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3 I The Best Online Education System in the world
SOME COMMON UNCOMMON ABILITIES
Kathlyn Q. Barrozo
Class of 1991, University of Santo Tomas
B.S. Medical Technology
In our day-to-day existence and interactions, we often get to experience both our inherent abilities and the
not-so-common ones that just come as needed.
Teachers are required to have the ability to inspire their students and stimulate their interest. Many teachers
have the uncommon ability to motivate learners in the study of even the most yawn-inducing subjects.
Teachers also have the ability to talk in their students’ sleep, jostling students awake with their “I warn you’s”
and a smart rap of a stick on the table. Teachers must have the ability to summon infinite patience in such
cases since failure to do so could result to senseless, endless soliloquy that will eventually end with the
senseless gnashing of teeth and hair pulling come grading time: How am I going to grade this student?
Some students also have the uncanny ability to keep their eyes open while stifling a yawn or sleeping inwardly.
God forbid that the teacher calls them, because they’d be reduced to mumbling their way out of the question
and having the teacher wonder what it was that she had asked the student in the first place. I have had such
comical moments, interpolating with a student I had caught unaware and then having to give the answer in
hopeless, utter defeat. Only much, much later do I realize that the student had skillfully maneuvered his/her
way out of the fix I had set and made me none the wiser for it all. Many students have the ability to remember
chunks of information the night before the exam, but become virtual tabula rasas at the end of the exam. Then,
they have the amazing ability to justify their atrocious study habits with the reason that they are individuals
who learn more from experience and perception and not by an incoherent jumble of facts and figures.
One of my own children has the ability to confound me with his answers and statements. Like one time when I
asked him why his new ruler had been cut in two halves, to which he answered that he had known beforehand
that it was going to be cut in two. WHAT??!! I virtually screamed. It turned out that he had used the ruler in a
swordfight with his classmate and had ended up with a broken ruler. At another time, I asked him how he got
green paint on his shirt, and he told me it wasn’t him alone who had gotten green paint on his shirt: there were
many, some, no, many of them.
We have our own abilities. How unfortunate that some of them can be maddeningly unique and mystifying at
the same time…..
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1.
What are your unusual abilities? Why do you consider them so?
2.
Can you name some people who possess uncanny abilities?
3.
What unusual ability do you sometimes wish you had? What makes this ability special for you?
4.
What do you think incites uncanny abilities to appear? Be as specific as necessary.
5.
Do uncommon abilities like being double-jointed or tongue rolling have scientific explanations?
Research on these two abilities and present your findings in class.