transposable element

this sums up why, if it was only financially feasible, i wouldn’t put jan into a local school:

The problem is that academic hothousing is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

True, it can sometimes yield the sort of results that make teachers gawp and parents crow: but what about the longer term? Does all that early learning pay off later?

No. The latest research suggests that reaching learning milestones early is no guarantee of future academic stardom.

One study in Philadelphia found that, by the age of seven or eight, there was no discernible gap between the performance of children who spent their pre-school years in nurseries that were rigidly academic and those who came from laid-back, play-based ones. The only difference was that the hothoused kids tended to be more anxious and less creative.

While many believe that knowing letters, numbers, shapes and colours is the best preparation for school, teachers take a very different view. They say that the child who arrives at reception socially adept, who knows how to share, empathise and follow instructions, will stand a better chance of mastering the three Rs later on.

The argument that more testing and toil is the best way to shape them for life in the 21st century is starting to fray at the edges. A report by King’s College London suggests that the cognitive development of British children is slowed by spending too little time messing around outdoors.

“By stressing only the basics - reading and writing - and testing like crazy you reduce the level of cognitive stimulation,” says Philip Adey, professor of education at King’s College. “Children have the facts but they are not thinking very well.”

In the future, the biggest rewards will go not to the yes-men who know how to serve up an oven-ready answer, but to the nimble-minded innovators who can think across disciplines, delve into a problem for the sheer hell of it and relish the challenge of learning throughout their lives.

unfortunately, even if i sell both my kidneys, we don’t be able to come up with the thousands of dollars required to even land a place in the german school, for example, which is asking for some 10K euro as a kind of bond, and annual school fees of more than S$15K. arrrgh!

what parent wouldn’t want to improve their kid’s intellectual abilities? but the more products i see in the market that “sell intelligence”, and the more i hear of parents sending their kids to tutorials and enrichment classes, the more i get turned off with the idea. my son is smart (if i may say so myself). that’s good enough for me. i don’t need nor do i want him to be the top of the class; i do not need such validation and i don’t want him to feel that he needs a sticker or a medal from a class ceremony to prove his worth. afterall, how much is a class medal worth in life, really?

now, slow parenting… that’s a new concept. haven’t heard about it? neither have i before i came across this article: Slow parenting part two: hey, parents, leave those kids alone. it’s the second in the series of articles on what the author calls “slow” and “hyper”-parenting, but it’s the one that had me nodding in agreement the most.

The first step is to accept that children have a range of aptitudes and interests - and that there are many paths to adulthood. Life does not end if you don’t gain a place at Cambridge or Oxford.

Not everyone is cut out to work in the City, and not everyone wants to. By definition, only a handful of children will ever grow up to be truly exceptional in any field.

If we are going to reinvent childhood in a way that is good for both children and adults, we must learn to tolerate diversity, doubt and rough edges. We must cherish children for who they are, instead of what we want them to be.

Inspired by a growing body of evidence and scientific research, schools, coaches, communities and families everywhere are finding ways to treat children as people instead of projects - and finding that they grow up happier, healthier and more able to make their own mark on the world.

now if only the rest of the society where we live in would agree. but alas, it’s not so easy.

We want them to have the best of everything and to be the best at everything. This brand of child-rearing has different names around the world.

Helicopter-parenting - because Mum and Dad are always hovering overhead; hyper-parenting; Scandinavians joke about “curling parents”, who frantically sweep the ice in front of their child. “Education mothers” devote every waking second to steering their children through the school system in Japan.

Yet parents are not the only ones curling, pushing and helicoptering. In Britain, a task force of parliamentarians recently warned that too many children dream of growing up to be fairy princesses or football stars. Their solution? Career advice for five-year-olds.

On the other side of the world, ambitious parents in Shanghai are enrolling their children in an “early MBA” programme, in which pupils learn the value of team-building, problem-solving and assertiveness.

Some are barely out of nappies.

The yearning for an über-child has always been there, buried deep within the DNA of every parent. What has changed is that many more of us now feel the social pressure, and have the time and money, to try to create one.

Deep down, most of us know that hyper-managing children is absurd. The trouble is that it’s so easy to get caught up in the frenzy.

here are the rest of the articles on this series:
Slow parenting part one: gently does it
Slow parenting part two: leave those kids alone
Slow parenting part three: let babies learn to think for themselves

the author has also published a book on this topic: Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting

day by day, i feel more and more like an aging elephant: heavy and slow. my belly hasn’t “dropped”, and i’m huffing and puffing with the slightest exertion. i know i need to rest and stock up on sleep, but ironically, sleep escapes me. i sleep with lots of pillows and that helps a bit, but the babe chooses to perform gymnastics during the wee hours of the morning, transforming my belly into strange shapes. and unlike those first flutterings in the first trimester, these moves aren’t funny anymore. getting poked from the inside isn’t exactly painless, y’know. add to that a couple of bad bouts of leg cramps.

four weeks to go. the countdown begins.

having been a scientist myself once upon a time, i am all for advances in medical and scientific research. i appreciate the extent of drug treatments available today for all sort of maladies for which, some decades ago there were no available treatment. i get excited and am hopeful whenever i come across discoveries, big or small, that have the potential to improve the quality of our lives. but this news stumps me: a woman-turned-man getting pregnant.

