The Better End of Educ 14

We always get to the point where we have to pronounce the final words after we start drifting away from each other. We do this to express rancor or love or gratitude. This also gives us the opportunity to say about things we directly or vicariously experienced along the journey of doing things we performed together.

At the beginning of the course, I mentioned that I want to know how guidance and counseling impacted student achievements. In the process, I've met questions that need insightful answers. I wondered if guidance can exist without counseling or can counseling exist without guidance. I learned that these two concepts – or human activities – are also two different things. They are not transposable. They cannot happen in the absence of the other. Otherwise, their goals to transform and improve life cannot be achieved. I learned that guidance and counseling have to happen together, one after the other or both at the same time.

In doing our portfolio, I was bombarded with many apprehensions and awareness about helping. We matter to the lives of those people around us. And it only takes a touch of a hand or a tap on the shoulder to start the act of helping and consoling. Our words matter to people who value us. That’s why when we write them messages; we show them how we treat them. This portfolio has compelled me to linger on the internet, to confirm my personal answers to trivial questions. This portfolio has encouraged me to become creative. I swear, I've never been this creative before. Even in my Humanities class. I don’t like cutting out papers, or drawing things and mixing up colors. I am not skilled in these things. But this portfolio swayed me to the other side. I learned that I have the potential to be creative. I am creative, in the way I knit words together or in the way I systematize my ideas. I am overwhelmed with gratitude that despite the bunch of stuff to complete at the end of the semester, I was able to accomplish them with patience and determination of a teacher. I can’t believe I did this!

The writing of my biography was very exhausting. Seriously, I suffered several repetitive strain injuries on my right arm in the process of writing. You know that feeling when your ideas are flowing ceaselessly and you don’t have the speed of hand to write them all? It’s frustrating. The memories jam at some portion of the paper and you don’t know how to unclog them. It is difficult telling your own story because you have the opportunity to lie or just be honest. You know you have to tell them honestly, without pretensions  yet you’re scared that someone will be reading them and they judge you because you did those things in the past. But I acknowledge the fact that this writing is only a way of getting acceptance of myself; that when I tell them about a part of my experience, I unload the burden that I endure for so many years that I didn't share them to other people. I am thinking about the days in the future when I tell stories to my students and I need to remember things in college. I want to remember this because this is remarkably a great thing to remember.

I can’t tell exactly how much I learned in this course. My grades won’t literally tell them. But when I wake up each day and I still have something to ponder about from the making of this output, I know I have learned more than I am ought to learn in this course.