Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts

Sunday, November 9, 2025

№ 789. Technical experts: Are they truly heard?

Technical experts: Are they truly heard?

By: Raymund Narag 

Sunday, September 4, 2022

№ 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.

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

№ 404. "Take your broken heart, make it into art."

Here's a middle of the week advice: for the laborers who are tired, knee-deep in life's muck; for the aging bureaucrats who are swamped with public summonses and scorn; for the toil of vocation in anonymity, without fanfare and without noise:  "Take your broken heart, make it into art."

"Thank you, Hollywood foreign press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said. You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. But who are we? And, you know, what is Hollywood anyway? It's just a bunch of people from other places.

I was born and raised and created in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola [Davis] was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina, and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Italy. Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Ethiopia, raised in -- no, in Ireland, I do believe. And she's here nominated for playing a small town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.




Saturday, February 11, 2012

Saturday, November 12, 2011

№ 56. Advice for the Young-ish at Heart

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.

You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

― Cesare Pavese


Bento Box:

I've traveled back in time. Thanks to gmail and my trove of archival data in the past 10 years. I've been deleting mails, spams and other forwarded wisdom.

There is so much history.

I remember circa 2001, email was the status line for online buddies. And forwarded anything---photos, videos, jokes, spams, chain mails, NSFW centerfolds and other trivia---used to pile up on our office inbox.

How far have we come? So far: snail mails, postcards, texts, emails, ym, Facebook updates and tweets. Same content, different media.

The Baz Luhrman video is one of those I came across in the pile.