The Day Before The PSLE

It is the day before the PSLE. I speak to parents about how they are feeling and everyone is feeling the nerves. Let's think about those nerves for a moment. They are nervous that their child will be sitting for an examination that will define what they do for the rest of their lives, right? God forbid our child ends up in Normal stream. That's the fear, isn't it?

My son sits for his PSLE tomorrow. I am anxious for him too but, more than anxious, I am excited. Excited that he has crossed this wonderful milestone and he would have proven how much knowledge he has gathered over the course of six years. Part of my anxiety stems from the fact that my wife and I chose, six years ago, to place him in Townsville Primary School instead of Catholic High. I remember that first meet-the-principal session at Townsville when my son was in Primary One. One of the slides flashed by the principal was the proportion of Townsville kids that made it into the Express stream and, if memory does not fail me, it stood somewhere close to 50%. I remember my wife turning to me with a look of hesitation: did we make the right choice? I spoke to my wife, after the assembly: do you really think he will finish in the bottom 50%? Our son, who was such an avid reader, who was eloquent, appeared to have ambition and could recite any Four Seasons song by heart.

But that was an old me, still shaking off my prejudice towards what it meant to be Normal. Should my son be assessed to be worthy of the normal stream, he will be disappointed, because it would mean he would lose his place in SOTA. I thought I would feel disappointment too, but the more I reflect on it, the more I realise that I really could not care less. I would be excited because he knows what he wants: to be a filmmaker (I am still trying to convince him otherwise). Along with SOTA, my son DSAed into Kuo Chuan and Deyi because both had media programs; attending those DSAs were a surreal experience because it felt as if there were not a lot of people who wanted to DSA into those schools. Again, this is the feeling I got, having brought him to both; I may be wrong. Why would you want to waste your DSA to a school that has Normal stream?

Soon, schools will do away with those dreaded tags: Normal, Express, Special, Gifted. But can we, as parents, no longer define our children as such? My wife was a Normal student; she attributes this to her endless days rollerblading in her neighbourhood with her friends. Even if we were to define her success in the most traditional sense, she earned more than me when she was working in a bank (and I, teaching in an international school); she earns more than me as a pilates teacher (and I, teaching part-time in a school and part-time at home.) But I don't define success like that (I have to say that even if it were not true because she earns more than me... ;-); I define success by the stories that she tells our children, and those stories aren't about the endless days studying, because she never had those, but about the adventures she had in her neighbourhood, fending off wild dogs and spiralling out of control down a hill and bringing a stray cat home. After all, "What Unites People? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it." (Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones)

I am super excited about my son taking his PSLE. I look forward till next Tuesday, when it is all said and done, scribbled and drawn, plotted and measured, that I can embrace him and tell him that he has made it.