My PSLE takeaway

PSLE ended, officially, yesterday, with Higher Mother Tongue as the last paper.

The biggest takeaway I have from this PSLE preparation is how callous children can be, for the sake of demoralising other children, whom they probably view as 'rivals' or 'enemies' all of a sudden.

Suddenly, everybody is a composition expert, dooming their friends' English Paper One by commenting that their friends have written a 'ridiculous' storyline, or that their stories are 'out of point'.

Suddenly, everybody is super-clever, because every single paper is 'super easy'.

William had a student who is the top boy in one of Hokkien Huay Kuan schools. He was worried that he might have gone out of point for his Chinese Oral Conversation. When he voiced his worry to his classmate, the girl who went in after him for the Oral Exam told him that she heard the examiners discussing his marks, and agreed that he should get 38/50 as he had gone out of point for the Conversation segment.

For weeks, the boy was affected. He was worried that it was true. Fortunately, the boy was accepted into a choice school via DSA so he could do his PSLE without further worries.

I thought that must be an isolated case since the girl must have viewed the boy as a rival.

How wrong was I!

When Coco told her friends that she wrote about a plane crashing into the library building which resulted in an explosion and fire, they commented that the story was 'ridiculous' and that she was 'going to fail'.

She was so affected that she cried just before her English Paper Two.

And she didn't tell me until after her Maths paper the next day.

I asked her to tell me how she wrote it, and upon hearing the way it was written, I assured her that it was alright, and that the language expression is more important than the actual storyline itself.

I had come across more ridiculous stories and did not fail those stories for even Content, much less the whole story.

Then when I went into kiasuparents forum, quite a few children or parents were worried that their compositions or their children's compositions could be out of point, with some being told by the children's friends that theirs were indeed out of point.

I got so riled up that I had to log in to say that the story was perfect for the title. Who are those people to comment that others' stories are out of point?

I am just very disheartened that children these days can be so callous. I am sure for the same kind of worry, children twenty years ago would have comforted or assured their friends that it was 'creative' or at least 'alright' instead of attacking their friends' morale and demoralising them for the remaining papers.

Did their parents teach them such 'tactics' or 'strategies'?

Didn't their parents teach them not to open their mouth if nothing good is going to come out of their mouth?

What sort of parents do they have - I genuinely wonder?

Nothing could have prepared me for this. What kind of generation are we raising? For the sake of their own benefits, they emotionally attack the meeker peers. What happened to the friendship they share on normal days?

I shudder to think what would happen when these children grow up.