Little School House

In the recent weeks, I have discovered, almost by accident an entire community of moms in Singapore who believe in homeschooling. And I am filled with great admiration at the dedication and commitment they put in to not go with the flow and to not be caught up with grades, over- achievements and competition not between the kids but between the parents.

People I tell about this inadvertently ask me if it inspires me to do the same. In one word...No. Not because I don't believe in it but because I know my limits and I know that I'm good at spending pockets of time with my kids but I can't spend 24-7 with them trying to come up with things to stimulate them. Someone once told me that it took her a year to be able to accept that it was ok for her kid to not be doing anything. That she didn't need to make a lesson out of everything. I haven't gotten to that point yet. Well, I do leave the twins to do a lot of nothing but I haven't gotten round to not feel guilty yet. And at the same time, I don't have natural patience. Ironic that I am a teacher but I really don't have the ability to be repetitive and that's how children learn. Even when I was teaching, I hated repeating myself even though I had to out of necessity and professional obligation. I don't want my children to get the short end of the straw because I just didn't have enough patience to do what needed to be done or because I was shallow enough to want to go to the spa and get my nails done rather than come up with something for them to do. So I'm being honest, while I would like to be able to give my kids the best, the most fun, the most creative and the most beneficial intellectual experience, I don't think I'm up to it. Like I said, I can do it in pockets, but ask me to do it all hours of the day and with every single thing I do, I may be worse than sending them to school. Or I'd get a nervous breakdown from it.

But at the same time, I would like to keep myself from falling victim to the Crazy Parent Syndrome that most parents in Singapore are wont to. Moms are amazed that I don't know what Shichida is, that I frown at Glenn Doman (possibly because I am lazy) and I hate what Kumon represents. I know that there is always the danger that I could become one of them. I am a naturally competitive person. You can't be an athlete without it and you don't win races by being blase. And it's important that I don't channel my competitiveness negatively into my children. Some element of competition I guess is necessary. I think being totally chill could possibly be dire but once again, I'm coloured by being naturally competitive and being a product of our education system.

And it is this, that I am a product of our education system and now a sometimes unwilling perpetrator of it that causes me to think the way I do. I would like my children to go to school, because socially I had some very fun adventures in school, even though I think I had more horrendous, emotionally scarring ones. I would also like them to go to school because when it was there that I eventually found my friends and like-minded people. But I don't want them to come home with worksheets everyday (I used to hide mine under the couch, in the hope that my mother would not notice). I don't want them to be told they had to read but not given the time and opportunity to. I don't want them obsessing about physics when they would never ever use theoretical physics again after sitting for the exam. And I particularly don't want them to come home in tears because they were made to feel like failures because they didn't top the standard in what ever subject they were doing. And yes, this is me chanelling my experiences.

So the happy median? I don't know. Probably not homeschooling, although while I'm home, I plan to try to show them stuff and muck around, constructively and nonconstructively. I just know I don't want to start them on the wrong foot and send them to a place where they will be literally be forced to learn how to write before they know what drawing is all about. And while I do that, I will do my best at home to show them things, like how dough squishes in their hands, like how different it is to have wet and dry sand to play with. What hot is and what cold is. And to allow them to figure out what a snail is by trying to dig it out of its shell, although eventually I took it away from Baby J because I felt sorry for the snail. And I promise not to introduce the word "study" into their vocabulary until it is necessary. It is absolutely unnecessary to be studying flashcards at this age. At any age actually. Well, maybe when you're in med school and that's the only way to learn anatomy or physiology. But that's another battle for another day, somewhere far far down the road if they so choose to want to go to med school.



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