A Trying Journey to PSLE

I have been screaming at Coco almost every day.

She has made improvements in all her subjects for SA1. We are all happy for her. However, she seems to be contented with what she has accomplished and has slumped back into her previous slump.

When I tried doing Chinese Oral revision with her, she was stumped by the lack of vocabulary at the swimming pool ie. lifeguard and buoy.

I flipped through her Oral resources and asked for a list of thematic vocabulary that had been prepared by her teacher.

She could not find it.

I screamed at her for her absent-mindedness and carelessness. I had passed it to her on the day of her Chinese Oral and had asked her to file it back in after the exam.

Apparently, she did not.

After a massive search, she said,"Oh, I might have lent it to Jasmine."

I said,"Then call her now! And ask her if it's with her!"

After a while, she got back to me,"She didn't pick up her phone."

I felt like I could have died on the spot.

After the rant, we proceeded to revising Chinese compositions.

I flipped through the Composition file just to find that the 10 model compositions I had photocopied for her were missing, again.

Same thing. I had given them to her and had asked her to file them back right after the exam.

So she got another harangue from me again, with 'bonus' - caning.

I thought if I continued to stay with her, tomorrow's headline would be 'Mother murders daughter over PSLE revision'. So I, together with William, took Baby to the zoo.

When I came home, I was glad that she had completed a Chinese composition on her own. But to my dismay, there was no evidence of any 'good' phrases used. On the contrary, she used quite a few dialogues in the writing.

I almost flipped!

I rejected the composition right away,"I already told you 'Don't use dialogues in your compositions' many times! Why are you still using dialogues?"

Coco,"Because I think dialogues are good."

So enraged was I that I rained her with another harangue. And this time, I even told her I doubted her intelligence, that she was indeed 'stupid', because despite years of reminders of 'don't use dialogues' from every single language teacher and me, with me explaining the reasons of why using dialogues 'cheapens' her compositions, she still insisted that 'dialogues are good'.

I really buay tahan already.

Her attitude towards learning has been extremely trying. She stretches just about everybody's patience.

The same attitude spans through just about everything she does, every subject that she studies.

Even for something as simple as highlighting key words in a question, she is adequately trained in highlighting the 'important' words, but when she decides to display that lacklustre attitude, she would highlight just about every single word in a question, except words like 'Sue, is, the'. When I get sarcastic,"You might as well highlight the whole question." She says,"Oh, I really should!" and proceeds to highlight the whole question!

In another instance, I was forcing her to highlight the areas she derive answers from. She refused to. Instead, she highlighted question numbers!

When I asked her,"Highlight question numbers got use ah?"

She replied,"Got use."

Before she could explain to me how useful highlighing question numbers are, I was scolding her upside down!

She is a wonderful girl, but when it comes to studying, she can be as trying as, if not worse than, the worst kid in school.

We have talked to her nicely, reasoned with her, showed her the consequences with real-life examples of not studying well in school, even reminded her of her nursery experience of being a misfit in a PCF kindergarten to illustrate how much of a misfit she would be if she goes to a not-so-good secondary school. But she continues to demonstrate disinterest in living up to her own potential.

She is definitely not slow in learning. I see how she could apply concepts in Science readily and how she could grasp the Mathematical methods in solving problem sums when I could not. I see how she could memorise 10 Chinese model compositions even when Chinese is not her forte. I doubt I can do that even though Chinese is supposedly chicken-feed to me. She has great learning capacity, and alot of potential to be excellent, but her attitude is stopping her from achieving a lot more beyond what she is achieving right now. It is such a shame.

I think we are reaching the end of our rope. There is nothing much we can do except to wait for her attitude to turn around.