My children are in the honor roll for the first grading period. Twin A’s average is around 93~94 (with high honors), which is not bad considering she was absent for a month and very sick for 1.5 months. She was wobbly at first (because of brain fog) but was able to catch up. We tried our best to study even she was hooked to four antibiotics when we were still in the hospital. She did school work even when she was an hour away from her biopsy.

Her advisor told me that she is very active in class and knows a lot of stuff—perhaps a little too much that she talks too much.

Twin I has an average of 97~ almost 98 = with highest honors. She got 99.8 in Social Studies and she’s pissed that she didn’t get 100. I told her, it’s ok, this is just the first quarter.

Actually, the teachers are happy with my girls. ❤️

My children had better study habits than I did when I was still a student. I was just winging it; I really didn’t study. I was just really good at note-taking, remembering things, and a voracious reader. I had terrible study habits—I was a master crammer.

My girls are the opposite: they even make their own reviewers that they ask me to print on the printer in my room. They do their homeworks immediately after they get home from school. I don’t remember doing the same. 🤔 All I remember was I watched TV first while having dinner in the living room. 😂

I knew I could have been one of the top students if I wanted to, but I didn’t. Maybe because I was already studying in one of the best high schools in the country so I didn’t see any need to push myself too much. I just wanted to be in the arts.

My kids, on the other hand, wanted to make up for the fact that they weren’t able to get into my high school. My school scrapped the entrance exam due to the government’s fear of holding national/regional exams would become a Covid super-spreader event. It is only this year that they have brought back the UPCAT, which also redounds to my high school’s entrance exams. Their only basis for asessing an applicant last year and the year before that are the grades on their 5th-6th Grade report cards—which is a disservice because many schools nationwide had lax grading systems during the online school years.

Now my high school probably recognized that so they’re holding a separate entrance exam for incoming 8th graders for school year 2024-2025 who would want to transfer.

My daughters asked if I wanted them to take the exam. I asked them back, do you want to transfer there? It seems like they don’t want to because they have finally settled in their current school.

My sis-in-law (SIL) said it’s ok if they stay in their current school because the private primary and secondary schools in our town are highly competitive anyway because they need to keep up with my high school and they’re within the perimeter of the university campus—they had to always keep up with the UP curriculum to produce a lot of UP passers for bragging rights. SIL has a friend who works for the DepEd who said our area has one of the highest concentration of schools with excellent National Achievement Test scores (I cannot remember which one was it) year on year. That’s why children from other towns and province/s choose to go to school here despite the long travel time.

While my kids feel bad that they weren’t able to follow their mom’s (and tito and titas’ footsteps by going to the same school), I think they have already come into terms with it already. Mainly because I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I don’t want them to grow up with huge chips on their shoulders. I told them, it’s fine, it doesn’t make them less of a person and I love them.

However, I told them they have to promise me that they need to study hard and try to make it to the honor roll because passing UP is not just passing the test itself (and having high scores) as it only makes up 60% of their UP Grade. The 40% of the UPG is comprised of their high school grade = final grades for the First, Second and Third Years (Grade 9, 10 and 11) . The info how our UPG is computed was revealed to us when we were prepped for the UPCAT in 1995-1996 by one of our teachers who used to be part of the UP Admissions.

My UPCAT scores were probably good and helped pull up my UPG because my high school grades were terrible. And students from our school earn extra points because we were already part of the UP system and our high school had a notoriously weird grading system, that teacher told us during our prep session. During my time, the ceiling grade in my high school was only 95 (while the rest of the Philippine high schools had 100 for the ceiling), which already put us at a disadvantage.

Long story short, I told my kids that even though grades from 7th and 8th Grade are not part of the UPG computation, it’s good to instill the good habits and discipline as early as junior high school.

I said they need to pass UP because I cannot afford the tuition in Ateneo and De La Salle as a single parent. They need to help me because I want them to have the best education without dipping into my retirement fund or working myself to the ground paying for education I cannot afford. Besides, why settle for second best or third best?