Get A Break

Last Sunday, there was a report in The Sunday Times about how jam-packed the June holidays are for some kids.

Yesterday, I brought KK and XX downstairs to cycle and play. It was about 12 noon and although it was the school holidays, the playpool and playground were deserted. I was wondering, hey, it's the hols and the midday sky that day is cloudy, so where are all the kids? Off to some school holiday remedial programmes, enrichment camps or overseas holiday? Well, there was ONE other kid, a girl with swollen eyelids riding on her skate scooter. (Maybe it's the swollen eyelids, that's why she's so free.) A friend who stays just nearby a school had commented that even though it's the school hols, every morning there are just as many parents dropping off their kids at school as per usual.

Yes, kiasu parents signing up enrichment classes for their kids is one thing, but schools too are not giving their students (nor teachers) a real break during the hols. I remember even during my time, the hols are precious times for poor performing students doing remedial lessons and to catch up with their work. Not to mention the ECA groups organising camps/activities etc.

On the adjacent page of The Sunday Times is a related report about how schools set overly difficult mid-year exams supposedly to spur their students to study harder for the finals. However, some parents have complained that the poor results only demoralised the students.

This revived my memory of how my 'elite' secondary school also used the same tactics. The Sec 4 Prelim exams was so difficult that I scored miserably, attaining 22 points, resulting in me not qualifying for any JCs during the first 3 months. When the 'O' Levels results came out, I scored 12 points, enabling me to get into any of the top JCs. Not only was my self-esteem hurt by the Prelim results, I wasted 3 months, doing nothing. When I entered Temasek JC, I was 3 months behind the syllabus and I struggled through the rest of the first year trying to catch up. Does this make sense? I agree that the exams should be set to an equivalent standard or a little more difficult to give students a sense of the real thing. But to make it overly difficult, where results can be 10 points different, that's too extreme. 10 points is a heaven and earth difference in terms of academic achievements.

I am glad to hear that from Jan next year, the Education Ministry will scrap the provisional admissions exercise under which students used their prelim exam results to enter a JC. That's 18 years late, if you ask me, but still better than never.