Education Beyond Electives: A Graduation Speech
I graduated from Southridge in 2011, when most of you were in grade two. Back then, there was no junior high and senior high, just high. And perhaps the closest equivalent of this completion ceremony was the day that you got to choose your elective. I had been looking forward to this for a long time. I remember getting a small slip of paper where I could choose between business math, biochemistry, journalism, programming, even rhetoric of war. I picked the most popular choice: Latin Honors. It was so popular that exactly two of us had signed up for it.
And of course, because I was so excited for it, Southridge abolished it. Not just Latin Honors, but the entire elective system, because of some DepEd rules they had to follow. We had earned the honor of being the first batch not to have electives. And two years later, when we entered senior year, we earned another honor as the first batch that didn’t need to write an English thesis. Unfortunately, we still had to write Filipino papers.
I never got to choose what I wanted to study in high school. My first taste of getting this choice was at UP Diliman. I majored in Broadcast Communication but took classes in Geology, Art History, Anthropology, and even Logic. I loved the electives because I got to choose subjects that I actually wanted to learn about. Now, midway through my time in UP, I visited the US and saw a friend of mine who was a freshman at Harvard, and she got permission for me to attend one of her electives. It was called “The Surprising Science of Happiness.”
Now picture this — twelve students seated around a table, a faculty member sitting alongside them, all discussing a book they had read that week about… happiness. That was a class! It was so… weird! In UP, teachers often stood in front of classes and we sat and listened to them lecture. Teachers were the fountain of knowledge. At Harvard, teachers were more often seen as facilitators of learning among students.
That experience eventually led me to apply, and later get accepted to Harvard, where I took many more electives. I took classes in self-control, innovation, entrepreneurship, and photography. Some classes were like the Happiness one, and had a professor seated around a table of twelve, while others involved a professor lecturing to classes ranging from 30 students to 500 students. And I realized that the biggest difference between studying in the Philippines and studying in the US wasn’t just the types of electives offered or whether the teacher stood up or sat down, but rather the way students were taught to approach their education. At Harvard, we were encouraged to take control of our education and learn in a way that best suited us, whatever that might mean. Fundamentally, they believe that there is more than one way to get a good education.
Today, I’m thankful that both Southridge and our government recognize that too with the introduction of Senior High and the three academic strands. Today, you get to choose what you want to study because some of you enjoy math, and some of you are normal. Today, you get to shape your education in a way that I didn’t get to when I was in high school.
As I was preparing this speech, I realized that even when I was in high school, there were a few ways that I had shaped my education even without electives. I want to share three stories with you so you can start to think about how you can take control of your education over the next few years.
My first story is about creating learning opportunities outside the classroom.
I was very involved in the Southridge Servers’ Society in high school. At one point, my classmates and I started thinking: what else could we do to make the SSS better? We had some crazy ideas. My favorite one was going on a world tour where we would serve in all the best churches in the world. We would be kind of like a band going on tour, except the only song we’d sing was O Salutaris Hostia.
But as soon as we had adapted this new mindset, where we asked, “what else can we do?” we started seeing where else we could be of service. About ten years ago, the Work Ed assistant, Mr. Mario Bayais, also known as the person who actually did your projects for you, got into a terrible car accident. He was rushed to the ICU, and his hospital bills piled up each day. We saw this as an opportunity to serve and so we created a campaign called SMB: Save Mr. Bayais. We went door to door and collected donations to pay for his hospital bills, and raised over 160,000 pesos. He didn’t make it, but the funds we raised went a long way to helping his family.
We might not have known it then, but we created a way to learn outside the classroom. We learned how to be entrepreneurial by finding problems in our community and creating a solution that would help others. I learned hard skills like fundraising, marketing, and accounting, and these are skills I’ve continued to use until today.
Look for ways to create learning opportunities for yourselves. If you want to learn to be a filmmaker, make a commercial for your club. If you’re interested in technology, learn to code an iPhone game and share it with your friends. If you want to become a dentist, start by pulling out your little brother’s front teeth. Just because something isn’t taught in school doesn’t mean you can’t try to learn it.
