What I Want to Be

Do you remember the first time you were asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Talk about pressure. I’d imagine that shortly after mastering your ABCs, adults stood over you during a family party expecting a charming answer. You would have breathed a sigh of relief when the adults smiled and patted your head after you blurted out the first thing you remembered from your community helpers picture book.

Career contemplation. In the end Dora decides to pursue her lifelong passion.

It took many seconds before I could think of an answer for my adults. I was thinking I didn’t want to be an engineer like my father because his textbooks had scary looking squiggly characters on them that looked like they came from a can of worms. At that time, I did not want to be a teacher like my mother either because she always looked like a bag of nerves.

So I told them I wanted to be a dentist. But I was as likely to jump into the field of dentistry as my molars were from developing athlete’s foot. After watching several episodes of Star Trek, I decided I’d rather be an astronaut instead. I quickly abandoned the idea when I found out that I could not even “Find X” (X seems perpetually lost too) in high school and that owning a scientific calculator does not make people develop an understanding for calculus.

I’ve had to undergo several different mutations where I thought I finally figured out the perfect identity. It’s seems however, that it’s now really anyone’s guess what I want to be or what I am now. Unlike Bong Revilla who is absolutely certain that he is a senator and not a thief or a wolf in senator’s clothing, I have absolutely no idea what I am.

I’ve given up trying to put a deadline on becoming a successful someone because I realized that the more I panicked, the more I missed out on other things like sleep, food, fun, my kids’ birthdays… oh, and is that my life passing me by? I didn’t even recognize it.

So I resolve to be calmer. The answer to that decades old question will come to me and it doesn’t have to be right this very minute.

What K+12 Education in the Philippines Means to Me

Teddy has to go to school with little Johnny

I was in my daughter's school last Friday when I came across a story more frightening than The Omen, The Exorcist or Anne Curtis' singing. I was told the Aquino administration is dead set on adding 2 more years to high school.

From all appearances, there's probably a greater chance of Aquino growing more hair than his changing his mind about this. Sadly, only beautiful women can say no to Aquino. His cabinet members and the entire nation must follow his bidding, or else thou shalt be impeached, fired or humiliated during public speeches. Our only comfort is in making fun of his sparsely adorned scalp. Hooray for Philippine democracy.

My brothers, sister and I each only completed 16 years of school but I remember my mom had to pay blood and sweat for every single year. She sold everything from sandwiches to magic beans to send us to school. If she could ride a unicycle she would have if someone paid her to do it.

I only have one kid in school now but every time I get the monthly school statement of accounts, my vision starts to dim, I go partially deaf, and I start speaking gibberish. My fellow parents and I call this the tuition fee syndrome.

It's not just the cost of sending kids to school that's the issue though. They've adjusted the recommended ages for the grade levels too. If kids should ideally be 5 years old when they graduate from Kinder 2, that means Kinder 1 kids should be 4 years old. Kids optionally sent to Nursery class for socialization and skills preparation have to be 3 years old. Toddler classes then will have to accept 1 to 2 year olds.

My youngest will be three years old in a couple of months and he can't talk, thinks everything is edible, still drops little odor-filled pellet surprises when he forgets what the potty is for and thinks he's the Batman. If my kid had to take an entrance exam now for admission in his current state, I know I'd be the first to cry. 

Even if admission tests and requirements are scaled down so young kids can pass, parents will still have to pack milk bottles, diapers, baby wipes and teddy bears along with the usual cookies and juice for their kids. That's just another way of saying small kids aren't ready.

Aquino says the Philippines is one of the few countries with just 4 years of high school. We need to add 2 more years to improve the quality of education. Don't we have highly respected Filipino nurses, doctors, educators, chefs and engineers thriving in foreign environments abroad? Aren't these people the products of four year high school programs? It's not in the number of years. It's in the quality of education and in the way we teach kids how to deal with the realities of life.

Are you ready for school little boy? Only if they teach me my ABCs in the Batcave. To the Batcave! 

