Do Kids Really Need More Homeworks?

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Zero assignments? Really?

It has been a serious debate both locally and abroad whether grade schoolers should be given less or more homework on weekends to learn better. In fact, the matter has taken weighty proportions lately that some quarters are clamoring for local education authorities to take radical steps at lessening—if not utterly ditching—weekend homework as they do in Finland, Japan and South Korea where pupils excel academically by world standards even with less (or no) homework.

I hope they'd thought of this in my grade school years. Too late for me now.

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Consequently, the Department of Education (DEPED) issued Memo 392 to this effect which was justified by former DEPED Secretary Armin Luistro as a measure to allow school kids enough time for playing and family bonding. The education secretary in the 1970s should've thought of this, too. Old school of thought on this issue maintains that in the past, school children had more time for play after school and yet had higher literacy rate. Yeah. I mean, people then were good at grammar and math even if they were just elementary grads. And play “is an essential part of every child’s life and is vital for the enjoyment of childhood as well as social, emotional, intellectual and physical development,” according to PlayEngland.Org.Uk.

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On the other hand, more-homework advocates point to remarkable results in Singapore, Shanghi in China, and Russia where kids spend from 9 to more than 13 hours weekly for homework [Quartz, qz.com], especially Singapore where kids face up to not just 9 hours of homework but very strict study disciplines as well. I'm just glad I wasn't a Singaporean kid. I mean, why 9 hours for homework? WHY?

But how true and proven are these theories and how effective are they? Have they done formal studies on these assumptions? Particularly, what did DEPED base Memo 392 on? Did it do surveys and sample surveys in strategic places in the country or did it simply adopt new homework trends abroad? We have this fondness for imitating anything we see from abroad, like extending school years, K-to-12, the idea of incorporating Korean language into the curriculum and all that crap.

In light of Memo 392, I think several schools have started trying out the lesser homework policy as a kind of experimental study. Consequently, this needs to be examined and evaluated to ascertain how effective it really is before adopting it as a permanent feature of the school’s curriculum.

The exercise may offer some relief to all parties concerned—teachers, parents and especially the pupils—but what would its effect be, especially in the long term? Would less homework result to better learning? Would that premise be effective to our local setting and culture? The effect needs to be measured.

How about the idea of giving more homework? Some teachers maintain that homework is the heart of learning. It further propels learning results in pupils, and added homework, they claim, can challenge them to push a bit further beyond their limits, improving their learning capacity. Really? If so, then why did I end up way below average after elementary? To me, more homework just robbed me of time for play and TV.

If there would be any study on this, the scope should cover some results on how the family and social life of the subjects are affected during the experiment. Do they actually have more time for play and family bonding, and does having time for these things really improve the pupils’ overall development, especially academically?

Ba't Me Forever sa Pagsalita ng Carabao English?

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So, how did we end up like this--we've been taught English from kinder to college and we've been colonized by the Americans (and still under their neo-colonialial power) and yet we speak carabo English? And it's not because we're not Americans. Something ended up wrong somewhere. Sayang aral natin ng English for so many years just to end up with carabao English. Sayang pagod at pera. What happened ba?

It's because we don't read a lot of English stuff. The same reason why most of us don't speak Tagalog well. And anyway, what we see mostly on TV and in movies are tampered Tagalog, not the real McCoy. So don't think watching Tagalog stuff on TV makes you good in Tagalog. Well, sometimes they produce something real and deep Tagalog, but they do it strictly for movies depicting history, like pure Tagalog is good only in the past. That's the impression created.

Read English books. Don't limit yourself to reading English labels and captions and ingredients in grocery items. Most people read only the headlines of English newspapers. I started with reading detective mysteries for kids and then gradually advanced to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock pocketbooks. Familiarize yourself with characters' dialogues, how they speak and act. When it's become a favorite hobby, you find no difference between books and movies. You "watch" them both.

With videos becoming more easily available to us today, the less we read books. We rely on watching than reading stories and that develops passive thinking (and may make them prone to dementia, say some experts). Watching videos or movies makes us passive--simply accepting things as bible truths without stopping to reflect on their validity, or if the portrayal does justice to real life. That mindlessness adds to our inability to comfortably talk in another language other than our vernacular so that when we try to, we stutter or slur or simply freeze.

The result? We can't quickly assemble words to express ideas in our minds. Sometimes, we do the same with Tagalog or Filipino. We have the idea but we can't translate them into sentences applicable for meaningful conversations. Why? Because our minds are not used to doing quick conglomeration and assembly of words to give form to ideas. Our minds are lazy. We just want to laugh at something funny. We don't step back and analyze why we found it funny and articulate that in our minds. Plus, our society has taught us not to criticize. We're told it's bad.

Well, some folks use criticism in stupid ways. They just want to outsmart others, period, prove themselves better. It's pure self aggrandizement. Honest criticism is weighing how close things are in the movies to real life. Many times, I see people laugh at jokes that are not funny. Though "funny" is something subjective, there should be a hint of something really funny about it somewhere. Like, merely spanking somebody is not funny, but you see some folks laughing at it really hard.

Moreover, millennial culture makes us all "text" rather than talk to our friends. The use of emoticons and GIFs makes this worse. I mean, you convey a whole idea without actually speaking out your thoughts. We lose our ability (and creativeness) to talk, our ability to express ourselves by composing words and putting our personality and individuality intact in them and then speaking them out. It's among things that make us human and unique individuals.

