On writing

Invitations to go beyond the page and appear on TV or do public speaking engagements are always a strange thing for me. Especially for TV, where invitations are always premised on something that I wrote in my columns or on the blog, and I wonder what it is they’d have me say in front of the camera that I haven’t already written. Between the risk of redundancy and growing up with parents who eschew self-promotion, the answer to these appearances has always been a quick no.

The invitations to speak to students though are harder to say no to. The Nanay always asks when she sees me cramming yet another new presentation for a talk: why did you say yes? And always my answer is, well, these are students. The teacher in me would like to believe that the more voices they hear, the more contradicting opinions they are presented with, the better learning they will have.