There and Back Again

The start of the June holidays means that the term is over. This has been a very eventful term, with my son starting his Primary One journey. The beginning was tough, with his body adjusting to waking up early in the morning. The mental adjustment was even more arduous. His separation anxiety surfaced again despite having attended childcare. Catholic High was relatively easy as he had been looking forward to attending a bigger school. Adjusting to Student Care took a long process. He only stopped complaining around April. Of course, if you read my posts, you will know that there have been challenges along the way. Academic results wise, he is fine. I feel there is nothing much to emphasise. Afterall, when was the last time anybody brought up Primary One results to guage your ability? But I will just show you the comments his teachers made. Just a note, the teachers' comments are usually taken from templates. They judge the students, and then find the word template that ...

Thanks to my son, I nearly had a brain haemorrhage today. His library card - he gets a stamp for every four books It all started a couple of weeks ago when he went to the library during Chinese period. He borrowed four books and brought all of them home. I looked at the books and discovered that he had borrowed mostly Chinese manga. They were mostly too difficult for him - one of them was actually a comic version of the Analects. I actually attempted reading the book to him, but even I got confused by all the Confucian terms mentioned in the text. I mean I did study Confucian philosophy for 'O' levels. But I did it in English and it was a very unique version - you know, teachings that suited the government were included and those that did not... you get the idea. So, the books were mostly left at home except for one which ended up at my in-law's place and one that went to my parent's place. When it was time to return the books, Old Master Q went missing. M...

I do not want to keep this blog limited to English, but to talk about my experience with educating my son in the various subjects he takes in school. One of the subjects he takes is of course, Chinese Language, being a Singaporean of Chinese origin. Because we seldom spoke to him in Mandarin when he was young, his Chinese Language is not very strong. Not to mention, he was a late speaker and we boosted his speaking with quite a bit of Speech Therapy, which is English based. As a result, he spoke Mandarin with a western accent. We send him to Berries for enrichment and it helped him quite a bit. His childcare probably did as well. Besieged by all sides However, there was something about his childcare's Chinese Language programme that I thought did not make sense. One of the things that did not make sense to me was the choice of idioms. The idioms the school chose to teach was very historical in nature - in other words, they were formed because of some historical event in Anc...