My 3rd Calling...

Big delay in writing this entry as my 2nd calling is not willing to drop the line... on call to write testimonials for some of the Sec 4 students who are applying for DSA and busy preparing for the cluster electronics workshop for the sec 4 from various schools! Thank you all for your encouraging replies to my blog! I appreciate them very much! The "blur" king/queen from my 112'05 class deserves a knock on the head, saying that I did not mention about them when one whole paragraph is all about them!

My 3rd calling, shouldn't be too surprising... It's what I have been mentioning all this while... to be a PAPA!
Hmmm, what do you mean? aren't you a father long ago?
You're right but I want to take one (bold) step further by switching job and helping my wife to homeschool our kids!

That's right! I'm most likely going to quit my job as a teacher next year June (when my bond ends) and embark on something else (maybe set up a tuition centre, a computer shop or online business - still praying about it! you want to give me some ideas?) so that I can have a more flexible control of my time and hopefully spend more time on my wife and 3 kids! I felt that I have neglected them because of my job. It's a big risk, giving up my iron-bowl job and venturing to unfamiliar grounds... I have always been a cautious (or rather timid) person all this while. I felt it's time for me to I take charge of my own life and take the road less travelled...

Home schooling is a big step for me and my wife. What's home schooling? Teaching my kids at home instead of sending them to childcare or kindergarten? Not exactly right. It means teaching them to develop fine motor skills, good attention span, curiosity for things and most importantly, good habits and God! Not so much about giving them worksheets and forcing them to study...We hope to let them play meaningfully and expose them to as many things as possible... Hopefully, we can bring them to travel around the world... We believe in experiential learning... learning comes from real experience, not textbooks and TYS... something that I unfortunately cannot do with my students because of time constraint, examination syllabus and my inadequacy in general knowledge. We decided not to take the easy way out: send them to a childcare centre or kindergarten to let the teachers do their "usual" stuff. My wife, in particular, don't like the ways some things are done or taught: e.g. teaching kids to draw... How do we do it? guide them by their hands and teach them how to draw things in a certain way? NO! It's about letting the kids explore by themselves and asking them to describe about their drawings! It's not the "what" they are drawing that is the most important! It's actually the "how"! Children should be given the freedom to express their creativity! We are often so into the system that we only know how to give model answers from others! Like what I told some of you, don't train yourself to be photocopiers! Be creative, be thinkers, be unique, be yourself! No one will compete with you on that! Life is what you make of it! Stand out by first standing still and letting the dust of the running crowd settle down so that you can have a clear view ahead and run at your own pace and in your own way...