What I Learned As A Mom After Putting My Kid In The Philippines’ Special Science Curriculum
Last week, I sat on a cracked plastic monobloc chair outside the school science lab at 4pm on a Saturday, waiting for my 10-year-old Lito to wrap up work on his group Science Investigatory Project. I was halfway through a 50-peso mango I bought from the street vendor out front, sticky juice dripping on my old jeans, when Lito came barrelling out, a crumpled brown paper bag clutched to his chest, talking so fast I could barely understand him. Their experiment worked, he said—they put different plastic sachets from local sari-sari store products in agar, added different amounts of our suki’s homemade coconut vinegar, and found that thin local sachets actually molded slower than the thick, branded ones from the supermarket. He pulled out a blurry phone photo of fuzzy white spots on petri dishes, and I couldn’t follow half the jargon, but I nodded along anyway. Two years ago, I never would have imagined us here.
When Lito’s Grade 3 teacher suggested he take the entrance exam for the special science section at our public elementary, I almost said no. Every parent group I was in was full of horror stories: kids waking up at 4am to study, parents spending ₱10,000 a month on tutors, SIP projects that cost more than our monthly grocery bill, kids having breakdowns before quiz bees because if they don’t win, the school loses extra funding. I don’t have a college degree, I work from home doing alteraciones for neighborhood clients, and I can’t afford that. Also, Lito spends just as much time drawing dinosaurs and building tiny boats out of coconut husk as he does digging up ants in the backyard. I didn’t want to turn his curiosity into another thing to stress about. We applied anyway, mostly to stop my lola from saying we were wasting his “smarts,” and he got in.
First grading period, he came home from school, threw his bag on the stairs, and sat there crying. He got 28 out of 50 on his first geology quiz. All the other kids in his section got 35 and up, he said, he was the stupidest one there. I texted his science teacher that night asking for a meeting, already had the transfer papers to the regular section printed out in my head.
Ms. Reyes, his teacher, pulled out his quiz and pointed to the open-ended question that cost him most of his points. The textbook question asked why volcanic eruptions happen, and the standard answer Lito got half right. But Lito added a whole paragraph about how he thought eruptions also happen more often when people dig too much for coal and gold, shifting the underground pressure. It wasn’t in the textbook, so he got marked wrong, but Ms. Reyes said that’s the whole point of the special science curriculum most people miss. It’s not supposed to be just for kids who can memorize 100 rock names or win national quiz bees. It’s designed to push kids to ask their own questions, not just repeat what’s in the book. All the pressure and the big price tags? That comes from parents and schools that care more about trophies and feeder high school spots than actual learning.
That conversation changed everything I did as a mom here. I stopped asking Lito “what grade did you get?” the second he got home from school. I started asking “what’s the coolest thing you found out this week” or “what question do you still have that your teacher didn’t answer.” It’s a small swap, but it took all the pressure off our after-school routine immediately. When his group started planning their mold project, I didn’t offer to withdraw extra money for fancy lab supplies. I told them to check our pantry for vinegar, collect empty plastic from the neighborhood sari-sari store, and use old shoeboxes from the palengke where I buy fabric. The only thing we had to buy was agar powder from the local drug store, and the whole project cost ₱180 total. You don’t need a big budget to do this right, if you stop caring about impressing other parents with a fancy display.
It’s not all perfect, of course. A lot of the old rigid structure still sticks around. Last month, Lito had to memorize 62 scientific names of invertebrates for a quiz, and he complained for three days straight that it didn’t make any sense to memorize all that when he could just look it up on his dad’s old phone. He’s right, but complaining to the principal wasn’t going to change the requirement that quarter. Instead of fighting it or telling him he just had to suck it up, I sat with him and helped him turn each name into a silly doodle that matched what he liked. He drew a jellyfish with its name scrawled on its tentacles, a snail with its name written on its shell. He got 42 out of 50, which was good enough, and he still remembers the doodles weeks later, even after he forgot half the names.
Last month, our barangay held a clean-up of the creek that runs behind our subdivision. The captain was telling everyone to pull out all the water hyacinth growing there, said it was clogging the waterway. Lito pulled me over, pulled out his tattered science notebook, and showed the captain a page of notes from class: water hyacinth absorbs microplastics from runoff, so if you leave a small patch along the edges, it actually cleans the water before it flows out to the nearby river. The captain ended up leaving half the patch, and asked Lito to come back next month to talk to the barangay’s youth group about what he found.
I still get messages from other parents asking if it’s worth it to put their kid through the entrance exam, if a regular working family can afford it. I tell them it depends on what you want out of it. If you’re putting your kid in just to lock in a spot at a top university or a high-paying job later, you’ll probably all end up stressed and broke. If your kid likes taking things apart, asking “why” a hundred times a day, and messing around with stuff in the backyard, and you’re okay with bad grades sometimes when they’re busy testing their own ideas, it’s not the scary, exclusive thing people make it out to be.
Lito still doesn’t get straight A’s. He still spends more time drawing than studying for quizzes some weeks. Last week he told me he might want to be a dinosaur illustrator when he grows up, not a scientist. I don’t mind. The program didn’t turn him into some genius child prodigy. It just let him keep asking questions, which is more than I ever expected. We’re still figuring it out, day by day.
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