Mateo has been going to school for more than a week now and it has been bothering me ever since. See, we enrolled him in a traditional school. Actually, I didn’t know that such traditional schools still exist. I was very surprised that they still do and that they’re still actually still more common than the kind of school that I’ve been used to for the past 7 years.

I guess I took it for granted that the school I used to teach in was progressive in its preschool approach. So during the first day, I joined Mateo for a few minutes and from the 30 minutes or so that I’ve observed inside the classroom, I didn’t like it. Heck, I cried on our way home because I felt like I took away something great for him and forced him into something else.

During the first few minutes of the class, everyone was sitting down in their chairs and expected to be in their ‘best behavior’ which I interpreted to mean that they should sit quietly and face front. Believe it or not, the parent in me wasn’t the one who was screaming inside but the teacher in me! There were no books for free reading inside the classroom which even Mateo noticed! Even if the kids don’t really know how to read yet, they can still use them by looking at the pictures and ‘reading’ in their own way. How else can they learn to love reading?!?!

Aside from this, the teacher spoke mostly in Filipino. I’m not exactly pro-English when it comes to medium of instruction but she kept on shifting from English to Filipino even within a sentence. Even here at home, I would often remind Ramil and try to be conscious myself of shifting between two languages. Mateo has an excellent grasp of both English and Filipino but he’d sometimes say ‘Saan tayo going, Mama?’ which we would quickly correct into ‘Where are we going, Mama?’ or ‘Saan po tayo pupunta, Mama?’. I want to bring up a bilingual child but not someone who cannot distinguish between the two.

Lastly, and probably the last straw for me, were the homeworks! He went home last Monday with homeworks! Please take note of the s there. He wasn’t asked to answer just one page in his notebook and book, there were several activity pages! What’s worse, he went home with more the next day and he has been bringing home homeworks everyday. Heck, I don’t even give homeworks to my own grade school and high school students everyday especially if all we did for a particular day is to answer seatworks and activity sheets. I only give them out if the most that we did for a day is mostly discussion and some examples. Also, I don’t believe in too much homeworks for preschool students. First of all, they should have time for all kinds of play – outdoor play, unstructured play, and structured play. With the amount of homework that Mateo has been bringing home, I find that we lack the time for him to enjoy other things.

Just last night, he was happily playing with his Lego. Ramil was helping him out and he was enjoying putting together his own pieces or making changes to Ramil’s. I couldn’t take him away from it even when I knew that he still has a lot of homeworks to do because it wasn’t just useless play, he was learning even if it didn’t seem like it. He was developing his fine motor skills with the small Lego pieces, enriching his creativity by making his own structures, and enhancing his problem-solving skills by figuring out how to put things together. I wasn’t about to pull him away from that so that he can practice writing ‘BLUE’ or ‘YELLOW’.

So, considering that Mateo is just 3 years and 5 months old, I went on a quest to look for another school for him. The school year is young and we didn’t really shell out a huge amount upon enrolling him in the school he is in now. I now have a prospective school but the monthly tuition will be double what we’re spending for the first school. Nevertheless, the school reminds me so much of Hedcen’s preschool approach that we are seriously thinking about it. I am thinking of taking on more work just to be able to afford it. Unfortunately, not until I’ve given birth because I’ve been given strict instructions by my doctor to get enough sleep (since I currently have iron-deficiency anemia). If we decide that we want him to go there instead, we will be bringing him for a visit so he can also try the place out. I was initially willing to let him stay in the traditional school because he’ll only be there for a few months anyway before we leave for Brunei but I just really can’t stand it. Both the teacher and the parent in me are crying out for him to get out of there.