GOHAS Edited

A foolhardy move, you might say, but I had to change what the last letter in GOHAS (Guest Of Honor And Speaker) stands for. Instead of Speaker, I revised it to Storyteller. 

As a part-time college and MBA teacher, I have difficulty getting my distraction-prone students to listen to lectures. But when I tell stories, they stare with rapt attention.  

Now, how about younger humans? Here are the statistics: the average attention span of a human has decreased from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds in the last two decades.

    • Goldfish have an average attention span of 9 seconds, one second more than humans.

    • The human attention span is shorter than that of a squirrel.

    • The attention span of Gen Z’s is around 8 seconds, similar to that of a goldfish.  

So here I was, thinking hard of what story to tell the Generation Alpha of my high school alma mater in my hometown (Umingan).  It would have been a cinch if Tony were still  around. He always had  opinions on indecisions. With a topic as nebulous as “Generation of Unity: Partners for the New Philippines,”  I was loathe to spew platitudes that would sound like Chat GPT.  

Then I remembered. As an author of value-driven books, I had a unity story for high school graduates: A Flood of Kindness (the last in the Oh, Mateo series of books).  It was inspired by what actually happened in Umingan! 

I thought that maybe, just maybe, the story—since it is close to home, or home itself—would catch the attention of the  kids and inspire them to emulate how the people helped build the new town, after it was devastated and flooded by the worst typhoon ever. 

Everyone (men, women, and children) did different tasks, but put together, their efforts rebuilt and transformed Umingan into the new town that it is! 

Did the storytelling work? I wish. And unity? I wish and pray for grace.