Raising Boys

Missing notebooks and lousy teacher November 15, 2005

It’s exam week and my son Dylan will be going to his tests unprepared. Unfortunately for him, his teacher only informed them yesterday that she will be holding the second periodical exams from Wednesday to Friday. She has not given her class pointers, has not taken time to review them, or made any effort whatsoever to prepare her pupils.

She is the typical Philippine public school teacher. No, change that. She is worse than the typical public school teacher. And all this because her husband is giving her a hard time. Why not leave him for heaven’s sake. To think her daughter is also in the class. I can understand not caring if other people’s children won’t learn anything but her own kid? That seems to me selfishness at its greatest.

I guess I can’t do anything but grumble. Even with my litany of complaints against her, I cannot risk a confrontation because she might take it out on my son. Since the school incorporates the grade on a child’s character with a major subject, it would be easy for her to say my son misbehaves in school. He’s the most behaved of the lot, though, and I am not only saying this because I’m his mother.
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Blood–what’s your type? November 11, 2005

My husband and I picked up the results of the blood typing tests on our sons Dylan and Lennon at the clinic this afternoon and learned that Dylan is AB+ and Lennon is A+. That’s to be expected I guess because blood type is inherited and I’m AB+ while my husband believes (he’s not sure) he is B+.

We had the tests done on our children because we thought it would be handy information to have.

I wanted to learn more about blood types so I looked it up on the Internet and found out that a person has two blood alleles, one each from the biological parents. A tutorial on the University of Arizona biology project website said “an allele is one of several different forms of genetic information present in our DNA at a specific location on a specific chromosome.”

There are three different alleles for blood types: A, B, and O. It was Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner who classified blood according to the distinct differences he found when he examined samples under a microscope.
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A mouse’s song November 1, 2005

A team of scientists has discovered that mice can sing, BBC News said in a report. Male mice, in fact, “serenade potential mates with ultrasonic love songs”. The US scientists discovered the male mice’s ability while determining how they respond “to sex pheromones released in the urine of female mice.”

Instead of making the ultrasonic chirps randomly, the mice used several different types of syllables arranged in regular, repeated time signatures resembling birdsong.

Mice now belong to an “exclusive club of mammals that can sing”, which count among its members human beings, bats, and cetaceans.

What’s your ‘brain sex’ ID? October 31, 2005

My Sex ID test result says I may have a balanced female-male brain. Balanced. That seems the safest thing to be. I would have preferred falling in the category of women who “think more like men” as opposed to men with “women’s brains”.

The test, “series of visual challenges and questions used by psychologists in the BBC One television series”, has six categories and each must be answered within a specific time period. A ruler comes in handy because a portion of the test requires measuring the length of the ring and index fingers.

171 languages spoken in the Philippines October 30, 2005

While searching for answers to 20 questions in an Internet scavenger hunt that my online journalism teacher Dr. Elliot King assigned to the class two or three weeks ago, I found this Wikipedia entry about the Philippines.

A total of 171 native languages are spoken in the country. Except for English, Spanish, Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Chabacano, all of the languages belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family.

There are 12 native languages with at least one million native speakers: Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Hiligaynon, Bikol, Waray-Waray, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Kinaray-a, Maranao, Maguindanao, and Tausug. These are spoken natively by more than 90% of the population.

The entry cited as its source ethnologue.com, a website owned by SIL International, which “studies, documents, and assists in developing the world’s lesser-known languages.” The entry on the Philippines in ethnologue.com was based on a 2000 study conducted by the organization.
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Dylan and classmates ‘follow the leader’ October 28, 2005

What do you get when you ask over 70 six-year-olds and seven-year-olds to dance to upbeat hip-hop music. Chaos, what else? And photos good for a few laughs.

My son and his classmates and 50 or so preparatory pupils danced to the “Follow the Leader” song in last Friday’s intramurals of the Science and Technology Education Center (Stec) in Lapu-Lapu City.