Jay And The One Day School Week

I’m fairly certain (at least 20% anyway) that most parents are like me and think that kids get to many holidays from school. So you can imagine how I felt when a couple of weeks ago his school decided that they would only have classes for one day that week and the kids would have a mid term holiday. But it wasn’t just his school, all the primary schools did it. And no, it wasn’t an official mid term school holiday.

So why did they close the schools down for 4 days in one week? Because of the PSLE marking. What’s that, I pretend to hear you ask? It’s the Primary School Leaving Examination, which all grade 6 students do to determine which High School they can get into. Now, I don’t know about most people reading this, and I don’t know if the system has changed in Australia since I went through it. But when I finished primary school, we didn’t have nationwide (or even statewide) exams to get into high school. Although I think there were some private high schools that had their own entrance exams.

And let me tell you now, Singaporeans take these exams extremely seriously. There was even an 11 year old boy who killed himself earlier this year because he failed an exam. The pressure doesn’t just start at the end of grade 6 either.

Singapore likes to get the exams and testing started early. In grade 1 Jay was already taking exams, and now at the end of grade 2 he’s taking exams that will determine which class he goes into in grade 3. From what I understand (and I don’t understand much it’s true) most schools will rank all the students and the best will go into Class 3A, with those just behind in 3B, and so on until they’ve assigned all the children to classes. I dread to think about how it would feel if your child was assigned to 3Z.

Jay’s school is a little different though, they only assign the top students into classes 3A and 3B, with the rest of the students assigned randomly to the remaining classes. Which I guess is a better system, but I’m not convinced it’s what is really best for the kids.

But anyway, back to that 1 day school week. To mark the PSLE exams, they let all the students stay home from Monday to Thursday while the teachers were marking. Which seems a bit strange to me, when I was teaching we had to keep up our normal teaching schedule and mark any exams in our time outside the classroom. Yes, that meant we took exams home to mark, but it was part of the job. And for major statewide exams, like the ones we did at the end of high school, the education department (or ministry or whatever it’s called) would employ (or use their staff) to mark the exams, so that the student’s teachers weren’t involved in the grading at all. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems a better option than taking kids out of class.

So what did Jay do during that week? Well, SO tried to get him to do some studying for his upcoming exams, but I don’t think he really got that much done. Most of the time he spent playing, on the PS4 or his other toys, or reading. The thing is, the school has a system in place so that if the school has to close for any reason, the kids can complete classwork on the computer. They just have to log on to a website and there are activities and material for them to complete. I would’ve thought that closing the school for marking they could’ve used this system so that at least the children weren’t losing to much time away from learning. But for some reason, the school decided not to do that, so for those 4 days they had an unscheduled holiday.

I’m sure Jay enjoyed those days though, and it gave him a break before his exams that will decide his future and the rest of his life. As for SO and I, we just want Jay to try his best, and if he doesn’t get into the top 2 classes, so be it. There’s more important things in life.