Speak English Softly

We give birth to Filipinos so we can raise them to speak a foreign language and work for other countries. 

In my kid’s old school, the English speaking area is also the silence zone. They should have been more explicit and just labeled it the English mime hall. But really, I would have preferred to speak Filipino in my own country, thank you.

In other schools, English speaking campaigns are stricter. Students are not only required to ditch their native tongue for a foreign one, they’re also punished for failing to do so. The general intention of these campaigns is well meant. Educators think that forcing Filipino kids to learn English will open more employment opportunities and produce more Ms. Universe winners.

Sadly, these aggressive campaigns have proven detrimental to our mastery of our own national language and regional dialects. I’ve known straight A students who’d rather do algebra upside down than recite in Filipino. The grandson of Filipino hero, Ninoy Aquino, no less, sits across his mother in a milk commercial and babbles in wonderful English, asking his mom to translate two simple Filipino words he does not understand.

It’s true. Knowing English can put you at an advantage. I should know. I work for an Australian company that pays well, but I still think our children should be bilingual in equal degrees. Otherwise, we’d be nothing more than a factory of workers for foreign companies.

For the record, I had higher grades in Filipino than in English. To this day, I still confuse gerunds with gerbils and adverbs with a torture device.

Philippine Classrooms Promote Better Education

When I was a college OJT, I got the chance to accompany my boss to a public school where he taught values. As he was shedding sheets of sweat, and nearing dehydration, with the effort of exhorting his students to emulate some saintly virtue, several pairs of eyes kept peering from the hallway windows.

I learned later on that the owners of those eyes were part of the class. They were constrained to give my boss’ constipated performance a mandatory standing ovation outside because there weren’t enough seats inside to accommodate them.

Those kids had it good actually. The kids at the back of the class had to risk their limbs performing a delicate balancing act on chairs that looked like they were held together by safety pins. Some chairs had no back rests, arm rests or had gaping holes on the seats like toilet bowls.

More than a decade after witnessing that state of calamity, I wonder how modern Philippine classrooms are doing. Based on news reports, there have been changes. Here are just some of the improvements that support better learning:

1. Due to the lack of classrooms, existing classrooms can now be occupied by two different grade levels being taught two different subjects. This permits young pupils to learn as early as grade 1 the concept of division. As a bonus for good performance, a teacher can reward her pupils by performing magic. She can disappear from one half of the room and reappear in the other half so she can teach both classes. This is a basic trick since most teachers have yet to master the illusion of being in two places at one time.
2. Pre-school students who have no classrooms squat in the hallways during classes, thereby allowing them to develop their leg muscles, a good preparation for higher physical education lessons.
3. Older kids also have their share of classroom shortages that’s conveniently solved by night classes. That’s good training for when they join the BPO/call center workforce.
4. Many students still have classrooms. Some of these promote practical and hands on education. Students can make detailed observations of the underwater greenery in their flooded rooms or learn proper garden shovelling when the water subsides.
5. Classroom sharing can be done across one grade or year level so students can concentrate on learning just one lesson at a time. This serves the dual purpose of values formation. Students learn quicker the value of endurance when they have to share a tight square space with 60 to 90 other human beings.

President Aquino is eager to add two more years to the high school level. It’ll be interesting to see how/where else students can hold classes. Well the trees are still unoccupied.

MisObedient

My daughter just wrapped up her first year of school. Whew! One year down, 15 more to go of sleeplessness, financial juggling, project-making and time mismanagement.

Predictably, schools have their ways of making parents feel glad that they went through all that stress, distress and duress. My kid’s school had a special awards day. Their teacher was so considerate and understanding of what we’d gone through that she gave all 55 or so pupils in her grade level a special award. They should have called it the common awards because there’s nothing special about something that everyone’s got.

I suspect that the teacher must have had a really hard time. Aside from having had to think of multiple synonyms to respectful, diligent, helpful and everything nice until she got 55 awards, she also had the monumental task of rationalizing each award.

