My home is an exclusively English speaking home. Chris can spell English words he's only just heard for the first time. Yet, because of our educational culture where Higher Chinese is valued, emphasized and relied upon as a measure of academic success despite English being our official language of business, he has had no choice but to spend a ( Read more... )

Today is my day off. There are a million things that I need to do before the family leaves for our vacation in 2 weeks, one of which is selecting pictures for a scrapbook that the mums in Natalie's ballet class want to do for our beloved teacher who is retiring soon. (it wasn't my idea to do the scrapbook, but by default the job fell to me, since ( Read more... )

My facebook status update today read as follows: "The local school system.  The greatest contribution to the degradation of the parent-child relationship in Singapore."

One of my old friends from secondary school days posted a comment to that, which spurred me to write this entry.  He asked, "What type of school system, in your opinion, would not ( Read more... )

In the car on the way home from school ( Read more... )