The first day of school ================= I could see that he was trying to hold back his tears as I led my youngest son to the holding room the school set up for Primary 1 students. For a week, our school allowed parents to accompany their sons to that room and the boys need not attend assembly with the older kids. Mama, can you pray? That became a daily request as I sent him to school every morning. He was always afraid that he would be singled out, scolded or reprimanded in public. That fear never went away, but multiplied as he watched friends and classmates being screamed at on a daily basis. Every Walk faster! or You are late! or Stop talking! would give him a startle. Even though I knew he was always anxious to go to school, I was shocked when the school called me up one day to rush there. I reached the school to find him dressed in borrowed school uniform and barefooted. The school servant had to hose him down from his own shit. He was so afraid of something he shitted in his pants, shirt, socks and shoes. I have never found out what caused that, but I knew this son becomes anxious even witnessing others being punished. After Primary 1, we moved him to an environment where scolding is non-present in his daily routine and his sensitivity to his surroundings appreciated. Now that has forgotten school anxiety, and with his self-confidence grown, he is starting to excel academically. On the contrary, my fourth child displayed a lot more confidence on first day of school, which started on the school bus. He is our most intelligent child and at P1, he was already very capable. We drove alongside the school bus and met him in school to ensure things were okay. It was. He came home in the school bus with many reports. He read the notice board and counted the number of teachers, he found the principal putting his own photo right at the bottom of the organization chart strange. He also figured the percentage of teachers who were not Chinese and the ratio of students to teachers. I found out that he actually knew ratio and percentage on that day. He would file his things nicely and present us every administrative form to sign that year. Every assignment was full marks and filed neatly. We thought school would be a breeze for him. Unfortunately, P1 was his only good school year. In P2, the school had a change of principal. My son was subsequently suspended by the school for flimsy reasons. In P3, the school refused to let him attend school until I escalated the matter and MOE stepped in to overrule the principal. School became rough after that and my sons psychological being was damaged: he started nightmares and night terrors that has only started to fade recently. I stopped putting him in schools and sent him to less socially-demanding environments instead. He started university when he was twelve. By observing our childrens first day of school, we can learn the most honest feelings they have about a very complicated and unnatural organization (school). If your child is starting primary school or secondary school, I have a little exercise to suggest you do with him/her. Ask him to write a short letter to his 18-year-old self, seal it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and then send it to your address. Open it on his eighteenth birthday. He/She will tell you how well you have done years later. Though how happy the child turns out at the end of the education journey depends greatly on the school, how we interact with him/her as parents and educators plays an even bigger role. We can either allow the world to convince us that the number of As is the unit measure of human intelligence or we can choose to look within each child to find that special gift and nurture that. We can either spend our time picking on their faults, or looking for their forte to bring out the best in them. Dont settle until you find that gift to nurture in every child. Wishing all a successful education journey!
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 23:09:30 +0000
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