Learning about whale sharks and moon dogs

“Look at the moon now,” read the text message from a friend, Charlie Azcuna. And so I went out of the house, only to rush back in to get my son. For the next half hour or so, we stayed outdoors just taking in the moon and, with the help of Night Sky, an app for smartphones, the stars.

What we were watching last Monday night was a lunar halo, a breathtaking phenomenon that happens when there’s ice in the atmosphere (in the clouds, actually), refracting light to produce a giant halo in the sky.

My life has drastically changed in the last few months because I’ve been home-schooling my son. I went into home-schooling reluctantly, given my commitments at the university, writing this column, and fulfilling the responsibilities of the “sandwich generation”—raising children while caring for elderly parents. In a way, I was forced into home-schooling because my son has what we euphemistically call “attention problems,” unable to sit still in classrooms or finish an exam. He’s bright, maybe too bright for his own good, much like a plant needing the sun but forced indoors.

It’s been challenging to home-school but it’s also turned out to be more fulfilling, even easier than with mainstream schools. Home-schooling is very individualized, allowing you to slow down or speed up as needed, clarifying issues, allowing the child to expand on topics that catch his/her imagination.

After looking at the night halo, for example, my son and I got to browse through the Internet to get more information, which included learning about moon dogs, where light refraction results in bright displays on the side of the lunar halo.

Home-schooling makes both parents and children more conscious about learning as a continuing process. My son is the one who will, over a meal, refer to a science lesson about healthy and unhealthy foods, while gobbling down potato chips with wicked glee.

Or, I might be browsing through the newspapers and he’ll come up with something and begin reading aloud, as he did last Sunday with Gilda Cordero-Fernando’s “Forever 81” column. My son’s attention was caught by Gilda’s heartwarming drawing of a white cat entangled in ribbons, so I quickly took the opportunity to get him to read the article itself, which was about songs and poems from Gilda’s childhood. Soon we were reading aloud: “Oh, captain, my captain…” and I found myself, at one point, lying on the floor: “…cold and dead.”

The home-schooling system I signed up for is The Master’s Academy, run by the Christian evangelical group Christ’s Commission Fellowship (CCF). It does not require you to become a member of CCF or to be Protestant, but it does have a religion module which emphasizes the Bible.

Jonah

I have attended Catholic schools most of my life, and the Bible was not given too much emphasis until college, where it was taught as part of Catholic dogma. Now, with home-schooling, I found myself with a textbook and a children’s Bible with characters I had never heard of, and with stories that needed to be interpreted.

But it has all worked out well, the sessions actually becoming an unexpected opportunity to integrate reading, writing, MAT (music, arts and theater), math, science and what they used to call “good manners and right conduct” but in an expanded sense.

“Mephibosheth!” Or “Jehoshaphat!” my son will shout out for no reason at all except that he likes the way the names sound, but he can tell you the stories behind these characters.

One day shortly after Christmas, I came home to find him playing with a new toy given him by an aunt. In a basin, he had a plastic replica of some aquatic creature, floating with all kinds of strange debris around: a shoe, a ladder, an anchor.

I quickly realized this was one of those wacky toys that kids love, the odds and ends floating around having been “regurgitated” from the stomach of this big whatever.

“So did you find Jonah inside?” I asked, referring to one of the Bible stories we had recently read.

He looked at me like I was the dumbest creature on earth, and said: “Dada, this is a shark, not a whale.”

Oh, ex-cuuze me. I did get to cover up with: “Remember we discussed whale sharks? What are they called again?”

I have to mention that the anchor came back one day while we were driving along and I saw a jeepney with an anchor painted on the side. I asked my son if he remembered the anchor from our whale shark. I had never explained what an anchor was, so here was the chance. I pointed to the hooks and how they stabilize a ship while it’s at sea, and said that maybe the jeepney owner had once worked out at sea.

“As a pirate?” my son asked, totally serious.

We did get to talk about Filipino seafarers, and how their deployments can in many ways be an ordeal similar to Jonah in the belly of the whale, except that it’s not just three days but several months.

Noah

The Bible’s full of animals, the most well-known story being that of Noah and his ark. When we started on this story, my son was quick to butt in, “I know all about Noah already,” and proceeded to explain why there were all these pairs of animals. So they wouldn’t be lonely, he said, each of them got to choose a brother or sister to tag along, but brothers are better, or maybe, you know, a best friend.

After we finished the story, he did throw one of those kids-ask-the-darndest questions: “If God promised never again to send a large flood, why do we keep having supertyphoons and floods?”

I was stumped for a few seconds, but got to quickly reply: “But humans bring the supertyphoons upon ourselves because we don’t take care of our environment.” So the story of Noah remained a story of covenants and humans breaking our end of the promise, and global warming and climate change—simplified, of course.

I smile whenever I hear my son retelling Bible stories to his sisters. There’s wise King Solomon and the “baby test,” Daniel sticking his head into the lion’s mouth, David taking on the giant Goliath… which is a bit like the movie about Jack and the beanstalk. And, of course, Noah and climate change.

Even with children who are in mainstream schools, we have to keep reminding ourselves that our homes can and should be venues for continuing learning.

Watching the lunar halo is a good example of that kind of learning. Home-schooling has taught me, too, that sometimes, as in night-sky watching, there’s a danger of overdoing the lecturing, of wanting to explain everything. Sometimes, it’s better to leave a child alone to reflect, in awe and in wonder, while we stand on the side, ready to answer questions if they do ask, or to listen as they share what they’re thinking.

We almost never have such opportunities for learning within the confines of a noisy classroom.

(E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph)