Home management and care
IN the Technical Vocational Livelihood (TVL) track of the K-12 curriculum Home Economics strand, students will also be taught with the basic home management and care. This must sound passé as students of today becomes globally competitive with careers that makes today, or with new careers that create the need, but at the end of the day, students will go to each of their respective homes and what a better, comforting and relaxing feeling it is to have that home that is managed with much attention and care.
Home is the basic unit of every society. In Home Economics that remains an important subject in school until today plays a vital role in shaping students with the basic groundwork – the household chores. Students will appreciate the importance of basic house management. They will also experience planning routine activities involving housekeeping. They will gain knowledge on how to perform the routine and seasonal activities involved in the care of the house from the typical ones such as dusting, silver cleaning, etc to laundry work, general cleaning, etc. The students will also appreciate the economic value of women’s, who in old days mostly take care of this job. Students of the opposite gender grow in the number of household help today because of plumbing, lighting and heating jobs involved in home management and care. Even household pests and prevention from these pests are covered in this subject.
Learning activities that are mainly taught in the home management and care lesson in Home Economics include the following: ( 1) general methods of sweeping, dusting and cleaning; ( 2) the scheduling of household tasks such as making daily, weekly and even monthly schedules and learning the advantages of systemizing a household task; ( 3) the prevention and methods of exterminating flies, mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches, ants, etc.; (4) learning plumbing troubles and remedies such as water hammer and dripping faucets, and how to change fuses and how to make repairs in electrical equipment; (5) the care of gas range, rice cooker, kitchen sink, refrigerator, bedmaking, dusting, dishwashing, laundering and dry cleaning; and, (6) cleaning windows and mirrors, metals of various kinds and woods of various finishes.
Lastly, students by the end of this particular lesson and subject will be asked to work out the money value performed daily, weekly or monthly by the average homemaker in the vicinity. This is for students to appreciate the work that household help does, and for them not to de-motivate and demean household help. Filipinos were first described in dictionaries as household help. We felt bad about it because we thought they made reference of us to the slaves and colony we once were. But home management and care is more than that. It is not an easy job to do. Filipinos may do the hard task or do things the hard way always, but we must pride on the fact that no one else does this more efficient and effective than us. (Paid article)