READING and A SENSE OF NATION

A speech by Ruby Ann Kagaoan – Calo delivered on the morning of June 25, 2005 to the parents of home-schooled students. On that same morning, the first street rally protesting the results of the 2004 National Elections was taking place in Ayala Avenue, Makati City led by the wife of the late leading opposition candidate, and there was a looming feeling of uncertainty about the Philippines. Amidst the heavy political dark cloud, this message of hope was delivered.

Good morning, parents.

Last night, I spent four hours with our national artist F. Sionil Jose. He’s 81 years old and he’s still writing, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize, and mostly likely he will be Asia’s first Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and he’s a Filipino.

So we asked him how did he get into writing, how did he start and how early did he start. His answer was so interesting. He said, “As soon as I started reading.”

He was born in Pangasinan, in a very small town there. He comes from a very poor family. And at that time there was electricity only for the street lamps. So he would go under the street lamp and read, at 10 years old, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

He said, “I remember crying when I read the story of the two boys.” Then his mother would call him and say, “It’s too late already.” So he could not wait for the morning to read.

So he was reading. And he was reading classics at 10 years old. After Noli and Fili, he read Don Quixote, then My Antonia. And that started him writing.

When I asked him, “What was the most important education that you ever received?”, he gave me a vague answer. He said, “I’ve had many.” And I talked to his wife. I said, “What training did he have for him to be a great writer?” And his wife answered, “Just like NVM Gonzales and Nick Joaquin, he actually did not finish college.”

“But how did he become a great writer?!”

And his wife said, “Through reading.”

I asked him to write a dedication on the book for my son, who was with me, a three-year old. He’s here. He’s (over) there. He kept awake for all the four hours that F. Sionil Jose talked to our group of writers. And he wrote – the name of my son is Kairos – “For Kairos, May you be interested in literature.”

The whole point is this – this is what he believes in – he said, “Literature and art have a very important function. They help us have a sense of nation.”

He said, “Literature teaches ethics. It’s not psychology. It’s not all of those other courses. It’s literature, because there you can see good and bad and make a decision.”

And when we asked him for an important message for us at this time, he said, “Nation is what its culture has built.”

And what’s important about culture are literature and art.

So he just kept on encouraging us to read, read great classics. While I was listening to him, I was encouraged, because I’ve been doing Reading Workshops.

And why I started doing Reading Workshops is because some parents in the school where my other child is attending had noticed how my child would just quietly sit down, read a book, and she would finish it quickly and get another one. It’s easy for her to finish three full books in a day just during her spare time, waiting for her dad, or at night.

And a number of parents had noticed it, and they were saying, “Sana gan’un yung anak namin.” (How we wish our child is like your child.)

And I told them, “She’s doing some techniques.”

“Techniques?! Meron bang techniques sa reading?” (Are there techniques in reading?)

“Yes, there are.”

And so the Directress of that school asked me to do a Reading Workshop. And that was the first time – last year. I did a 3-hour workshop. I tested on them things that I had done with my children. And, they worked. The techniques worked.

This summer, I was asked to conduct workshops as well, Reading Workshops. And these were with children who were average or below-average. They would read less than 30 words per minute. And if I asked them what they remembered, they could not remember!

They would spend about 20 minutes on one page. That’s how I started the workshop, just to test them. I asked them, “What do you remember?” They couldn’t remember. But within a day, just teaching them some techniques, right away from 30 it became 110. And the next day, 245. The next day, 260, and with a comprehension of 70 to 80 percent.

For each level, lower elementary, upper elementary, I did different techniques. And then for the parents I shared techniques for adults, and their rate was 500 percent improvement, from 200 words per minute to 700 words per minute with a 90 percent comprehension.

These are techniques that I learned over the years.

When I was 9 years old, I had my first poem published and that encouraged me. By the time I was 11, continuing my creative writing, I felt I couldn’t write as much as I wanted to because I didn’t have enough inside. So I said, “I must read.” So I forced myself to read anything – labels…everything.

At 12 years old, my father enrolled me in a reading program. So I had all of those techniques. But later on I realized these were all external techniques. I’m sure you’ve heard of them, these things (demo the speedy zigzag finger-pointing technique), and all of that. These are external.

When I became a parent, my first child, who is a student of TMA, was born three pounds. While she was in my womb, the doctor said she would always be delayed mentally and physically. And I told myself, “That will not happen.”

I prepared for her birth. I read How To Teach Your Babies How To Read. I read many things. And so at 6 months, I was teaching her doodling. At 5 months, we were teaching her how to swim. At 6 months, I was doing sight reading to her. By the time she started toddling at 10 months, she could read, she could identify words, she could read before she could speak – and it’s possible – and I continued to read to her, read with her, everyday, not knowing that these were techniques, which I will share with you.

By the time she was 5 years old, she said to me, “Mommy, give me a real Bible.”

“Hmm?! You have many Bibles. You’ve read them many times. The Children’s Bible and several versions.”

“No, no, no, I want a real Bible. The one without pictures. Small print.”

Because her imagination was so much, she did not anymore need pictures. Pictures were even a hindrance to her own imagination.

I gave her a real Bible! And she was reading it at 5 years old. She could read like any college graduate at 5 years old.

I read the Bible from cover to cover. It took me actually two years – from age 33 to 35. Two years to read the Bible from cover to cover. It changed my life.

When she was 7 years old, I told my daughter, “Why don’t you also start reading the Bible from cover to cover.” And she read from Genesis to Matthew in two months, at 7 years old.

At 7 years old, my daughter went with me when I had my routine check-up for my eyes, and she said, “Mommy! Mommy! Me too! Me too!” So I said, “Okay.” And there I discovered that all that time my daughter was doing all those feats as a child reading, she only had one good eye.

Because of her premature condition, something happened with her left eye – it did not develop like her right eye. And so I thought, “If my daughter who has one good eye can read that way, what more a normal child – a child with two good eyes.”

And so I had this thing with reading. My second, she’s a reader – the one who is in the other school. And we have our third – he’s now in Ateneo Prep – and although he couldn’t read like his sister at 5 years old, because he would see in our house we’re all reading, always reading, there’s a culture of reading in our house, he also loves books.

So I’ve seen that this is something that we could share. It’s not all of those “external” (demo the speedy zigzag finger-pointing technique again). It’s something about the heart, and a whole attitude about reading.

Recently, an NGO invited me to share the reading techniques. The NGO is called BASA. It’s just a small group headed by a Jesuit priest, Fr. Ted Gonzales. And their vision is so large scale, nationwide. They want to create a culture of reading in our nation by creating public libraries. And so they asked me to share.

And the first project we had was in a Makati public school near the race station. These are children poorest of the poor who live with horses, because their parents take care of horses. And it was told me later on that the children that I handled were remedial children from Grades 1 to 6, meaning, they’re delayed academically. But that was not my consideration when I taught them. As far as I know, they’re students.

But just the same, the techniques worked on them. That 500 percent, they achieved it within an hour. So the four hours was because of activities, building up, building up, so they knew whatever were the obstacles in their minds about reading, they were taken out. And they started enjoying reading.

And so when TMA asked me to share the Reading Workshop with the parents and with the students, it is with great joy that I’d like to share these techniques.

And all the more I was inspired when I heard F. Sionil say, “Literature can help build a sense of nation. And if we have a sense of nation, we will have a sense of obligation to our nation, a sense of sacrifice for our nation so that we can build a strong people.”

Thank you very much.