12 July 2010 – For the past few weeks, there has been a lot of stress at home. Well, some of it is brought home from the office, I have to admit. After all, I just finished a company-wide town hall and Tatay just covered P-Noy’s inauguration as president. Those big items sit right on top of daily duties as employed individuals. Busy has hardly been a word to describe our schedule… we can quite possibly aptly describe it more as megatoxicI’mgoingtobeinstitutionalizedsoon.
Work we can handle. We’ve been through worse kinds of hell, i.e. his coverage of the Maguindanao Massacre, Typhoon Ondoy, attack of Manila Pen, Glorietta 2 bombing, Oakwood Mutiny, etc; my very interesting rides in choppers as daylight drew or cargo planes that rained inside or garbage trucks with pig heads near my feet, waking up at 5 in the morning after a gig that ended that 2am, etc.
Given this view of the past, a town hall for 1,000 employees or a presidential inauguration after 9 years of near-dictatorship is a couple of slices of a piece of cake.
What I didn’t realize would truly slap heavy duty stress right onto our faces is that of going back to school. Yes, we are back in school; in Grade 1, to be more specific. When I graduated from college in 1997, I didn’t think I would have to go back to Square Friggin One. After changing our carefree lives ever so drastically when she was born six years ago, Tala has taken it a notch higher simply by going to big school.
Nothing forces you into adulthood more efficiently than sending a child to school, I believe. First there’s the sky-high tuition fee, then there are the million and one school supplies that your child “just has to” have, then the everyday baon that makes a slight yet (as it turns out) still significant dent on your monthly household budget…
And then there’s the homework and the tests. Math, Reading, Language, CLE, Science, Sibika, PE, Art, Music, Filipino… seriously, this schoolstuff is driving me mad. I never studied this hard when I was at school; my parents and my transcripts would tell you as much.
And yet here I am, plowing through a vast field of Grade 1 work, digging deep into the recesses of my brain to unearth whatever I know of complex topics like cardinals and ordinals, odd and even numbers, Alpabetong Filipino (which, by the way, has changed since I last had to memorize it), digraphs, singular and plural nouns, common and proper nouns, ang pamilyang Filipino, Panunumpa sa Watawat (which used to be a much longer Panatang Makabayan)… the list goes on.
Nothing forces you into adulthood more efficiently than sending a child to school, I believe. More to the point, nothing forces you into adulthood more efficiently than going back to first grade.
Now, what’s the URL again for Math worksheets?
