№ 648. How to Do Well in School

Gjismyp

HOW TO DO WELL IN SCHOOL
by Danton Remoto


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.