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Thursday, October 21, 2010

Who Will Teach My Children?

"Stand up for life, stand up for love".  Those are the words that stuck in my mind from the lecture that Atty. Jo Imbong, Legal Counsel of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) gave at the Teaching Night for the Couples for Christ's Mission Core Group.  The  Mission Core Group or MCG is made up of all top leaders of the Catholic lay organization.  Since I know that the stand of Couples for Christ in the raging war on reproductive health is the same as that of the Catholic Church, I expected a rehash of the arguments a few years back.  I admit that my stand on some of the provisions of the bill are debatable and/or do not conform with the stand of my Church and my being a "leader" of Couples for Christ, one provision though woke me up from complacency.  The controversial provision is the mandatory reproductive health education for Filipino children from Grade 5 to high school.  From what I heard from Atty. Imbong and from my readings, the sex education, as it is commonly referred to, will be taught to the youth by someone whom they don't know or are close to.  I feel strongly on this as this bill will usurp my role as a confidante and friend to my children.  Not only do I believe that it is my right as a mother to explain to my children this highly sensitive issue of sex education but I would be assuring them that I only have their best interest in mind.  Does a health worker or teacher know better when to teach my children the "birds and the bees"?  Do they know how my child will react on this topic?  What about the health worker and teacher?  Are they comfortable in implementing the RH bill if it is against the teaching of their Church?

I agree that government has to make the most of its meager resources in delivering the best services to its citizens.  In the first place, governments exist for the people.  But will this mandatory reproductive health education for minors be the answer for government to be able to deliver basic services to more of its people?  Isn't providing quality public education and livelihood opportunities better alternatives so the youth will be spared from early parenthood and teen marriages?  In my more than five years serving in a depressed area, I found out that teen pregnancies were common to out-of-school youths and to those with absentee parents.  H. G. Bohn's "A Handbook of Proverbs" encapsulates it with this verse:  "An idle brain is the devil's workshop."  On the other hand, lack of better employment opportunities for the majority of the people make "orphans" of our youth.  Parents are forced by circumstance to seek better opportunities elsewhere to make both ends meet leaving children with little or no guidance at all. 

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Saturday, October 9, 2010

Bravo Khan Academy!

I brought my daughter Kara last Tuesday to Loyola Student Center, a tutorial and review center along Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City, to help her prepare for her quarterly exams in Geometry.  She said she was having difficulty and feared she would fail in the exams.  I forked out P800 for two hours of review which I fervently hope helped her only to find out three days later that I could have saved that P800.

Three days after, I saw the video that one of my friends in Facebook posted about Khan Academy.  He also wrote on his wall "Go back to school for free.  And you don't have to leave home."  It's home-based and best of all, it's free.  Fantastic!  I viewed the video and found out that Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization created and sustained by Salman Khan, is one of the 5 winners of Google's Project 10 to the 100.  Google awarded the academy $2 million "to support the creation of more courses and to enable it to translate their core library into the world's most widely spoken languages."  Checking out its website, I was introduced to a free online collection of 2,000 videos on mathematics, science, history and economics.  Yes siree, Geometry is included.  If only I saw this website earlier, my daughter need not go to a review center for her Geometry exams.

How did Khan Academy come about?  It all started when Salman Khan, a Bangladeshi American, began tutoring his cousin in mathematics using Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad. He decided to distribute the tutorials on YouTube when more relatives and friends sought his help. The popularity of his tutorials and testimonials of appreciative students prompted him to quit his job in finance in 2009 and work for the Academy full time.  Sal Khan's long-term goals are to provide "tens of thousands of videos in many subjects" and to create the "the world's first free, world-class virtual school."

Bravo Salman Khan!  You are laudable for making the dream of a quality education within the reach of everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy
http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html
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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

My Bucket List Part 2

Film poster for The Bucket List - Copyright 20...Image via Wikipedia
As promised, here is my next 10 desires for my bucket list:  Please refer to an earlier post entitled My Bucket List.

11.  Build my dream house on a rolling terrain with my dream kitchen in it.  How would you like to cook up goodies with every gadget that you will be needing is within your reach?  Oh, that would be nirvana.
12.  Go on vacation riding my recreational vehicle with my husband, children with their respective families.
13.  Send at least 100 indigent students to college.  I believe that a good education is the best thing that a parent can give to his child.  Armed with a good education, a poor person has a fighting chance in uplifting his present predicament.
14.  Set up a real estate business which will take care of the retirement needs of my husband and I.
15.  Learn hydrophonics.  While in Malaysia, I saw premium vegetables like lettuce, asparagus, herbs grown in a small patch of a rocky and hilly land.  I cringed at the thought of barren tracts of land back home.
16.  Turn my Dad's agricultural lands into productive ventures.  These agricultural lands have been handed down to my Dad from his father and forebears and were the fruits of their hard work.  I would like to give tribute to them by making these lands productive and away from the long hand of the Department of Agrarian Reform.
17.  Have a farm with a mango orchard and fire trees lined up like sentinels at the entrance of the farm.  I dream of the day when my eyes will be able to feast on splashes of red and yellow.
18.  I would like that my husband and I be able to bequeath to each of our children a house and lot.
19.  Have a successful business/businesses with all my children helping out.   I would like them to work hard for what their parents had started and enjoy the fruits at the same time.
20.  Build a beach house.  It is so nice to hear the sound of the waves as they hit the sand and lull you to sleep.
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