According to the story, Mr. Beatie was born a woman but decided to become a transgender male and legally changed his sex to male. He had his breasts surgically removed and started bimonthly testosterone injections, but kept his vagina.

Now identifying as male, Mr. Beatie legally married Nancy Beatie, the story says. The pair wanted a biological baby but Ms. Beatie was unable to carry a child. So they decided Mr. Beatie would carry the child.

“How does it feel to be a pregnant man,” Mr. Beatie writes in the article. “Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child … I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family.”

what is the world coming to?

it’s been a year, dad. a lot have changed since you were gone. some for the better, some for the worse, but i think we are all coping well, getting on with our lives. living, just like you would have wanted us to. sometimes i wish you didn’t have to go, but i comfort myself in knowing you’re with me, will always be.

for some reason, i’ve been thinking of weddings a lot the last few days. the guy who took my maternity photos and his wife were a blast from the past– his wife and i were active members of the weddings@work email group about 7-8 years back, organizing our respective weddings. we got to talk our search for photo- and videographers, and how these guys, who were just starting out during those days, are now big names in the industry. i am especially pleased to see how far jason magbanua (jasonmagbanua.com) has gone to become one of the most awarded and coveted wedding videographer today. i’m not going to reveal what a measly sum he charged us back then, but i’m glad we got married in 2000. if we were to get married this year, i would never have the budget to afford his services. but oh, is he worth every peso! check out this video teaser he made. he shot and edited it on the same day, and showed it during the reception:

cool, eh?

i hope i can unearth our wedding video from all the rubble and clutter here in our flat so i can post it here in my blog. it was made before the advent of all these modern digital cameras and editing software now available, but the style, the craftsmanship is still distinctly jason magbanua’s.
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i never really fully understood the connection of easter eggs, easter bunnies and easter egg hunt to the christian feast celebrating jesus christ’s rising from the dead. and having celebrated easter here in singapore, i got even more confused. over the easter weekend, we saw lots of people go and visit and offer gifts to their dead and burn pieces of paper. although perhaps that was an entirely different commemoration that didn’t have anything to do with easter and was just a date coincidence. or qingming, the chinese all souls’ day held in advance? oh well…

for jan, easter is like a mini christmastime, just that instead of the nikolaus, it’s the easter bunny bringing the goodies. sometimes i feel a bit worried perpetrating these illusions. when it eventually sinks in that there really is no santa claus, and that bunnies couldn’t care less about colored eggs, it’s gonna be one major letdown.

a sneak peek of our photos from last weekend’s shoot:

many many thanks to rey and cata and the rest of the gang…

sorry, thumbnails na lang muna. shy ako eh. hehe.

we spent a very enjoyable afternoon today having a maternity photography shoot, and i have to say it’s been a lot of fun, although it was more tiring that i imagined and jan was his hyperactive self and was just remotely cooperative, arrgh! oh well…

i’ve always said that i felt my prettiest when i was pregnant with jan. probably because pregnancy is the only time in my life when i don’t give a damn about stretch marks, flab, and cellulite. and it’s definitely the only time i would consider being photographed in sexy costumes without feeling atrociously malformed, haha. talk about periodical vanity.

i can hardly wait to see the results. i wonder how much photoshopping had to be done, hehe.

when we were planning our wedding almost 8 years ago, i had tremendous help from the weddingsatwork email group. back then, there were no blogs yet, not much independent, unbiased reviews of wedding related services, particularly in the philippines. nowadays, it seems that information for organizing weddings, or any event for that matter, has become much more accessible.

for those of you organizing weddings, check out marikit toni’s new blog: bigdayplunge.com

looking back to my own wedding, i am happy with most of the suppliers i ended up with (i had no wedding coordinator; proudly a d.i.y bride!). our photographer was superb and discreet (and that was before the advent of digital photography), and our videographer who was just starting back then was none other than jason magbanua, who, several years later, was the one commissioned to shoot claudine barretto’s wedding. if there was one aspect i wasn’t entirely happy about, it was the florist and flower arrangements we got. to this day, i still feel disappointed about that. so here’s a tip i thought i would share:

for those of you needing flowers for an wedding on a budget, find someone who offers wholesale calla lilies, roses, daisies, hydrangeas, and other flowers. not only will they come out cheaper, they will also be arrive with your much fresher. you can also order flower packages which would include the bridal bouquet, bridesmaid bouquet, corsages, boutonnieres, and table arrangements. or if the budget is really tight, you can just order the flowers and have a talented friend or professional do the arrangement. or, if money was no object and you’re looking for rare flowers, or a type you won’t find in dangwa, such as ecuadorian long stem roses, consider getting them from fifty flowers. they ship your orders by fedex within 2-3 days of being cut.