Tag Archives: Weekly Update

2016 Sec 1 Week 15 Update

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We’re hurtling our way towards the end of semester exams. For secondary schools, the exams start earlier than they do for primary schools, with both exams starting sometime in the end of this month and ending around mid-May. This is also different compared to primary schools where the exams would be over in 4 days (5 if you take Higher Mother Tongue). Also when there are two exams on a particular day and you don’t have to give one, you can come late or leave earlier, unlike primary schools!

GG had a very busy week as she had concentrated practice sessions for the performance which is next week. On the first day of the long practice session, she came home only around 7:45 pm, which was almost 13 hours after she left home for school! Right from the time she has been a baby, she reacts to tiredness in the same way – she gets angry and cranky. She’s learned to manage her emotions slightly better now, but now and then, they overflow. That’s exactly what happened that day – she called me when she left school, close to 7 pm and said she’s tired and will not have dinner! I immediately knew she was getting cranky and as soon as she came home and showered, she started shouting and fighting with BB! I tried to console her and eventually fed her some food and she broke down. After a few minutes of hugging, she calmed down to eat and finish her homework before bed. The next day, she told me, she dozed off in class! I will be happy with the performance next week so that she can concentrate on her end of semester exams. Though, like I told GG, this is life – there will be several situations in life, especially when you start working and at the beginning of your career, when you may have to manage on minimum sleep and have to do it with grace and fortitude and this is just a rehearsal for those situations.

Oh, I have to mention this. Someone from BB’s school parent support group recommended this free app which is great. The app is called OurPact and it is free in the App Store. I guess it should be free for Android also. What it basically does is that it gives the parent (or adult) control over their child’s phone. We downloaded the app and sat together to decide on what I called ‘Phone Ban’ times. So once I schedule the times, their phone gets locked up. They can’t access apps except phone, text and music. So they are contactable at that point, but can’t use the phone to play games, watch videos and generally waste their time. We’ve used it for the better part of a week now and I love it. It also allows me to block access if they already have it remotely if I feel they are misusing phone usage privileges. It’s been such a relief, especially when I am at work and I know they are playing with their phones instead of doing something constructive.

Next week is their Hindi end of semester exam. GG’s performance is a day before that and she will be home only around 10:30 – 11 pm! Hopefully she doesn’t break down at the end of the day and this affects her exam performance!

2016 Week 14 Update

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A quarter of 2016 is over!! Where are the days flying and why? This has been quite a bad week for me, you’ll know why as you read on.

I never learn and repeat this mistake almost every week. I try to catch up on sleep over the weekend, especially by taking a post lunch nap. Saturdays are not so bad, but when I nap on Sunday afternoons, I sometimes have difficulties going to bed at a decent time on Sunday night. So this means Monday I am pretty beat at work. Usually Monday nights are ok and I manage to catch up. But this week, for some reason I didn’t sleep well on Monday aslo and so Tuesday I was a real zombie at work. In this sleepy state in the afternoon, I decided to go down to the cafeteria in my office to see if I could get something that would wake me up, but there was nothing and on the way back, I decided to use the toilet, and I am guessing you know what happened next! Yup, I dropped my phone inside!!! It was for just a second and the phone has a cover and dropped topdown (that is the top part only was in the water for that one second). And there started my phone problems….

Intitally everything seemed fine, but later that day, the headphone jack got locked, and since then my phone decided to just randomly show me the power off button and the home button has become hypersensitive. My phone is around 15 months old and while I can still buy a new phone, I don’t want to spend the money. I’ve been reading up and doing what my good friend Google says, so let’s see if I can push this another few months…Otherwise it’s money down the drain that I can ill-afford to spend now L

I was also very upset with BB (see my post of yesterday for more details) and have since spoken to him about this. I need to work with him on toning down his aggression. I do think he’s become more aggressive these days compared to a year or two back. I’m not sure if this part of being a teen or the result of the games he plays. I need to monitor this and do something about it. I know teens don’t like being told off, so need to do this very diplomatically. He was such a sweet, non-aggressive boy; don’t know why this is happening!

Work-wise, I’m down to 20 days today and there’s still no clarity. I did speak to the company which employs me and they haven’t heard anything from this company. Apparently something should have come over the weekend, clarity perhaps, on if contractors should be renewed and if yes, for how long. The site manager did let me know that she knows it will not be for one year, definitely less. So now I need to wait for Big B to come back to me. Otherwise I am going to ask them to look for a new position for me. Nothing much to do except one slightly big presentation for which I need some data which will only be available at least a week from now, some web presentations which will take me all of next week and then my handover report! I’ve already done more than 70% of that, so I’m going to keep that till the last week to tidy it up. I need to check with Big B who will be my replacement and then will tweak it accordingly.

Oh, my reading challenge, I almost forgot about it. I’ve been quite diligent about reading one non-fiction and non frivolous book for the past two months, need to just be slight more diligent about it. As of the 31st of March, I’ve managed to finish 74 out of my targeted 150 books which is almost 60% of the challenge! Most are the really fun books (romance and chick-lit which don’t take much time to go through, I can read a book a day for these), so I guess once I hit 100 books, I’ll have to revise my challenge numbers….

Well that was my week, let’s see what this week holds for me. Hopefully a much better week and a better month than the previous one. Have a wonderful week people!

2016 Sec 1 Week 14 Update

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Another week and another month has gone by! We’re looking at the first Semesteral or mid-year exams coming on very soon. The first exam is predictably Hindi which is two weeks from now and then towards the end of the month both GG & BB start their school exams.

