Forest

For this school year, nothing is more challenging than the socially distanced class.

With the new set of ground rules in classrooms, school is no longer what it used to be. The good news is that we have found an extraordinary secondary school for my daughter. When I received the notice of out-of-class learning from her school early this week, I didn't think twice before clicking the reply link. 

That's a canyoning experience (yes, into the canyon!), with challenges provided by abseils and supervision by outdoor education teachers. When I heard about how the students got wet (totally wet at times, including their masks), I realized the way it's called a forest school. That also reminded me how the school teacher recommends us Richard Louv's Last Child In The Woods in the welcome letter for parents.  

Nothing beats a school bringing kids into the woods. A zoom classroom, without question, can't.

Ball

There are few tricks as strategic as "learned incompetence", by which a husband (mostly) is trying to escape sharing the work or chores.

I suppose that a small confession is in order before I go on. That’s me. I'm among one of those husbands.

School is back. If you want to know my contribution to preparing my daughter's new school term, I shall talk to you privately. If you're still curious about how much I help my daughter's studies, please be reminded of another term for my incompetence: strategic ball-dropping. If you drop the balls and your wife keeps picking them up, you'll learn to keep dropping them.

There's no reason why it has always to be the husband dropping the ball, or ducking. Inasmuch as I'm telling the truth, the answer should be my lack of shame.

Oh dear. 

Bookshelf

A coronavirus-laden world has changes far greater than any event in living memory. Everything is shuffled. Many become uncertain. Quite a lot have turned topsy-turvy. Simple as it should be, breathing becomes uneasy.

What matters to surviving the pandemic, whether as grow-ups or as children, is best explained by Dostoevsky who believes that human is a creature who can get used to anything.

One trick lies in the fact that we can look at more than one side, and at least at the positive side now and then. My daughter has been captivated by page-turning Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets this week. "If not because of the outbreak," said Jasmine, "I wouldn't have picked up this entertaining book series."

That's the flip side of closing public libraries. Nowhere is the need for book hunting more evident than in a city with libraries shut down for more than three months. To prepare for the third wave, I had already checked out more than ten books in June, before public library service was axed. Those book companions didn't last long; we had finished them pretty soon. Then it's time to dig into the old books on our bookshelf. 

That's how Jasmine found an old favorite of her mum's books and received a Hogwarts acceptance letter.