Mall Schooling

I must admit that I personally do not favour the term "home-schooling" since it conjures images of a child being confined at home studying. Personally I prefer the term "alternative education".

My beloved princess is being "schooled" both at home and in the malls, where I can breathe easier. Though she takes after the dad and seems to be more comfortable at home where her toys, videos and entire library are, she is alright with learning in Delifrance or any other air-conditioned cafe that mummy needs to have that caffeine fix.

Today, at Parkway delifrance, we did Critical Thinking for toddlers, a nursery level activity book. It is really so exciting to see your little child learn sequencing, matching and comparing and puzzles in addition to the usual colouring. Apart from Mandarin which we adopt a more laid back attitude, Rachel is progressing very fast academically and muscially.

Musically, she understands adagio, andante, moderato, allegro and presto, the various italian terms for tempo. Recently she added cresendo, diminuendo, fortissimo and pianissimo to her musical vocab. I love it when she recognises and sings in tune the various Mozart and Beethoven pieces. Her favourities are Vivaldi the Four Seasons -Spring, Allegro and the summer Presto. Violin wise, she is still getting acquainted with the instrument and together with the teacher, we adopt a very long term nurturing approach.

Since we are raising a music lover in a musical family, we definitely prefer the non-mainstream approach to educate our kid. The current compulsory system in Singapore is very left brained and exam result focused. It is ideal for mass producing degree holder knowledge workers in my opinion. In fact the vast majority of graduates end up as executives and managers for the rest of their lives rather than you know, artistes, business owners or entrepreneurs.

It troubles me to see the scores of children going for tuition classes both during the school term as well as the long holiday breaks. Many kids these days have so much academic stress and they do not seem to appreciate music and life as much. I was one of such "pressure cooker" child who had tuition aplenty to turn any Bs to As. So what with academic excellence? I had a gold award for ten distinctions in O levels, the awards were long tarnished and trashed. As a kid, I love to learn but I HATE exams and had butterflies in my stomach all the way to university. In fact, the stress level was so high that to this day, occasionally, I still had vivid nightmares of not making the grade in my university exams. In those days, one had to sit for sub paper if one failed and if we fail again at the sub paper level, its a premature goodbye to varsity life. Thank God for the modular system that my siblings were entitled to. I believe it does make the entire learning and striving for academic excellence process much more tolerable.

Personally, I have a Bachelor of Accountancy and Yan a Masters in Architecture. Between us we have 3 degrees and while we are more learned in areas of finance and architecture respectively, we are also able to courageously follow our musical passions, that of violin playing and teaching respectively.