My daughter was awarded Most Obedient. That was after she snuck out of class after I told her to stay put. She only made it in time to the ceremony thanks to a harassed teacher assistant who managed to locate her without a tracking device and drag her and one other deserter to their proper places.

A couple of other parents commented that their kids’ awards appeared to be positive takes on gray character traits. That led to a panel discussion among the more humorous parents.

This is what your kid’s awards might really mean:

• Most Energetic – Your kid can’t stay put and is the reason why his teacher’s curly hair is now straight

• Best in Performing Arts – Your kid loves to dance on top of tables and impersonates the teacher behind her back

• Most Well-Groomed – You or the nanny is obsessive compulsive or has a phobia for dirt, the exact term for which your kid will never ever get to spell correctly, ever

• Most Resourceful – Your kid can figure out how to give his classmates a black eye with a paper clip

Of course, we were just kidding. We all really love and appreciate our kids, even those who seem to redefine their special awards.

Where The Money Is

Technically, I failed lots of subjects in high school, those that formed the basis for profitable careers: algebra, physics, entrepreneurship, chemistry and, uh, P.E. (think Pacquiao, Nadal, Jordan, Woods). I was probably allowed to graduate either because I had top notch group mates who pulled my grades up or I had teachers who dreaded encountering my redefinitions of their subjects' core principles for another year. I argued that x+y=depression and that entrepreneurship meant tricking your grandmother into buying female hair loss products.

In college, my interests remained largely unprofitable. I excelled in ancient history, art appreciation, sociology, theology, classical literature and community service. Instead of imagining enterprising ventures like my classmates I imagined riding the Starship Enterprise or living in castles in the air.

I'd probably be doing great if I decided to pursue a career in the nunnery but a contract signed before a judge has already made sure I'll never escape the secular world with all its persistent concerns of making enough money to put milk in bottles and upstart kids to school. I badly need to educate myself differently. More importantly, I need to teach my kids to think differently before they follow my ship and hit an iceberg.

Fortunately, a fall into a rabbit hole has brought me into the world of internet marketing where everyday I get to sip tea with mad marketers who know where the money is. I just need to get more infected with whatever they have to get over the kind of upbringing that somehow makes making money so scary.

The UN Adventures

October has been designated as United Nations month to the dismay of cash-strapped parents throughout the country. What used to be a thoroughly enlightening and character-forming event has now been reduced to expensive fashion shows that kids have to join to get good grades.

Merchants who can smell opportunity miles away have gotten a whiff of this potentially lucrative event and now sell a myriad collection of international traditional clothes. My own search led me to a rack at a local store with the following list of nations: Korea, Argentina, India, Mexico, Hawaii and Aladdin. I had no idea a new nation was recently born and named after a petty thief at that.

My troubles would have come to an end if I had volunteered my daughter to represent Aladdin but alas, she had to be Ms. Panama. None of the stores in the city carried Panama’s national dress so I ended up walking 1.5 km of a street dotted with seamstresses, showing each some dress pictures printed from the internet, as if I was looking for long lost cousins in the wrong side of the world. None of them would accept the complicated design for a pittance. They all said it was so difficult to sew that they’d only accept the task if I paid them my kid’s inheritance.

I finally found a seamstress who agreed to sew the dress for less than a fortune but I had to do the materials shopping. I came back a few hours later with 3 meters of satin. The seamstress looked at me as if to ask, “How could you do this to your own daughter?”

Apparently, satin would make her look more like a little bride, the bride of Chuckie perhaps, rather than a lady from Panama. I wanted to explain to the seamstress that I was born with a shortage of estrogen and couldn’t tell satin from cotton, wool or toilet paper but Britney Spears started singing in my head, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman. All along I knew, I’m really half a man…” So I kept my mouth shut.

After three more hours of leg work and distress, I finally settled on 300 pesos worth of something, a.k.a. whatever. I next set out to visit my father-in-law to look for baubles to hang around Ms. Panama’s neck. He listened patiently to the story of the last few hours of my life and then he rolled his eyes and gestured to the windows. I blinked in disbelief. Fancy that, after all the stress and expense my pa had the perfect dress fabric hanging over his windows.

