Young Blood

Living physics
Back in my senior year in high school, I developed an immense affinity with my physics subject. Not only did it challenge me with
different formulae and computations, it also taught me various lessons that I apply in my daily life up to now.
In learning, we are comparable to a white light passing through a prism, which embodies the knowledge and education that we obtain.
As a result, we come out in different colors, from red to violet, darkest to lightest, showing us that initially we are all the same, and our
outcome depends on how we understand lessons and apply these in our lives.
Dreams start merely as thoughts, fueled by perseverance and determination, immortalized by passionate people who never cease to do
the impossible.
Our dreams are like vectors represented by arrows. The arrows tail, the origin, shows us the starting point where we first i magined,
wished, and desired. The length or body of the arrow symbolizes the distance we took in attaining our wishful thinking. The arrowhead
leads us to the path where we will succeed, overcoming all strife and achieving our vision.
We are continuously changing our position; thus, we are constantly in motion. We speed up and keep up with the external forces that
enable us to carry on with our plans. Once we accelerate, we are restless, always seeking progress and growth. There will be instances
when we decelerate, but the point is that we always go back to where we started: our reference point.
As the First Law of Motion states, every object continues to remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless a force acts on
it to change its state. We look at this force as our inspiration, the driving element that starts our engine, fueled and kindled by a blazing
zeal and passion for success and fulfillment.
A person attains power when he/she does work over a period of time. Its a lesson in perseverance, as stated well by the old Filipino
saying Kung may tiyaga, may nilaga. In order to succeed, we must work hard in spite of the time we must spend. All the efforts we
exerted will be worth it once we attain the dreams weve worked hard for.
We are all projectiles thrown in different places, in different circumstances, in different ways. Yet, we all have our own path we call our
trajectory, which determines the direction of our journey and the time that we have to spend in reaching our destinationtriumph and
glory.
We are magnets, constantly attracting what we imagine and what we aim for.
We have to attain internal equilibrium in our lives. We have to feel a state of inner balance in our system. Its either we are stable or
unstable. When we are stable we become firm and strong, forces equally distributed throughout our whole system. On the other hand,
when we are unstable we are frail, easily toppled. Our equilibrium is affected by the position of our center of gravity, the society that
either makes or breaks us.
The people around us are called forces, for they are the ones who push and pull us, either for the better or for the worse. These so-
called forces are unpredictable for there will be times that we wont see them coming. There will also be times when these forces will
help us rise from our fall or, the opposite, push us to the edge.
Gravity is a natural phenomenon. It is an attractive force that exists between all objects in the universe. It pulls objects down, similar to
how problems pull people down and let them fall. Problems are tests that God gives to people for them to surpass, not to weigh on
them. Another thing gravity teaches us is how to keep our feet on the ground, regardless of how much life has graced us.
Interaction with people is represented by the two intermolecular forces: cohesion and adhesion. We are cohesive when we interact with
people of the same interests, adhesive when we interact with those of different interests and preferences. Although being adhesive also
means having contrasting pursuits, we still keep the affinity among our differences in order to work as one for progress.
Our parents, mentors, and peers are the buoyant forces that push us up when we are engulfed by various difficulties in life.
When we are stressed, we are physically, emotionally and mentally distorted. And when we fail to find solutions for our stress, we
become strained, our ego is deformed.
The Law of Interaction states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I believe in karma, and that whatever we
do to the people around us returns to us, whether good or bad. That is why before we do or say something, we must first discern the
repercussions of our actions and words. When we do good, we are blessed. When we do otherwise, we are condemned.
The greatest lesson Ive learned in physics is that for every problem there is a solution. The formula of each solution may not always be
the suitable one, but if we explore further and devise new formulae to solve our problems, we may find the right answer.
Vinny Denise Gabrielle T. Real, 18, is a second year pharmacy student at the University of Santo Tomas.