My second story is about actively improving the institutions that teach you; in this case, that’s Southridge.
I advocated for a lot of policy changes when I was in high school. I wrote blog entries about policies I disagreed with and posted them online where my classmates and teachers discussed them with me. In my senior year, I created a proposal to lift the single-gender policy, which bans girls from entering campus, so that our debate team could host an inter-school tournament in Southridge. I met several times with the Executive Director and convinced him to bring our petition to the school board, which he did.
I stayed away from most things academic, but there was one case where I just couldn’t help myself. In junior year, I made a Facebook page called “I can’t wait until the school year ends so I can burn my Filipino book.” I shared it on Facebook and my classmates laughed about it, and then the teachers found out. I forgot we were friends on Facebook.
In the middle of class one day, there was a knock on the door, and the Filipino department head asked to speak to me, in his office. Now the department head back then was probably one of the most intimidating teachers in Southridge. He had a very strong personality, had a thick beard, and was known as one of those teachers that you didn’t want to get in trouble with. And I did.
He could have tried to do many things — get my teacher to fail me, call my parents, suspend me, but he didn’t. We had a mature conversation where I explained to him my concerns about the way Filipino was taught. I told him how I was confused why we didn’t read Noli and El Fili, why I didn’t understand why we were learning sociology in Filipino class, and why I was frustrated that we all had to write the same long term papers. He answered all my questions respectfully. I didn’t necessarily agree with them, but he did answer them.
I’m not sure how many things I was able to change about Southridge, but I think that in one way or another, I forced teachers and school administrators to have discussions around why certain policies existed and why we did things a certain way. And you can tell they didn’t hate me for it because they still invited me here today.
If you want to make the most out of your education, you need to help improve and develop the institutions that are supporting you. You’re one of the first batches in Senior High, and I guarantee you that it’s nowhere near perfect. Give feedback to your teachers, to the OpCom, and to your parents. Tell them what you like and don’t like so they can do something about it. Maybe don’t make angry Facebook pages about it though. That might not work.
My last story is about surrounding yourselves with people you can learn from.
One of my best friends in grade school was a Taiwanese student who later became my debate partner. He also happened to be an atheist. He was my first non-Filipino friend and was also the first atheist I’d ever met. We never agreed on most issues, which is probably one reason why we became great debate partners. We also became, and still are, great friends. Being friends with him helped me develop a stronger appreciation of my Catholic faith.
Many of my best friends at different stages in my life have been people who were very different from me. At Harvard, I learned about what it means to immerse yourself in different cultures by befriending a white American from Texas who can speak and rap fluently in Mandarin. I got a history lesson on Judaism from an American girl from New Jersey whose aunt was tossed out the window by her mother who was on the way to Auschwitz where she would later be murdered. And I learned about leadership, perseverance, and grit from a British friend who now runs a multi-million dollar startup in Silicon Valley.
And at the same time, I was able to teach others too. When we were visiting the Vatican museum together, I shared with a Japanese-Australian friend who never grew up with a religion why I loved and believed in the Catholic faith. I shared stories about the American Occupation in the Philippines with Americans who never learned about it. And together with the Filipino club at Harvard, we hosted a variety show for the Harvard community and danced tinikling to raise $10,000 for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan.
You will learn more from those people who are different from you than from those who grew up right next to you. You will learn more about your faith by talking to Muslims, Protestants, and atheists. You will value your Southridge education more when you realize students in other schools don’t get mentors, don’t learn about virtues, and don’t get the same opportunities you do.
Ultimately, you will become better students, engineers, doctors, software developers, bankers, lawyers, and people in general when you meet those whom you think are very different from you and realize you’re more similar than you think.
Before I end, I want to challenge you to take control of your education and learn what you want to learn. I want to challenge you to learn from your extracurricular activities, shape the future of Southridge with your feedback and criticism, and befriend those who are different from you.
And, parents and teachers, I hope you will support that.
Admirals, remember that you aren’t plants waiting to be watered by your teachers; you are Admirals! You are captains navigating the open waters in search of the education that you want to pursue.
Let me end with my favorite quote of all time from Mark Twain: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