That settles it. Next year, my daughter will be wearing my pa’s curtains.

P.S. No disrespect is meant to Panama and the country’s national dress. The curtains are made of expensive lace that costs 290 pesos a meter. Of course, I do know Panama’s actual national dress isn’t made of lace but no one I’ve consulted knows what the fabric in the pictures really is.

Can't Relate

I was in the mall last week to watch my pre school kid's class stage a teacher's day show. For some reason, my little girl was left out of the program along with a couple of other seemingly irreverent classmates. She sat ogling the stage with envy and I thought, "Okay. I'll teach her to aggressively seek inclusion next time."

Then I saw the whole show. The core part of it featured kids in superhero costumes sashaying down the ramp like models. Two kids wearing the colored underwear that constitute female hero costumes were among them and I remember turning to my husband saying, "No, no, never will she ever set foot on that stage ever."

I wouldn't consider myself a rigid conservative (and there is nothing wrong with super hero costumes). I probably won't wrap my daughter up in ankle length tablecloth when she becomes a teen or tape an alarm clock around her neck so she'll know exactly when I want her to be home. It's something else. Probably my sense of purpose.

For the first time, I came to appreciate how the nuns in my old school "raised" us. We had to go to school in a rigid color scheme uniform from head to foot. Any article of clothing or fashion that was in excess of what was prescribed earned us tickets to the amazingly frightening office of the guardian of morality.

On special days when there were school shows or presentations, when we were permitted to sport clothing outside of our dull, blue world, sleeveless shirts, short skirts and colored nails were still banned and costumes for shows had to cost less than a burger's price tag or cost nothing at all. The shows themselves had to be so visually minimalistic that watching them felt like watching a fish in a round fishbowl that didn't even have the courtesy of sand to adorn it.

We thought the nuns had a pretty devious recruitment process in place and we rebelled on the weekends with ostentatious displays of bad clothing. Apparently though, the nuns had more in mind than trying to recruit us to wear penguin suits. Now I see that part of what they wanted to teach us was to have a sense of purpose.

They may have been too extreme but their methods drove home a point. Most of what you do must be relevant and must have a pretty damn good reason behind it that adds value to your life or someone else's. Stripping the frivolity that surrounds you is part of finding out if who you are and what you're doing can stand solid enough to justify itself.

Going back to the Batcave and my girl's super hero friends... Where was the purpose in all that? What was that for? Other than having put those kids up on stage so we could all appreciate their cuteness, there was nothing minimally relevant about it. To me, that day probably marked the birth of a handful of minds on shallow waters.

*Image by Crystaljingsr

Books on Wheels and Everything Nice

When I was a little girl studying in a private school, our teachers used to ask us to bring all our books and notebooks to and from school every day. So I strapped on an extra large bag almost half my size. Before there was the fantasy character template of the pretty, goody two shoes, hunchbacked, provincial girl secretly carrying a sinister gremlin inside her hump that we seem to see so often on Philippine TV these days, there was me and my hump full of books. My mom says my gremlins were the reason why I shall forever be denied the chance to apply for jobs where 5’2” is a requirement.

My daughter doesn’t need to grow her own hump. Now, kids have Barbie and Batman on wheeled frames attached to handlebars to carry their books for them and make sure genes and not education are blamed exclusively for shortness.

When I was in high school, we stayed inside warm classrooms for nearly eight hours a day. Each classroom had a single ceiling fan. Each fan seemed to look browner every year. When our fan started to make weird noises, stories of students whose heads had been chopped off by the blades of a fallen fan started to circulate. That’s when asthma suddenly became a fad and a popular excuse to get permission to sit farthest from the fan.

My daughter goes to an air conditioned room where the only threat is the explosion of odor after twenty, small, sweaty bodies that had been out playing under the sun too long pile in. At least only the teacher has to get distracted. There are no thoughts of chopped heads to frighten the kids.

Yeah, my kid enjoys the comforts of wheeled contraptions and air conditioning. I hope that’ll mean she’ll learn a lot more to help her live better and wiser.

