MEDIUM RARE

Three cheers! to Gabbie, BS in Economics, UP class 2023, and Maya, Immaculate Conception Academy (high school) class 2023. Gabbie for her magna cum laude honors, and Maya for being a merit scholar of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, USA, where she’ll be taking political science and economics. Already, the two girls are enjoying some of the fruits of their scholarship. Gabbie is in Los Angeles to claim her reward from her parents, a ticket to the Taylor Swift concert, after which she’ll fly to Singapore for training with six others from Manila to prepare for work in a multinational company, in her case as a corporate analyst. On the other hand, Maya is all set to leave for Notre Dame U tomorrow. She’s only the second-ever student from the Philippines to receive the $100,00 Hesburgh-Yusko scholarship; on top of which she’s entitled to a yearly summer enrichment fund for self-designed projects. Maya has had conversations with her NDU adviser in Mandarin, her chosen foreign language, owing to her ICA background. Gabbie and Maya are first cousins, four years apart, but they’re both ICA alumnae. I insert this bit about their alma mater in an attempt to show that a second or third foreign language learned in school is not necessarily a bad thing, conjugation, vocabulary, and the rules of grammar and logic notwithstanding. Years before the two girls came along, students who were enrolled in what were called Chinese schools spent half the day – morning classes – studying Chinese history, literature, civics, arithmetic in Mandarin – while the afternoon was devoted to the regular curriculum, with English as the medium of instruction. In 1970, the Department of Education changed that to Pilipino, the national language. Before that, the Spanish law had come into effect for college students. For those taking their graduate studies, yet another foreign language became mandatory, though the student was free to choose from French, Latin, Greek, also Pilipino. In my time, the bright boys and girls who chose to major in writing in the national language as journalists seemed to walk a little taller, not least because they were a rare breed, i.e., special. What I do know from listening is that Filipinos have an ear for language.