more than what you knew going into it.
As you can see, "do well in school" was never one of my goals. I focused on learning and getting into college. That's when education actually begins.-
LOL. I don't know man, I've learned a lot, made fun of a few professors, been a diehard conservative, played with a yoyo towards the front of a PSYCH class in the middle of lecture, and had side projects and currently have a 3.92 after 2 years at Georgia Tech. Then again, Tech is better then the average school; I think the "like all the good fellows I drink my whiskey clear" in our fight song says it all. -
I was talking high school. Also applicable to elementary and middle (junior high) school.
-
-
Don't care f**k all about it. That's how to do well in school. (Saves a lot of worry and stress.) -
Amen to that
-
Work hard, work smart. -
Set a goal of becoming better then your teacher. Whether you achieve it or not, I guarantee you your efforts will be less vain, more spirited, and more applicable to later in life. Not only will you get a good grade, but what you learn will stick with you, which is far more important. You can get a good grade without learning anything, but very seldom do you learn well and not get at least a B, and that's only if your lucks rotten.
Add Your Comment
Login to leave a message.