*Photo by Arvind Balaraman; www.freedigitalphotos.net

I Wake Up in the Middle of the Night Thinking of… Money

I now personally know of two people who never finished school but are earning thousands of dollars a month online. One of them earns more than a hundred thousand pesos a month, more than what one top corporate executive I know of earns. Both these new acquaintances of mine know of several others in their circles who earn even more. Their common denominator? They all know how to sell themselves.

Should I tell my kids not to go to college and just focus on learning how to sell? I know of an eight year old who already earns dollars online through some basic form of online marketing and a teen who’s asking his mother if he can quit school so he can focus on selling website designs online. The question is a dangerous one that I’m not willing to confront or answer now or ever.

But it’s tempting to get twisted.

I graduated at the top of my class but I’ve since learned that the only way I can make money out of my academic achievement is if I have my medal melted. That’s if it’s even made of real precious metal and if I can risk being labeled persona non grata by my alma mater.

I’ve never really been at the height of financial desperation. Parenthood though can make people transform in crazy ways. I haven’t yet devolved into an automated sales spiel dispenser but I’m beginning to think I need to have some marketing skills injected into me fast. I’d imagine that would feel like having a huge chunk of squid stuck in my gut. Aside from math, science, computer and physical education, high school entrepreneurship also felt like some esoteric alien discipline designed to cause digestive disorders.

I don’t have much of a choice but to devour the esoteric and hope my intestines are strong enough to digest it. Two cute, wide-eyed kids wake up every dawn beside me. They kiss me good morning before they scream for milk. The older one is about to go to school and unfortunately I don’t think the school principal will kiss me good morning before screaming for tuition fees.

I need to gain financial skills fast but I need to be kind to my digestive system. I’m starting off with the 8 Secrets of the Truly Rich by Bo Sanchez. So far I haven’t suffered from indigestion, diarrhea or constipation yet. So far, it’s the only resource I’ve ever come across that makes me feel like business, marketing and investing are Barney and Friends.

I still honestly think education is vital because it helps build character but I wish our schools could drill into us more the importance of financial wisdom.

I will make it. I can do this. I will succeed. I will not have my academic medal melted.

When Numbers Fail Me

“Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping.”

---Bo Derek

To the utter dismay of my husband, words never failed me, but numbers always did, which allows my husband to get back at me for not failing at words by relying on my inability to compute his exact monetary worth. I wish I could use words to earn tons of cash but in the Philippines, the kind of words I excel in can only earn either impoverished fame or the ire of the politicians with the big guns.

According to CNNMoney.com, the highest paying jobs all have something to do with math skills. I hope my daughter takes after her father and finishes a course that can actually pay the monthly bills. They say money isn’t the answer to everything but it sure helps to have some.

Breeding Thieves

Take advantage of [the] misfortune of this country if you want to survive.

-Alleged advice from one bigwig in office to another

Do you remember the goody-goody two shoes apprentice nerd everyone made fun of in high school because he wouldn’t let anyone copy his assignments or peek at his coded notes? I wasn’t exactly that kid but I almost fit his shoes. Of course, I didn’t make a fuss about lending my notes or swapping minor assignments. Quizzes and tests were different matters though. The veiled nun in my head kept visiting me at night giving me sermons on the evils of cheating. I also resented the fact that I had to study for hours only to drag my feet groggily to a row of expectant fresh-faced classmates who did not need cucumber slices or coffee. But I let them copy anyway because the torture of ostracism was more painful than the permanence of eye bags or the imaginary monologue of a woman in a penguin suit. 

There was one thing I couldn’t stand though and that was me copying from them on major exams. I cheated rarely in high school and when I did, it was only because the cryptic symbols of math looked the same as chicken scratches to me except that algebraic gibberish threatened to give me a heart attack. But it was when I was the one copying that the nun in my dreams brought me a whip.

