In 2012, I was part of Our Singapore Conversation, a massive nationwide exercise to hold dialogue sessions with 47,000 Singaporeans to shape the country’s future. I was sitting in a group dialogue session and the topic was about the local education system.
An elderly man in the group struck up a conversation with me and asked about my fatherhood journey.
I shared with him that my then nine-year-old son’s school grades were getting worse and I didn’t know what to do. I had tried everything from coaching him to encouraging him, and it often ended up with me scolding him harshly.
The man asked gently, “What is your definition of a good grade in school?”
I replied, “Umm, about 85 marks?”
He smiled and said, “Who defined that number for you?”
I was dumbstruck. You see, I had grown up getting what I would consider good grades at every stage of my education path and so thought of anything lower than that as “bad”.
From the time we had streaming in Primary 4 until the day I completed junior college, I was always in the top few classes in school.
In university, I was awarded a scholarship with Singapore Press Holdings and graduated as the valedictorian of my faculty.
I expected my first child to follow in my academic footsteps. I assumed he just needed to be conscientious and study hard like I did and he would get the grades to succeed in life.
But after the initial easy years of Primary 1 and 2, I could not fathom why my son was struggling in his studies.
I tried to teach him subjects like Maths but I would end up scolding him out of frustration and anger.
My son did not like to revise what he had studied, which I believed was a bad habit and the cause of his poor grades. I ended up scolding him more and more. He became sadder and quieter as the months went by.
More at https://www.schoolbag.edu.sg/story/...d-through-school-so-why-is-my-son-struggling/
