Fragmented
By Mike Gulapa
I was quite sure it was being instructed in English. I recognized the words and the sounds but I really didn't understand them once they are lumped together. 
I knew those were 'sentences' he was mouthing and those were 'numbers' he was writing. But everything didn't seem to make sense to me at all. By the way, it's the Physics lessons in my Nat Sci 1 class I'm talking about.
It all started a month ago when I decided to enlist in this Physics/Chemistry class. Of course, I knew what it was all about, or at least I thought I knew. Nevertheless, I was really sure that I would be taking this course no matter what.
Then it happened. After the first batch processing of classes, I already got enlisted! However, neither was I happy nor sad. I guess I felt just a slight stream of anxiety. So to neutralize the angst, I thought of it as luck and considered it a rare opportunity to be in this supposedly hard-to-get-into class. It was comforting though until the day I knew that slots were like donuts in a donut store, still widely offered and available.
The door leading to Physics and Chemistry was then opened widely right before my eyes. (his paragraph was supposed to be about the days I secluded myself into thinking whether I would shut the door or step right into it. But I thought it's going to be useless since apparently I did step right into it. So, moving on...
So I took the challenge and plunged myself into something I was uncertain of. I verified. I enrolled. I braced myself for the arduous semester to come. The day came where I could taste the pudding of my decision. It was tasty at first: an air conditioned room, an LCD projector, a white board. It was a very conducive niche for learning. Also with me in the class were familiar faces from our department and an orgmate of mine actually, so I felt that I was not at all alone and the pudding was nothing more than sweet. But the bitter ingredient of it started to take over my tongue as the professor, who actually is a super physicist of the physics world, started to talk physics to a non-physics major. A philosophy major at that!
I was quite sure it was being instructed in English. I recognized the words and the sounds but I really didn't understand them once they are lumped together. I knew those were 'sentences' he was mouthing and those were 'numbers' he was writing. But everything didn't seem to make sense to me at all. Things seemed utterly pointless. After an hour of lecture, I ended up looking at him like a dead fish, blank and naive. I tried to dig deep inside my brain for the remnants of my high school physics but I didn't find even the smallest rudiments of it. "Ooh I'm doomed", I whispered to myself because the lessons were far from what I expected them to be -- just an introductory physics or some sort of physics appreciation for everyday living. Haha!
Nevertheless, I took pleasure in copying the Physics wingdings on the board and drawing the inclined planes with pulleys, strings and boxes. I've longed for these actually. It was the subject I was deprived of for 2 years and the subject I used to be good at. This was one reason why I enlisted for this class. I wanted a break from philosophy and the papers writing and reading life entailed with it. I wanted to solve numbers for a change, because I've been dealing with arguments for quite some time already. I wanted to apply logic in the quantitative realm. I wanted to write numbers, integers, square roots, signs and summations. But it came with a price though: long examinations!
The battle plan is, to enjoy writing the wingdings and savor the break from philosophy and let my engineering friends, housemates, and orgmates decipher it for me. Because there must be an underlying meaning and principle to those and I'm not just in the right place to decode it as of the moment. I even forgot what theta actually means for crying out loud!
Another reason why I partook in this class was because I've had my experiences of electives that were so easy and uno-able but I didn't learn anything from them at all. I actually had a grade of 2.25 on one of those, and it was depressing because not only did I not learn anything from it but also I was given a grade I didn't deserve. So I felt it is better to get something out of a course than to get nothing at all. Easy is not always excellent and education ought to be taken for its purpose. Grades should be of secondary concern. This was what I had in mind when I clicked the 'enlist' button. To be out of the parameters of what I already know and extend my intellectual horizon. Besides, this I think is the function of general electives, to produce students with holistic knowledge so they would not end up fragmented. And even if I don't understand it now, I know I soon will, and I'm glad I decided to want to. And it's just nice to challenge yourself with something once in a while, because as you deal with the tough everyday, you simply become tougher than yesterday.
I knew those were 'sentences' he was mouthing and those were 'numbers' he was writing. But everything didn't seem to make sense to me at all. By the way, it's the Physics lessons in my Nat Sci 1 class I'm talking about.It all started a month ago when I decided to enlist in this Physics/Chemistry class. Of course, I knew what it was all about, or at least I thought I knew. Nevertheless, I was really sure that I would be taking this course no matter what.
Then it happened. After the first batch processing of classes, I already got enlisted! However, neither was I happy nor sad. I guess I felt just a slight stream of anxiety. So to neutralize the angst, I thought of it as luck and considered it a rare opportunity to be in this supposedly hard-to-get-into class. It was comforting though until the day I knew that slots were like donuts in a donut store, still widely offered and available.
The door leading to Physics and Chemistry was then opened widely right before my eyes. (his paragraph was supposed to be about the days I secluded myself into thinking whether I would shut the door or step right into it. But I thought it's going to be useless since apparently I did step right into it. So, moving on...
So I took the challenge and plunged myself into something I was uncertain of. I verified. I enrolled. I braced myself for the arduous semester to come. The day came where I could taste the pudding of my decision. It was tasty at first: an air conditioned room, an LCD projector, a white board. It was a very conducive niche for learning. Also with me in the class were familiar faces from our department and an orgmate of mine actually, so I felt that I was not at all alone and the pudding was nothing more than sweet. But the bitter ingredient of it started to take over my tongue as the professor, who actually is a super physicist of the physics world, started to talk physics to a non-physics major. A philosophy major at that!
I was quite sure it was being instructed in English. I recognized the words and the sounds but I really didn't understand them once they are lumped together. I knew those were 'sentences' he was mouthing and those were 'numbers' he was writing. But everything didn't seem to make sense to me at all. Things seemed utterly pointless. After an hour of lecture, I ended up looking at him like a dead fish, blank and naive. I tried to dig deep inside my brain for the remnants of my high school physics but I didn't find even the smallest rudiments of it. "Ooh I'm doomed", I whispered to myself because the lessons were far from what I expected them to be -- just an introductory physics or some sort of physics appreciation for everyday living. Haha!
Nevertheless, I took pleasure in copying the Physics wingdings on the board and drawing the inclined planes with pulleys, strings and boxes. I've longed for these actually. It was the subject I was deprived of for 2 years and the subject I used to be good at. This was one reason why I enlisted for this class. I wanted a break from philosophy and the papers writing and reading life entailed with it. I wanted to solve numbers for a change, because I've been dealing with arguments for quite some time already. I wanted to apply logic in the quantitative realm. I wanted to write numbers, integers, square roots, signs and summations. But it came with a price though: long examinations!
The battle plan is, to enjoy writing the wingdings and savor the break from philosophy and let my engineering friends, housemates, and orgmates decipher it for me. Because there must be an underlying meaning and principle to those and I'm not just in the right place to decode it as of the moment. I even forgot what theta actually means for crying out loud!
Another reason why I partook in this class was because I've had my experiences of electives that were so easy and uno-able but I didn't learn anything from them at all. I actually had a grade of 2.25 on one of those, and it was depressing because not only did I not learn anything from it but also I was given a grade I didn't deserve. So I felt it is better to get something out of a course than to get nothing at all. Easy is not always excellent and education ought to be taken for its purpose. Grades should be of secondary concern. This was what I had in mind when I clicked the 'enlist' button. To be out of the parameters of what I already know and extend my intellectual horizon. Besides, this I think is the function of general electives, to produce students with holistic knowledge so they would not end up fragmented. And even if I don't understand it now, I know I soon will, and I'm glad I decided to want to. And it's just nice to challenge yourself with something once in a while, because as you deal with the tough everyday, you simply become tougher than yesterday.
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