Eight years after my last year in high school, I held authority over a high school social studies class of my own. For two years, I threw periodic fits over identical schoolwork. In my time, we had the sense to rephrase and change the context of assignments that we copied. Today, kids rip off pages from Wikipedia, photocopy them ten times, write different names on each copy and submit to the teacher. What makes them do this? Is it laziness, opportunism, stress or the culture of dependence?

I got so tired of reading perfectly written paragraphs that I made sure none of them would ever copy again. I made the skill of analysis a requirement for all my assignments, quizzes and tests. I stopped asking what and when and started asking my students how and why. Even if they opened their books in class they never found the answers until they learned to analyze by themselves. That cured cheating in my class.

Many of the non-teaching individuals I know never could understand my zero tolerance for cheating. They say it’s always been a part of school life and no student these days will survive without using each other. That’s just the kind of attitude that breeds the kind of future scoundrels rallies are organized against. Of course, I had many classmates who were chronic cheaters who grew up to be upstanding citizens of some other country, but would you rather take the chance hoping your kids won’t grow up into thieves in office? Tell them it’s ok to cheat a little to survive and they have a 50% chance of growing up into those thieves.

Do you want to clean up this country? Start with the kids. Tell them it is never acceptable to compromise and that cheating in any form is never right. If they’ve never had nightmares of nuns, you’re the only one who can help.

English Campaign

It is shameful. I cannot bear to imagine that many schools, organizations and institutions still require their people to speak only in English.

I suppose it is admirable that many Filipinos have a good grasp of English. It just absolutely perplexes me though that in some quarters, those who slip are fined, rebuked or ridiculed. If memory serves me right, it was only a couple of weeks ago that a beauty contestant became the recipient of all words unholy for her poor grammar and her inability to express herself in English. A politician went so far as to say that her performance was proof of our country’s declining quality of education.

I daresay shame on him and on anyone who puts a premium on another country’s mother tongue over our own. I do understand that mastering English is a must for most of us. It is after all most people’s major key to either get call center jobs that are perfect manufacturers of the living dead or get overseas employment from where a few Filipinos have come home in white boxes.

It is the poverty issue yet again. I don’t think we lack racial pride. We just can’t afford to speak in our own language. Learn to speak in English or else you will never survive or escape the sinking Pearl of the Orient that has sprung as many leaks as there are islands. I think the reason why the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese still speak their mother tongues better than they do English is because they feel no need to abandon ship.

Note: Yes, I write in English so naturally I have to be defensive. I have to write in English because I too can’t afford to write in Filipino but I actually write better in Filipino.

Teacher Entrepreneurs

You know how they say that teaching is a noble profession. I’m not about to argue with that. In fact, I love teaching and I did teach for two years while working as an HR officer for a school. I admit that I liked teaching better than the emotional mayhem of employee office intrigue that struck my office on a daily basis. So why didn’t I choose to pursue teaching?

After two years of excruciating spider veins and hoarse vocal chords, all I had was the so called psychological fulfillment benefit of teaching (which is really debatable because I personally know teachers who confuse fulfillment with the satisfaction of knowing that they finally know better than a whole classroom full of people). I had mouths to feed; I wasn’t earning well and I wasn’t about to go through the beaten path of supplemental earning. It’s not because I have any real moral qualms about it. It’s really because I’ve never been good at selling.

I remember my husband’s stories about studying in a public school. They were expected to buy from their teacher’s hidden store of edible merchandise. My husband was at a better position than his classmates. He was the designated seller (and was therefore entitled to leftover freebies) while his teacher diverted the attention of the roving principal.

Unlike my husband, I studied in a private school and vending to students and parents is strictly prohibited in most private schools. Of course, I know better now. Private school teachers don’t sell food like some public school teachers do and they definitely don’t sell to students unless they’d like to get a one way ticket to unemployment. Some private school teachers however inconspicuously carry glossy Avon, Sara Lee and Natasha catalogs while principals, coordinators and HR officers (like me) discreetly look the other way or even secretly place orders themselves.

Okay so there’s nothing inherently wrong with a teacher selling during her free time but they didn’t have to if they were paid right.