Education officials, in an Inq7 report, said they have found the textbooks submitted by local publishers for possible use in public schools in the country to be full of grammatical errors.
I’m glad they’re finally taking notice but alarmed that there is no mention of those textbooks already being used by schoolchildren in public elementary and high schools that are also full of mistakes.
I should know. My son goes to a public school.
If illnesses behaved the way doctors and medical books said they would, I’d be bald, obese, have acne, and maybe even a beard. It’s a good thing they don’t always do, my gynecologist said when she told me I have polycystic ovaries or simply that I have cysts in my ovaries.
As it is, I’m still all of 100 lbs., my long wavy mane (which I straighten out with a hair iron) is as thick as ever, my eyebrows on the other hand are still as sparse, no growth on my upper lip that could be mistaken for a beard (and I look in the mirror every hour just to be on the safe side), and there is not a single pimple on my face.
My obsessive research on this subject has led me to a forum of near hysterical women seeking a cure to this or that symptom. I guess I’d be hysterical if I were balding, 45 kilograms overweight, and have hair on my upper lip.
I was tempted to join and ask if there was room there for a skinny, beardless female still grappling with the realization that her hormones had gone haywire but stopped myself just in time. I obviously do not fit the stereotypical patient so why add to the confusion.
(more…)
Playing weboggle and getting very bad at it. Is it just me or are the words getting harder to find? Sigh. WEBoggle is the online version of the classic word game Boggle.
My 7-year-old son and I were watching Dreamcatcher (a screen adaptation of a book by Stephen King with the same title) on cable when, during a really scary scene, his hand clutched at his chest and he exclaimed “Gracious!”
I looked at him and he looked at me and we burst out laughing.
Dylan has been using English in most ordinary conversations now, an offshoot I’m sure of a policy in his first grade class that sets a penalty of a few pesos on anyone using the Cebuano dialect in the classroom.
But I did not realize how pervasive the effect of this policy was in my son’s life until last night, when he preferred to express his surprise in English, in our home, where it won’t cost him anything to speak Cebuano.
(more…)
My seven-year-old son Dylan goes to a science school. I had considered it a special public school (this view seems valid if you consider the reasons given by the school for its existence or its vision-mission) until yesterday when I learned that it does not have a science subject (gasp) for the first and second grades.
That seems incongruous — a science school without a Science subject and at very crucial grades in the elementary level. Shouldn’t this be the time when a foundation for science is developed in pupils? By teaching them about the world they live in, the creatures they share their world with, and their world in relation to other worlds?
(more…)
For those of us who are grieving over the sad fate of Hogwarts headmaster Albus Wulfric Brian Dumbledore in The Half-Blood Prince, the sixth installment in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, let us take heart for there may still be hope.
Dumbledore is not dead. He could not be dead. Or so Dave Haber, managing editor of Wizard News, contends and in his website—aptly named Dumbledore is not Dead, he gives us his reasons for this belief.
Haber believes there is more to what happened to Dumbledore in HBP than meets the eye and lists the many clues in the book that tend to show why the Hogwarts headmaster’s death could be other than what it is.
