I never really did not know how to prepare for the study of law, but at the hindsight, I think I did by sheer accidence.
My elementary years is best described as games and fun, punctuated by mandatory classroom instructions. When I left the classrooms, I did not bring the lessons at home. My time was spent playing with my friends: hide-and-seek, swimming in the river, fishing, hunting birds, chess, and yes, basketball. Even if basketball is for the giants, almost all kids play the game, at least during my time.
In a small barangay setting, my genes, and not my serious study, may have stood out among my classmates. Or was it the blood relations of of my mother that resulted to my being honor student despite the lack of serious study? In a small place, everybody was a relative, including my teachers. Or is it that though I did not take down notes, I would listen to my teachers’ lecture attentively and try to absorb the lessons?
The high school education at Xavier University did not stop my propensity to play. Uprooted from my rural setting to the urbane Cagayan de Oro, I ceased swimming in the river, hunting birds, and even playing hide-and-seek. My high school was all basketball. And every summer when I went back to my hometown every summer, the days were spent in basketball, joining local fiesta leagues.
When you are a frog in a small pond, a feeling bigger than the actual is inevitable. That exactly felt like it in during my elementary education. But high school was a much bigger pond, and the frog in me almost felt tiny in the vastness of the water.
Coming from a small elementary school, Xavier High school was an awakening. You could not be an honor student by just listening to lectures. And you cannot rely on your relatives-teachers. No one was a relative. Everybody could be friends, but they were not yet friends.
Xavier was not a pond; I was thrown into an ocean. You have to cease as a mere hopping frog, but you have to swim through the waters.
While raw intelligence worked in the elementary, the Jesuit education required excellence, specially in both written and oral communication. I could follow the mathematical formulation, grasped the earth science, and revel in recalling history. But though I wanted to participate in class, I could not verbalize my thoughts into the acceptable English language, nor could I expound them in lucid sentences in a piece of paper.
For the first time in my education, I got 78 in my English subject for the first grading period in my first year high school. I was hurting when I received the grade of 78 in English. The readings at the room of my grandfather were not enough. With bruised ego, a resolve to excel in communication was hatched. If failure were the stepping stone to success, that low grade must have been my rubicon to conquer and master the English language.
The books became my refuge, and the Bibliophile club, my vehicle. Without funds to buy books, the Bibliophile club allowed students to borrow unlimited number of books from the library as some sort of compensation for rendering services in the library by filing books in the shelves, and indexing them. ( to be continued )