Another uneventful week for us, is this the calm before the storm?

School this week has been filled with Mr. Lee Kwan Yew. The children came with me to pay our tribute at our local CC and then later in the week, the school also took them down to the CC to pay their respects. They didn’t write in the book (imagine 500+ students trying to do that)! What they did was stand in groups in front of the portrait of Mr. Lee and bow down thrice to show their respect.

We’re down the two weeks before the Hindi SA1 and need to get BB & GG upto speed there. Next month will also start the Open Houses in schools which we plan to go to, more on that later.

This week was the March School holiday week – note the emphasis on WAS!!

Poor kids – they had school for three days of the holidays and tuitions the other days 😥

But I think they are slightly better off than the others giving the PSLE exams – a work colleague mentioned that since her son (also a P6 student) does not have to go to school, she has scheduled two tuition lessons per day of the holidays. Others we know are giving up extra curricular activities which take maximum of an hour per week to concentrate on the exam. 

Are we doing too little in comparision?

A very boring week from my perspective. I was away from home the whole week for a related conference (more about that tomorrow), and so most days by the time I came home, GG & BB were asleep!

GG even wrote me a note on the things she wanted to tell me, but couldn’t! So sweet right!

We are having Parent-Teacher Meetings in school on Monday and Wednesday and I am sure the teachers and me will/should have a lot to talk about…

On another note, BB & GG have their NAPFA (National Physical Fitness Award) test on Monday and Wednesday and they are a bit scared about it. This test is to assess the overall fitness of students in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions with the test modified to suit age and gender. Of the six stations, they are worried about 1-2 that they are not sure of passing. They say they will be made to take it again and again till they pass it. More about this next week…

The CA 1 results came in this week and BB did fairly well, he could have done better, but we’ll work on that for the SA1 and the Prelims. GG didn’t do well in Maths, her nemesis subject, but other than that, she did ok in her other subjects. She still needs to up the ante though….

We also went to a Open Symposium at the School of the Arts (SOTA) as GG was interested in the school and try through DSA. It was quite a full house, but I felt that the process could have been handled better. Firstly it was not an open house – we were armed with questions and we didn’t get a chance to ask any. The open house is on the 11th of April, where you could see the school. This was billed as an hour’s programme and basically had the school principal and vice principal selling the school. While I understand the need to sell the school, but the fact is that unless you were a parent or child interested in the school, you would not be there at 7 pm on a Friday evening. Parents and children came there to see if the school is a right fit for them. Then once the hour’s worth of talk was over, we were moved to another place, by specialty (we were there for music) and taken to an auditorium, where someone from the faculty of music started talking. He was American (I think) and even though we were sitting halfway down the auditorium, what he spoke was very indistinct. He basically reiterated that was said above and not much in terms of new information. Then there was supposed to be a concert – by alumni and students! We didn’t wait for the concert and left at this point. GG is now having second and third thoughts about the school – one being the fact that school starts at 7:45 am, which means she needs to leave home by 6:30 am to get to school on time, notwithstanding any accidents or delays on the road….