GG’s week was more stressed out than BB’s. She had practice twice during school and once more on Saturday. Actually they’ve been having practice quite often on Saturdays, but because of her Hindi classes, her school is asking her to come only twice – the two Saturdays before the event. She comes home so tired when she has practice though and then getting up in the morning is a chore for her, but she has been a trooper. I also realise she’s matured faster than BB who still seems a bit silly to me, especially when I compare them (which I try not to do, but sometimes, it does pop in my mind!)
While GG did not too badly for her first series of class tests, she does need to do much better for this mid-year exam if she wants to top her class. I seriously think that topping her class and getting the school award will do wonders for her self-confidence. She suffers from a case of serious exam stress and this was the big reason she didn’t do well at the PSLE exams last year. We didn’t realise how bad this stress was until it was too late and now I need to get rid of it before she sits for her O levels. So an injection of self-confidence will help her a lot.

Her school concert is a day before the Hindi mid-year exams and so she needs to manage time to work on that too. She’ll be back home after the concert close to 11 and then the reporting time for the exam the next day is 7:30 am! The centre is a bit of a drive (approximately 30 mins) from our home, I don’t know how she is going to manage this as she is like me in the sense she needs her sleep or turns grumpy and cranky!

BB on the other hand was super cocky during his term 1 exams and this showed in his results! He actually failed in English Literature and didn’t achieve targets for any subject. In his case, though he does not study in a top school, I have noticed his peers and classmates, all get good scores. Again, if wants to win school and class awards, he really needs to buck up this term and needs to go up a full band for each subject. Hindi is of course going to be the weakest link, and I think I need to step up and especially from next month when I will be at home, which will co-incidentally be during their holidays, I plan to work out an intensive time-table for both of them.

Friday I got a very hesitant message from BB telling me he wanted to tell me something. My mom antenna went up and I immediately called home to speak to him. He told me his Form teacher wanted to speak to me. From the way he spoke, I knew something was wrong and asked him the reason. So the reason he told me was that during CCA on Wednesday, he accidently hurt his classmate with his penknife. They were using that to make balsam wood planes. So I spoke to his teacher and the story was slightly different. According to the teacher, the other boy wanted to see BB’s penknife and BB shouted ‘No’ while pulling it away from him and in the process, the sharp tip hurt the boy. It was apparently a deep cut and required stitches. I was quite upset to hear this. The teacher asked both boys to write an incident report and since their versions differed, he spoke to me. Now the impression I got was the teacher believed the other boy and the reason was he said, “The other boy is a top student and also a student councilor”. I don’t agree with this reason because I firmly believe that just because you are a top student and a school leader does not mean you don’t lie or twist the truth. I am not disbelieving the boy and know BB shoulders more of the blame, but I didn’t like the way the teacher used these words. This kind of reinforces my belief that in this society we live in, it’s just academic excellence which matters and nothing else! Which is very sad as you need all kinds of people in a society and just academic excellence is not a blueprint for a child’s success in life!

Anyway, BB has been asked to do another reflection and the teacher did say this incident will not be escalated and the other boy’s parents also are not pursuing it further, which is a huge relief!

So that was pretty much the children’s week.

2016 Week 13 Update

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This was another short week and as of today, I am now down to exactly five weeks before my contract runs out. By right, the company I work for should formally let me know either this week or next if there’s no chance of continuing here, but will they do, I really don’t know.

I am also more confused than ever what will happen to me here, sometimes when Big B speaks to me or others, he alludes to me being around after the contract ends, but he does not say anything directly to me. Yes, the income coming in would be great, but I think I’ve made my peace with this situation, whatever happens, no hard feelings and I’ve got plans for the rest of my year, which I will share later.

Big B is going to be traveling mostly from next week for work and pleasure and I think in the next five weeks, he’ll be in two and out three. So far he’s in during what is supposed to be my last week here.

Life also will come a full circle – when I was recruited three years back, it was just before this major annual conference the department has and I had to get stuff ready in roughly two/three weeks’ time, and it all come together so beautifully that my then boss and his boss was full of praise. Now I will be leaving a month before the same conference, which will be in the same city as the first conference and my successor will be the one who has to dot the I’s and cross the t’s before the event and hopefully he/she is as successful as I was all those years back!

We went to a wedding on Good Friday and it was nice catching up with the extended family. The wedding was of the daughter of S’ father’s distant cousins and most of them are meeting GG & BB after eons and they were all startled how big they’ve grown – I’m talking some meeting them after 7-10 years, so you can imagine how astonished they were, since BB is quite tall (he is roughly 170 cm or 5 ft, 7 inches) while GG is shorter at slightly over 5 ft. 3 inches. The irony is that we all live in the same city and some of us live within a couple of kilometers away! That’s what a busy life does to you I guess….That’s why such social functions are great for catching up with friends and family…

Ok, back to the grind after a relaxing three days, gotta go to work now. Happy Monday everyone and we’re almost at the end of March which means a quarter of the year is done…..

2016 Sec 1 Week 13 Update

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This is the first week of school and both GG & BB’s schools have started working on their mid-year exams. GG is super busy with practice sessions for her programme next month.

I also went for the Parent Support Group meeting in BB’s school and once again wondered why GG’s school is not so proactive in engaging parents. Her school also has a PSG in place (all schools do) and we did meet the members in the first week of school when they invited new parents for a talk by the principal, but after that complete radio silence. I also sent an email to the PSG and am still waiting for a reply – nearly 3 months later….

As I type this I realise we didn’t do anything of note this year in school, or maybe I am not observing enough? Never mind, this shall then be a short post and I will endeavor to do better next week!