Instead, our use of uniformed emoticons and GIFs and text messages that shortcut everything make us lose our individuality and just melt in the faceless anonymity of the crowd. We don't like exercising our minds to think and question and get to the truth and voice that out. We prefer to click on a button that produces a uniformed response and saves us from using our brains.

So we speak carabao English. Instead of saying, "You're invited to have lunch at our place," we panic and become rattled (because we're not used to doing this) and say, "You eat our house."

CE Virus Has Mutated

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Now, why has the problem grown worse? The virus has mutated. Just browse on your FB wall and you'd see folks saying their own versions of English that look and sound more like alien tongues. I mean extraterrestrial. Despite the fact that English is a second language to us. From kinder to college, there's always the English subject to keep us literate. But are we?

The trend in Tagalog TV programs today made it all much worse. They say it's to endear the national language more among youths. Well, so far youths are far from becoming expert speakers of Tagalog or Filipino. What develops instead is a strange Pinoy millennial lingo derived from street Taglish and gay slang which authentic Filipino speakers barely understand. And the CE virus has spread. CE as in Carabao Englsh.

I miss the days when most TV programs were in English and we still spoke good, traditional Tagalog as kids. We enjoyed Filipino classic movies in the early afternoons where we heard actors and actresses of old engaging in rich, poetic Tagalog dialogues. That's besides the nice, archaic local background scenes unmistakably Pinoy. Some of us still had terrible English grammar then but not the kind you see today.

So what happened?

As school administrator back in the 1990s, I interviewed several English teachers and had them write essays. I was shocked and shaken by their carabao English, even revolting in my stomach. Who taught them that? And to think they were English majors. What more if they had it as a minor subject? And how many more teachers in the country are like that? These teachers were LET passers! What's happening? Is it the end of the world? Climate change? Global warming? Fake food from China?

But I was also like that once upon a time. My friends and classmates in grade school made fun of my grammar and lines of thought. I thought "sugar" then was a magic healing potion you used to "make the medicine go down." I watched too much Mary Poppins, I guess. And I got the lyrics of my favorite songs comically wrong and coming out with weird, funny ideas instead. I was the laughing stock of my peers.

But I managed to fix that. I determined to catch up with my English and Math during high school (especially Algebra and Physics) so that come college I'd be fit to be a top agent of the British intelligence service MI-6 and pass for another double O7 agent. Seriously. I imitated Roger Moore's diction (and also tried to look like him, but this part didn't work). That's how I beat my carabao English. I found the Carabao English cure that Pinoy bloggers and teachers especially, would find very helpful.

Later on I tried imitating how American actors talked, like Mel Gibson and Paul Walker. I noted well how they constructed their sentences and their pronunciation. The result? I was the top in my speech class when I underwent training as a call center agent. Our brand then was Riders where we assisted American drivers in the US find their way when they were lost on their highways. They thought we were Canadians. It's an effective way of improving your grammar and pronunciation--imitating the way actors talk in movies.

No matter if the CE virus has spread, there's still hope if we just have more English TV programs. Let's put them back and minimize the stupid local soaps flooding our TV programs. I learned a lot from Jake and the Fat Man, Airwolf, Hawaii 5-0, Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote, and the rest. Plus movies. Please try this, especially if you're an English teacher. Take pity on your pupils.

And I'm planning on starting an e-book on Carabo English Cure, the first 50 of which I plan to give away to my first subscribers here. You want to pre-order a free copy while I'm still doing it? Or, you need my CEC free lessons? Then email me at caraboenglishcure@gmail.com.

Say It Right

Believe it or not, there's a close connection between speaking carabao English and not pronouncing words properly. The enunciation laziness sometimes leads to laziness in grammar awareness as well, especially for us Filipinos. Why? I don't know. I just see it. I know the virus is there and rampant. Too many of us are careless about it all. You see it on FB. But folks with good enunciation often have correct grammar, too.

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I guess it follows that being wary about grammar means you're also careful to pronounce words correctly. It's my theory. Have you seen any grammar-conscious person speaking in a blurry way? I haven't, except if the guy has a speech problem involving his tongue or mouth. Then the enunciation problem is not due to laziness. I'm talking of lazy pronouncers who deliberately eat their words.

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So, be careful with your grammar and that will somehow take care of your pronunciation skills as well. And vice versa. Not always but mostly. Usually, if you're careful and smart with your grammar, common sense tells you to hone your enunciation skills as well. It's useless to have good grammar but slur when you talk. So, this mindset often automatically works when you talk if you're smart about grammar or enunciation.

And if you're a Filipino conscious about grammar or pronunciation.

There was a time when blur speech worked for me. My teachers thought I was saying the right thing and the correct answer so they gave me a passing mark. Try it. You want your poor grammar nearly undetected? Just talk indistinctly and fast. You'd often get away with it. But later, I realized it really didn't work for me. You make it a habit and later it boomerangs to you. It doesn't work when you're in sales and marketing, or in PR, for instance.

I did a stint in sales, marketing, advertising and PR, and in these fields you need to be clearly understood. You no longer answered to get a good grade. Your answers needed to be clearly said to make a living. So I started to be conscious about my spoken grammar. I was okay with written stuff because my journalist dad taught me professional writing. But spoken is a different thing altogether. I needed to be extra careful.

That element of extra consciousness or being wary with our grammar or pronunciation when speaking is what keeps us Filipinos safely grammatical. So we need to stop being lazy with our pronunciation or grammar. I know it's fun to eat, but not your words when speaking. Exert effort to enunciate correctly. And sometimes that means making sure your dentures are firmly in place.