The Margins is This Quiet River

ISA Facilitators, ISAers, a pleasant afternoon to you all:

I have a strong feeling that your General Assembly this afternoon will go down in the history of ISA as another significant milestone, equal in importance with the conferment of ISA as “The Model School” 10 years back; equal in weight with the recognition of ISA as “the only private school in Iloilo City that belongs to the Top 5 Performing School in the National Achievement Test” 5 years ago; equal in leverage of that glaring record of ISA as the “Only School ever to win the top 3 places in 8 grade levels out of a total of 10 in the MTAP Math Challenge” 2 years ago. 

But what makes your gathering today extra significant is that, I believe, it will kick off a movement in the ISA campus that will have a repercussion so far-reaching that it has the potential to fundamentally transform the way members of the ISA community think, the way they conduct their daily interaction, their worldview, their mindset, and their thinking. All these changes may not present themselves in a drastic and blaring manner like a mighty tropical storm, like a revolutionary tide that can sweep all the old existing norms away in a snap, but in a subtle, oftentimes indiscernible yet sustained and uninterrupted, like the flow of a quiet river, forming an alluvial unobtrusively, the alluvial expands into a delta, then an island, and eventually an inhabitable environ.    

The Margins is this quiet river. As members, and more precisely as pioneer members, you are The Margins. I encourage you to invite more high school ISAers to join your circle, expand and become stronger, and in the shortest possible time strive to form alluvial soils, then eventually a delta, an inhabitable island.      

Before I end, I want to share with you the profound insight of a philosopher and creative mathematician Rene Descartes regarding reading good books. This is what he said “Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.” .

The Margins is a forum where you converse with your fellow ISAers, and share your conversations with the most cultivated minds of past centuries. The Margins of a book are such a limited space, treasure it.

Thank you.