My parents are teachers.
This is the second time I've mentioned it, but I think it's relevant to the topic. My parents were my first, and probably most memorable, teachers, and the fact that they are teachers not only by association to me, their child, but also by profession and career, meant that they knew not only what to teach me, but how to do it.
There is a stereotype attached to children of professors, one I've fallen trap to numerous times in high school -- that they, or we, have to have good grades and we have to be smart. It's a stereotype I despise because it was applied to me during a time when my grades were the least of my worries, but one I understand now looking back, because for the most part it's plausible. If my parents can teach hundreds, thousands, then they should be able to teach me well, right? I never noticed it as a kid, but my parents never forced me to study in elementary school, and that was the time when I had stellar grades and was considered a "smart kid". I realize now that instead of telling me to study, or scolding me when I didn't, they helped me when I needed help, but they never did unless I asked for it first.
And, based on experience, I think that's what education should be -- something that aids in learning. Learners, or students, should be allowed to think for themselves, they should be allowed to try and to make mistakes, but they should be gently guided and helped, through teaching.
My parents teach art -- art history, art theory and approaches -- and I also think that the subject they teach lent a lot to how they taught me. Art is a very broad field, but it's also a very personal one -- each art work is different, each artist is different, each movement is different. The definitions of things like "formalism" or "abstract" are both debatable and flexible. Unlike science which, for the most part, is very exact, where a is a and b is b and it ends at that, art will say "a is a because it's not b" or even "a is not actually a" -- that kind of open-mindedness translated not only in what they taught me, but in how they "dealt" with me, how they dealt with defining what my "success" was.
They dealt with it not by giving me definitions of it, but by letting me define my success for myself. I remember one of my childhood ambitions was to become a make-up artist, because I had a fixation for make-up as a kid (both out of necessity and as a hobby) but instead of immediately dismissing the idea or directly voicing her (pretty obvious) disagreement with my choice of ambition, my mom suggested that I look into making cosmetics, and not just putting it on people. They wanted me to aim for something they thought was good, something I had a clear future in, but they made sure it was something I was interested, and something I could possibly want.
Later, when I finally settled with writing as my main ambition, they pretty much left me to decide for myself what I wanted to do, and how I would get there. Of course there were some suggestions thrown around, but the conclusions of all those suggestions were always "it's your decision". So to me, success is something we define individually, something that we tailor to our own goals and aspirations. Whether that means getting high grades, or graduating, or getting a good job -- if they're goals and they're accomplished, that's success.
Grades have always mattered to me. They've always mattered because in elementary school I knew what it felt like to get high grades, and I liked it so I wanted to keep experiencing it. And they mattered even more in high school because I had one goal, and one goal alone -- to qualify for UP Diliman. That was my goal mainly because it was the only school my parents would send me to, both academically and financially. UP is UP, but at the same time, my tuition under a hundred pesos a semester. It took four years for me to realize though that regardless of my parents' wishes, I would've chosen UP anyway. It's all I've ever known, and even if the thought of going to Ateneo, a new environment, appealed to me a bit after I was accepted, it eventually scared me more than it intrigued me. Which is why my entire high school life was basically spent doing two things -- trying to get into Diliman, and trying to graduate so I could actually go once I got in.
And ultimately, grades mattered. Grades matter. To me it's not an obsession because of want, it's an obsession because I see it as a fact of life that I need to win at if I want to achieve my goals. It's a stepping stone I have to please if I want to get what I want. I wanted to get into UP, so I tried my best to get high grades in high school, and now I want to get my dream job as fast as possible after graduation, so I'm aiming to graduate with honors.
As shown in the movie, actually learning something is the most important, I completely agree, and it's not like I just memorize empty facts like some of the characters in the movie, but in the real world, what goes on paper matters too. They both matter, and I think instead of concentrating on just one, it should be a compromise of sorts. Learn something, internalize it and apply it to real life, yes, but we all need to grasp the rudiments, the foundations and all those boring equations or concepts, before we can apply them. That's what exams are for, and that's what grades show, in my opinion.
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