Time to graduate

I should be graduating, like everyone else. By now my Facebook profile photo should be showing myself in Filipiniana attire, with a sablay across my chest. Months after that I should be sending out copies of my resumé to certain offices—just like everyone else.

But I missed a step and it has rendered me out of sync with what my batch mates are up to. And now, to every tita who asks what year I’m in, I say it’s my “fourth year in college with an asterisk”—some sort of a declaration that it’s taking me five years to finish a four-year undergraduate course. I’m always trying to believe it when I tell myself that it should be okay, above all the rolling eyes and interrogative voices in my immediate surroundings alone.

There are people who have taken six, eight, or 10 years of the same thing, but that shouldn’t make them any less worth looking up to. Schools that foster the ladderized and highly competitive environment that thrives on rewarding the win-all champion of a rat race to the stage make it seem so. The comparisons we pit against each other’s paces change how we see the value of our own.

And for what purpose? Against what odds and losses?

I could be graduating by this time (or “on time”) if I didn’t drop out of school in the middle of the last semester. It’s been hard to explain to people who only see that I had no reason to do so given the material conditions that are within my privilege.

So many Filipinos my age can’t afford a college education—or an education, period. But take it from this dispatch of what it’s like within classroom walls: They aren’t missing as much as we make them believe.

All the 3.0s to my name will tell you that I fulfilled the extreme minimum of the class requirements, just enough to pass and move on to the next class in which I’m just as likely to underperform.

I admire classmates who apply an extraordinary dedication to the projects we mount in school. I see them give their all. I hear them talk about all the hours of sleep they lose to their academics, while I was elsewhere. For more than half my life, I thought I had to be the same. Tried to blunt myself into place. My parents would be proud and I’d earn the respect my peers have for the student with the supernatural ability of time management. But I feel less of that admiration when I observe that the same people don’t show up as much for things that aren’t graded.

There have been days when I learned infinitely more things from riding the bus to and from school than when I was sitting on a chair watching slide after slide after slide. But my professor doesn’t ask about the bus I take to school.

Even student organizations, which should serve as our alternative spaces for the areas of educational pursuit that our classrooms lack, have been infected with the same crippling mentality.

All the big-name organizations in our university boast of providing a training ground to produce “professional” members. I was guilty of wanting the same for my organization, until I realized how problematic it is to shield the personal nuances of the work from view. Being “professional” has little room for the quirks that might make work enjoyable and memorable.

We all have varying ways of learning. There are as many ways and means to learn as there are people who are willing to learn. No authority should impose a singular step-by-step checklist. If anyone should do so, we reserve the right not to listen.

Accommodating these quirks, others may argue, will compromise efficiency. I have a lot of these quirks, some admittedly unnecessary (i.e., “Wait, I need to buy a good ball pen before I can start to write”), and other make-or-break essentials. There are things I can’t start doing if I don’t understand why I have to do them.

This less than desirable work ethic is a sure bane for all my would-be bosses. It already is for my professors and classmates and all the other people who’ve had the displeasure of working with me, I’m sure. They know the classes at which I stopped showing up, the papers I never bothered to complete, the deadlines I watched pass right in front of me.

We are taught how to make the most material gains with the little resources we have. Everything is in the name of economic advantage, which, however, isn’t always a wrong way of looking at things. After all, this is a world that works within the constraints of money and time and several other limitations no matter how much we want to believe otherwise.

I can understand why so many Filipinos regard education as the golden ticket out of poverty, or, for those who are not at the brink of it, as a fast lane for some semblance of vertical mobility. But the way society breeds that desperation does so at the cost of the things that are supposed to matter most.

I want to take my time in school, to spend my time believing that this is the laboratory they say it is. On the other hand, my parents are waiting for my graduation photo to be framed next to everyone else’s. And I don’t hold that against them. I want them to finally be able to retire from their day jobs because they deserve to.

I’m always secretly hoping that sincerity counts for something. I wish I don’t have to make it secret, or at least not express it under my breath as though it were an admission of sin. I wish we can afford to make mistakes for as long as we learn from them.

But I can understand that that fight isn’t here within the classroom. It’s outside. So for now, I will shut up and write my thesis, do what I can. And one more year from now, I will see you out there.

Telle Delvo, 20, is a journalism student at the University of the Philippines Diliman and is the president of the UP Journalism Club. She says that in the course of writing this piece, she realized how much she wants to be a teacher.