Too cool for school

Ihated school. I’ve had brief phases of being a good student. I’d start the school year showing up early for class, carrying all my books and notebooks (and there were a lot) in my backpack, thoughtfully taking down notes, and preparing for exams. I studied hard and I enjoyed it. The task at hand was straightforward and simple enough: to learn and show your teachers and parents how much you were learning. It was fun until it wasn’t. Eventually, as I moved from prep to elementary to high school, I lost more and more interest. By the time I got to college the eagerness to learn had all but faded. I wanted to become a writer. But as soon as the general subjects (Math, Science, History, Philosophy, P.E., et al) began to present themselves at the first week of the first semester of my first year out in the real world (spoiler alert: it’s not, not yet), I knew that it would be the longest four years of my life. I asked myself, “Why can’t they just teach me how to write?” The answer wouldn’t come to me until recently at a bayside dinner with two of the best writers and journalists of their time. But then, at 17—so full of life, ambition, and preconceived ideas of success and independence—school was so repulsive to me I just wanted to be done with it.

Recently, I found myself at De La Salle University (DLSU) Manila to cover its third Student Media Congress (SMC), a two-day, studentled and organized conference that “goes beyond exploration and empowerment to help create a new perspective on today’s dynamic media landscape.” I am a stranger to DLSU’s imposing white halls and edifices that tower over Taft Avenue. But that it’s been seven years since I graduated seems absurd and heartbreakingly nostalgic. Standing among hundreds of students whose only problems, at that very moment, involved school requirements, early curfews, and being seenzoned, I recalled my life as a student, so far removed from the real real world I am in, and actually missed it. I almost forgot how much I hated it.

This year’s SMC had a very impressive lineup of speakers from all corners of the media—print, broadcasting, online, and advertising. SMC promised over 1,200 students/delegates from all over the Philippines “meaningful ways to connect and create impact” and where better to glean these innovative and sage ideas but from people like Manila Bulletin Lifestyle editor AA Patawaran, Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Sandy Prieto-Romualdez, screenwriter and playwright Ricky Lee, GMA News’ Mike Enriquez, CNN Philippines’ Pia Hontiveros, comics author and artist Manix Abrera, ABS-CBN’s Dennis Lim, and film and TV director Cathy Garcia-Molina, among others.

With the theme, “Experiencing Media Dynamics,” the Congress offered five plenary talks, 15 competing and 60 non-competing workshops on a wide variety of topics that mostly implied the importance of keeping the Millennials involved in and fascinated with the industry, especially on print, enough to ensure that journalists, writers, and artists would not be replaced by robots by 2050.

I head down to a third floor classroom to attend my editor AA Patawaran’s talk on feature writing. His was a competing workshop, meaning there would be a writing competition after his presentation where he would judge and pick the three best feature articles from some 40 to 50 delegates. I sat beside kids who were, apparently, a good mix of college and high school students. My editor talked about facts and fantasy in lifestyle journalism. How fantasy is just as essential a component to writing feature stories as facts. How feature writers should write through vivid pictures that jump off the page, not just with letters and words.

I sat in that room for three to four hours feeling adrenalized and inchoate. All these things I learned from my editors when I started working as a journalist. All these things they’re learning now, as young as 13 or 20, just as they begin to figure out exactly what they want to do with their lives. And this was just one workshop. Next door, Ricky Lee encouraged delegates to write in Filipino. In the other room Quinito Henson talked sports journalism. At the end of the hallway poet Mark Cayanan talked rhythm and free verse.

Had I known how much I would have learned from school through programs like this, I might have coped with it differently. I would have put aside my resentment of authority and teachers who came to class to listen to their students report on lessons they were supposed to teach. I would have dropped my defenses and just learned. I might have a basic understanding of relevant things like Geography or Economics along with my Grammar and 5Ws and 1H. More abstractly, I might have felt early on that I had truly been open and porous and driven to learn much like the delegates and the students behind SMC. After all, who said school was supposed to be fun, in every sense of the word? School, in its simplest form, should be enriching. School should equip you with the knowledge, values, and skills that would serve as your safety net when you free fall to reality.

As early as now, the DLSU Student Media Office, the DLSU Culture & Arts Office, and the DLS-CSB Student Publications Office are already brainstorming on the fourth installment of this transformative assembly of students and innovators. “So what’s next?” I asked a member of the core SMC team. “It depends on what the world throws at us, but, definitely, progress.” You can’t get more dynamic than that.