A Student’s Woe
Part One, a student writes:
“On the first day of classes, you asked us what we were expecting from this class. I said I expect it to be hard. You said I was too pessimistic. What I said wasn’t a prediction, I was stating the obvious. History has been the most difficult subject for me ever since I started learning about it. That sentence is wrong, I actually never learned anything from history. Every time I study for a test, while I’m reading a book or my notes, my mind drifts off into space. I ask myself why I’m doing such thing as reading something that will just drive me crazy and before I know it, I’ve read the whole thing without understanding anything. I believe I can do anything if I set my mind to it. But the problem is, I can’t seem to do that with History. That belief (or should I say fact) works well with other subjects: Physics, Math, Chemistry and the like. It works only with subjects I find important or those subjects ‘na may katuturan’. I tried hard to convince myself that history is important, but I can’t. I can’t find anything important in studying History. I even tried asking smart people I know but they were not able to give me a reasonable answer. And you weren’t able to do that too. Or maybe you did. Maybe I was just not listening at that time. Or maybe not. My classmates say you didn’t. So maybe you could explain that to everyone. The only reason I can think of is because the people we are studying now gave too much effort, even gave their lives, just so their names would live forever. So let us not waste their effort, we should learn about them!”
