A ritual of summer

THE annual recognition ceremony for our community elementary school took place yesterday, in the heat of the morning sun; thankfully, it was over a little past 10:30 am, thanks to the tight program prepared by the Grandview Elementary School management headed by Luis Marasigan, its officer-in-charge.

So how did my worried Grade V son fare this time? Well, Budi wound up a fighting fourth; on the basis of academic grades alone (which I think account for 70% of the total grade), his performance this year would have been good for 2nd, which is what he did last year. But then again, Budi will have his final chance next school year when he moves on to Grade VI.

Nonetheless, he ended up with the most number of special academic and non-academic awards, including being the best performer in Filipino -- a subject all my three children in public school, starting from Ezekiel down to Sofia, are having trouble with, but seems to have conquered this year! Maybe this thing helped after all, Irvin?:)

My future little teacher Sofie, in addition to the "Best in Filipino" award, also got fourth. But she, I think -- and this is not because I'm playing favorite -- has more upside than Budi if performance trends are considered.

At the tender age of six after finishing Grade I two years ago (Sofie was only 5 years old when we enrolled her), she was scratched from the honor rolls; that was the year then Education Secretary Butch Abad decreed -- correctly, I think -- that there should only be one set of awardees per grade level regardless of the number of sections there are in a school. That year, Section B contributed most of the honor students, simply because their teacher was more liberal in grade-giving.

Last year, Sofie cracked the Top 10, good for 8th place; this time around, she leapfrogged over older classmates to take fourth, within striking distance of the perennial top performers. Competitive like Budi, and blessed with extraordinary diligence that she got from her mother, my Patsy Bulatse is aiming higher in these next three years.

How about Ezekiel? Lynn texted me last Friday that our eldest dropped out of the Top 10 again, but still within the Top 20, more than enough to stay in the Engineering Science Education Project (ESEP) class of Cam High next year if he chooses to. But to his credit, he did very well in the recent national and division achievement tests, topping Mathematics and Filipino.

So on the whole, in this annual ritual of summer, our family remains to have a lot to be thankful, and our kids a lot more to do, and far more grounds to cover. Whether they will commit themselves to higher personal goals and make the requisite sacrifice these entail, or enjoy the view and smell the flowers along the way, is largely up to them: their father, mother and lola will always be around as guide until they become ready to take on life on their own.