Never.Say.Die

Dear Students,

The news about the increasing deaths by suicide because of academics among your age group is saddening and alarming. As a teacher my mind set is to give you the grades and the policies that you deserve. So it is important that I be as objective as possible at my evaluation techniques and calculations. In the first place, you are the ones responsible for what you get at the end of the semester. You have the whole semester to build it up. I am just supposed to facilitate your learning during that period, compile your work, evaluate it and compute the final output. Grades are supposed to be a measure of how well you have learned or performed at a certain subject.

I have observed that many of you, though not all, easily give up once you encounter things that you have no solutions to. This is manifested by: forgetting that your exams are scheduled on certain dates; submitting your papers too early because you do not know the solutions to your exams and laboratory exercises; stopping your schooling and choosing to stay at home to watch TV because you do not have enough money to pay for your tuition fees; changing a subject at an impulse because you were not able to accomplish its requirements at your first try; choosing to waste your time on Facebook whenever you are stuck at that paragraph or solution; grumbling to the ends of the earth because you got a failing grade and many more.

There are more manifestations than my previous paragraph could express. I do not know what to believe about the real reasons to your current behaviour. However, I am more inclined to the theory that this is because most of you are used to getting things done at the snap of your fingertips. I am well aware that most of you now prefer to run to the internet cafes as compared to the library whenever I require a research paper; and then, you would also be conveniently consulting Google for that integration problem that was assigned to you as homework. I am not saying that these developments in technology are bad—they are helpful in many ways. It is just that these things have made your lives extremely easy that they have greatly contributed to your impatience and weak tolerance to academic pain and struggles.

During our time, some of our exams take 5 hours or more to finish—and we’d usually stay until we have exhausted all the possible solutions that our barely functioning brain could come up with. We make it a point to remember all the exam dates so that we can allocate enough time to study for each subject and not miss a single exam. We still consulted the dusty and mouldy card catalogues whenever we practice our computations or do our researches. Some of my friends work nights to teach the English language to Koreans or work as part-time student assistants to earn money. This pays for their schooling, and then these people would even go home to their dormitories and eat pancit canton for dinner. And to make ends meet, they’d be content with the choice of pancit canton or the twenty peso siomai meal for breakfast and lunch. Furthermore, people do not easily give up when they fail. I even had a classmate who needed to take a subject ten times to get a passing mark; I could only imagine the agony of failing repeatedly, but he never gave up.

These are just some of the agonizing things that my batch has experienced; needless to say that the generations before us had a harder time to achieve what they needed to accomplish.  I am neither the perfect student nor the most patient to be worthy of telling you these; I have my own shares of failures and mishaps. But, I am saying this because you already have the world at your fingertips; a lot of things are so much easier now than they were before. Many of you could now afford to drink that 100 peso glass of milked tea for snacks—that is almost five meals worth of food for some people. Your opportunities are wider and bigger; so whenever challenges come your way it is just up to you to look at it in a perspective which will benefit you most.   

I do not recommend that you run away from the challenges that have befallen or may befall on you. Be it the lack of financial resources, scarcity of enough points to pass a subject or a number of subjects, absence of or severance of a relationship, etc. Rather I strongly recommend that you face each of these challenges head on, do not quit on them, never say die until you achieve that goal you are hoping for.

Use your poverty to learn how to generate your own income. My love, money does not grow on trees and neither do they magically appear on your parent’s wallet when you ask for it; your parent’s have sacrificed a lot to earn that 100 peso bill which you conveniently spend at the nearest coffee shop. Use that failing grade, be it repeatedly or be it that failing grade that cost you your graduation to build your character, strengthen your backbone, and develop calm and reasonable responses to failure. In this life, failure is inherent; ergo, the only thing that you could do is to respond to it properly. And please do not blame your teachers for your failing marks even if you feel that they are not too good of a teacher in the first place; the blame-game is for the weak. Use those broken or failed relationships as motivations to see the good in other people. Use it to improve yourself and to learn from your mistakes. We have to learn how to turn our perspectives around such that, no matter how dire our circumstances are, things would always end up to our gain.

So I beg you, please do not give up that easily. There is more to this life than your academic standing or accomplishments; as much as academics is your main purpose, you should not let it define you. Always remember that there is more to you and in you than what your scores are telling about. Your grades are just numbers; you are worth more than that. But, you have to earn them to graduate. So you have to work for it. If you fail, then it simply means that you have to work harder—it is not the end of the world. Do not quit, because you will never be able to accomplish things by giving up. You have to exhaust all possible facets of this world if you want to achieve something, never say die. Try and fight for it until you feel like you are almost dying. Because in the end skills and intelligence is but relative; what will matter is what defines you—your soul, your purpose, your values, your character and the legacy that you will be leaving behind.

I know that I made a lot of over generalizations. I know that there are still many of you out there who are going out of their ways to achieve their goals; I urge you to press on, run the race and achieve that price. But for the others who are not, there is still time to reflect about your life and think on what you should do about it. And believe me, I would be more than happy to be proven wrong for some of the things I have said earlier.