Young Blood
Taga-public
Id very much like to say that I am currently a highly paid professional living in the lap of luxury, just so I can lend this piece an
inspirational rags-to-riches feel. But, alas, I am simply a twentysomething writer, trying to make the most of my paycheck. This is not a
rags-to-riches story, only a simple tribute to my beloved alma maters.
I grew up in public schools. I clearly remember my very first day in the first grade. We didnt have nanniesour mothers themselves
had to take us to our classrooms and then leave us there because they had laundry to finish. I was scared and I wanted to cry,
especially when I glanced through the classrooms wooden jalousies and saw my mother leave. But eventually I made friends and got
the hang of it.
Friends in public school tend to stick, probably because no one went anywhere far enough. Or maybe because every day, we had to
greet them with Good morning, dear classmates! Whatever the reason, I know that my best friends in the first grade are stil l my best
friends now.
Not everyone stayed, though. Many of our classmates kept missing classes and became the butt of jokes. But during Parent-Teacher
Association meetings, wed hear their parents explain that those kids had to take care of their baby siblings or help their f athers in the
fields. In many cases, theyd be absent on a Friday and not come back the next Monday or for the rest of the school year.
Then again, its not like public schools are a kids idea of a wonderland. Kids dont exactly like being cramped in small square rooms
with 40 to 50 classmates. Kids dont have enough patience when they have to share old textbooks, especially with classmates of slower
reading speeds. Kids dont get motivated when they have to make do with rickety seats or leaking roofs.
Still, we had our share of fun. Though we had no playground with swings and seesaws, we loved playing team games on the grass.
One favorite was the slipper game, which is like baseball, only with slippers instead of balls. Yes, we wore slippers to school. There was
no real policy on wearing uniforms, much less school shoes. This was only appropriate, considering that many of us couldnt even buy
new slippers when the old ones wore thin.
We didnt mind, because we would rather go barefoot than wear shoes when we leaped in luksong-tinik or climbed trees. For us, it was
childhood bliss.
Kids as we were, we had very little sense of entitlement, because everyone was required to work. We were taught early on that we had
to work not only for the things we wanted but also for the things we were responsible for. We scrubbed classroom floors and weeded
gardens. We hauled gallons of water to feed the plants and cultivated the earth with our hands.
We had to perform tasks like these every day and no one was exempted. It became such a norm that if anyone tried to dodge the tasks,
he or she would be branded lazy and annoy the rest of us.
My favorite task to do was rare: cleaning the library. Ironically, the school library was closed on most school days, and one of the few
times it would be opened was when Department of Education supervisors were expected to do inspections.
I loved being a library cleaner. The books fascinated me, partly because they werent readily accessible to us. As I dusted the shelves,
Id go through every one of them, from the 20-page Adarna books to the donated American textbooks which still had the names of their
previous owners.
Despite the restricted access to books, we had other ways to enrich our learning. We especially loved Sineskwela days, when entire
grade levels would be ushered into the administration building to watch Sineskwela on TV. We were packed like sardines, but we
cherished our every brush with the multimedia.
Things werent much different in high school. We still did the cleaning, still expected closed library doors, and still got giddy over any
new-ish technology that arrived. My batch, the so-called wired generation, couldnt use computers until we were juniors who took up the
ICT elective. Even then, the most we could study was Microsoft Office. And this was 2005.
But most of us didnt mind. The notion was that we wouldnt have much use for computers in our small rural town, anyway.
This is where we fell short. We werent thinking big enough, or maybe we didnt know how. Its no wonder why, when high school was
over and we had to make one of our first big life decisions, we were fazed.
On my first day of college at a private university, I was alone and it felt like first grade all over again. The difference was that the
intimidation didnt wear off the more people I met. Instead, it intensified every time a classmate mentioned a computer term that did not
ring a bell for me or an author whom I had never heard of. The alumni of private high schools, especially, seemed much more well-read,
better-equipped, and generally way ahead.
I worried at the thought of not being able to keep up and not passing university standards. I cowered so much that I even flunked an
algebra midterm. A freshman without close friends, I wanted (more than I ever wanted in grade school) to go home and cry to my
mother.
But if theres one thing from public school that empowered me, it was the years of experience in school publications. That was why I
took a communication course in the first place. So I pushed myself to outlast the tricky minors, and when my writing classes finally
came, things became easier.
I knew then that I owed a lot to my publication mentors in elementary and high school. They were the special kind of public school
teachers who stayed after hours just to help us students become better at what we do.
When I realized this, I saw the many ways public schooling has gifted me. I had teachers who went beyond the lesson plans just to
teach our class skills like public speaking and singing. I formed a sense of responsibility and an awareness of my environment because
I was taught to dirty my hands with the earth and be proud of it. I had the best childhood because we were allowed to be innocent and
happy with the simplest things, like 20-page books and running barefoot on the grass.
So this is my salute to all the public schools across the country. Thank you for teaching us, in unexpected ways, the very essentials we
need in life.
And this is a shoutout to public school kids who grew up and now see the real world, the small-town kids now taking the midnight train
to anywhere, the tree-climbing kids who had holes in their slippers and now on their certainty about the future:
It may look scary, but youre ready for it. Go big, classmates. Youll never get lost with your bare feet planted firmly on the ground.

Hyacinth J . Tagupa, 23, is a freelance writer and a proud alumna of Catarman Central School, Camiguin National High School,
and Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan.