tv!

// PPB Double Up - what happened to Tom? wasn't able to watch what happened earlier... then he's sick. e ang gwapo lang nya grabe. hahaha supercruuuush! ang lalim pa ng boses. mas gwapo pa pag nakasalamin. haynako. ah si patrick din crush ko! hohoho! mukang kuya kim eh. hahaha >:P

// Survivor Philippines Palau - so far, the part of the jury who spoke today will most likely vote for Justinne (yehey!). then there's the rest tomorrow. SPP today is made of epic win because of SUZUKI!!! WAHAHAHAHA!!! mega laughtrip! and he's trying to be serious. wtfinger?!?! when Jeff was asked, "crush mo si marvin?" -- her reaction was sooo damn priceless. she was blushing like crazy! laughtrip of the night! whew! di ko kinaya! >XD

// Plants versus Zombies! honestly i still like Luxor hahaha. but it's cool to have tried it, finally! gaaawd, i just get bored at the start cos it's too slow and the plants take a lot of time to recharge, next thing i know it's game over. the michael jackson zombie was amusing though! hohoho >XD

// Luxor? stuck at level 11. >:|

// heeey, i'm studying parin naman. in fact i did my homeworks first! like when i got home from school cos pundido na yung ilaw here so i won't be able to write on paper when night falls hahahaha.

// goal = DL. must have 21 units next term. come on, i need the discount... and my name up there. >:P

henako

// i learned something today. something i've wanted to confirm long before but is too scared to. cos i'm pretty sure i won't be getting the cool side of it all. haynako i knew it. i fucking hate it that i attract the wrong people... or i attract the people i don't like, or those i never thought i would attract in the first place. !@#$%^&*() why can't it just be the other way around? fuck naman e. so i wasn't surprised at all when i heard it. shrugged it off as soon as it was said cos i already know about it, my instincts served me right this time. epal. so, what to do? wala! keri lang! act like i never heard anything. i'm counting on TIME. yes naman, TIIIIME!!! go find another. i'm doing my part naman e, i'm doing everything to imply that there's no chance. hahaha sana next term na please???? and when i was asked why i don't like the 'news' i just heard, i just said that i simply don't like it, that i have my standards and it's a fucking dead case between the two of us. i won't give him the benefit of the doubt.


// yehey. he helped me set up the projector awhile ago. haha but i suck cos even though he's already there, i still called kuya IT to help me cos the projector won't turn on. sometimes my brain gets so clouded that i can't think and still call on other people even when somebody is already there. wtf? a life learning?

// wow. i thought i was already slacking off with filione but it turned out i got the highest midterm standing among all of the sections our prof is handling. yehey? >:)

i fear destitution

i still favor the elite mentality despite its narrowness and bounded philosophy. simply because i don't like being poor. i hate poverty. if it's not about the opportunities that an elite education could give me (cos apparently, i've already missed out on that), then it's about the bigger opportunities my ambition could open up to me. fucking pride. it's good to have some.

// went to the gym... to read. finally halfway through The Graveyard Book. haha

// yehey! i saw my crush awhile ago. same old. >:P

// Survivor Philippines Palau awhile ago was crazy. i still can't follow the reasons why Justinne burst out like that, but to me she still deserves to be the Sole Survivor.

>:)

// i went to school but the guard won't let me in cos i was wearing maong pants. honestly, i didn't think it was obvious, no one noticed them before. kudos to mr. guard's sharp eyes. so i retreated home and told my parents our teacher is absent the truth. thank you dan brown for signing me on the attendance sheet (as always) hehehe.

// since it's my sister's rest day... we went to the SM north! yehey! sobrang taken for granted ko na talaga yung gym. i never workout, i'm too lazy! so while she's working out, i did our trigo homework and continued reading The Graveyard Book. then i saw RR Enriquez! hahaha she goes to the gym pala. and also Yas Neri... the one from UPCAT The Movie. actually, i never thought she goes to the gym. anyway, she sat across me at the lounge and read a book din. i wanted to speak to her or something cos we were schoolmates naman nung highschool pero nahiya ako. hahaha that's what happens when someone you just see walking around during highschool becomes a celebrity. i'm usually more friendly than that. haha

then we crossed to trinoma and blah blah blah. we didn't shop, we just looked around. i'm brooooooke. tapos! i saw this super nice red jacket at Solo. haynako bibilhin ko un promise! i just need cash. pleaaaase i want that jacket. i really really want that jacket!

FAIL: we ate at WORLD CHICKEN. their food looks really yummy and super sulit BUT IT'S TOO MUCH and nakaka-umay! figure this, 152 for a quarter chicken, pasta and rice. pasta pa lang busog na ko, it took a lot of self-motivation on my part to continue eating. the food isn't really masarap, but it's madami so we're really cool with just that. we even saw Rodjun Cruz and his girlfriend Diane (tadjock diane from wazzup?) eat at the same stall. wala lang, foodcourt eh. haha anyway, i never finish an entire plate at world chicken. sucks how i never learn. mejo sayang pera cos takaw tingin ako. sayang sayang! hmp.

// TOM! TOM! TOM OF PBB DOUBLE UP! hala ang gwapo nya! hahaha supercrush!!! >:D

// i don't feel anything special with turning 19. 19 lang nman e. hahaha next year na lang ha? hahaha >:P

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewics

Something that struck me just now.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
By William Deresiewicz

It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn't have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn't succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. "Ivy retardation, " a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn't talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

...The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren't like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly— homogeneous. ...

....I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were "the best and the brightest," as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright.... I never learned that there are smart people who don't go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don't go to college at all....

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I've been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. ... The problem begins ... when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when "better at X" becomes simply "better."...

When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher...

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they're not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people.. Their pain does not hurt more.
Their souls do not weigh more....

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich... but it takes away the chance not to be....

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher— wouldn't that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn't I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they're all rich lawyers
or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn't it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. ...

Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They've been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents' fear of failure...

But if you're afraid to fail, you're afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren't kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? ...They are... But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework...

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel...

There's a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty...

It's no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of building, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it's hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to
sell theirs...

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next
generation of leaders. The kid who's loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn't have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it's given us the elite we have, and the elite we're going to have.

---

William Deresiewicz taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008.