A New Chapter, About To Begin….

It’s almost time for the Miss to leave Safari Kid, to take up her spot at Rockstar’s old kindy alma mater, ESF Hillside Kindergarten. We told Safari Kid when I submitted the Miss’ application to Hillside. We’ve watched Safari Kid double their own intake during the Miss’ year with them, we’ve met ex colleagues who’ve told us they live nowhere nearby but have moved all three young children over, even their summer camps are now horrendously full. Oops – gush, gush. In short:

Goodbye, Safari Kid. If we had any more kids, they’re going right back to you if you will take them. Like other alumni, we’re also constantly checking your extracurriculars list 🙂 

What’s next?

School Choice is a very personal, very touchy topic. Ask any doting parent – it’s either Why, You Think My Child Cannot Get In Issit? or You Think I’m Making The Wrong Choice For My Child ISSIT?????? If there are many good schools then it’s up to the parent, who uniquely knows their child, to  put on headgear and boxing gloves  get in there and find the right fit. Every choice we ever make in life will be a “package” of pros and cons, goods and bads – we find the correct fit based on the position of each item on our proverbial laundry list of needs, wants, must-haves, can-live-withouts, in relation to pro and con of said “package” you are evaluating. Because “perfect choices,” perfect anything, lives in the realm of Gingerbread houses where Willy Wonka is your next door neighbour.

Now, I used to have long email conversations with readers whose kids go to four different schools because of a mixture of convenience and can’t-get-in. As in, you send the kids who can get in into the best schools they can get in to and then worry about the others.

We briefly considered putting the Miss in a Chinese-medium school (the reverse is popular among Chinese-speaking North Asians; they speak Cantonese or Putonghua at home, want their kids to learn English, so completely immerse them in an English-medium school. Certainly Rockstar’s school Chinese department would cater to native Putonghua speakers in this way by streaming into pure native Chinese speakers, students with one native-speaking parent, and non-native Chinese speakers.) Chinese-medium school is something we simply couldn’t have considered with Rockstar, because his birthdate made him either one of the youngest or eldest children going in – however while Rockstar is a Christmas baby, the Miss is born early June. Also, the Miss is kind of the opposite of our thin-skinned, shy first born whom we once were given “How To Boost Your Child’s Self Esteem” articles for, from parent-teacher meetings.

By the time we got to being able to consider putting the Miss in a Chinese school however, we were already happy with Rockstar’s Chinese progress in his own ESF school (Rockstar is very comfortably in the intermediate group and we have quite a few neighbours and friends whose kids are in the native speaker streams) and decided to stick with ESF.

Next up – English-medium schools.

High on our list is another very personal reason for sticking with the ESF Group:

We liked how they handled it when Rockstar wasn’t doing that well.

Somewhere at the back of my mind is the gut feel to always throw your weight behind the one who treats you well when you’re “down”; you may never again see as clearly who your friends are. In this case, the school equivalent of that.

We began forming our impression of the ESF group right from the interviews. Both Kindy and Primary interviews for Rockstar were engaging, un-stressful, and they brought out the best in our then-very-shy-and-thin-skinned child. Every parent always gets stressed out about whether schools want your child, but the flip side should also be true:  How schools approach evaluating your child is actually very useful information for you. If you’re jumping through a gadzillion hoops for the interview or worse, pretending your child is a completely different person to get in, can you imagine dealing with this school for years to come, if your child does get in? 

I blogged about little kiddie school entrance interviews in the past, said how in some places you need to call the Emperor out. (He’s not really wearing anything, yet “everyone” goes along with it……) Y’know, how some places have these stick-up-your-butt, make-you-feel-bad-about-your-parenting interviews where there’s always other parents doing a better job or Wow Those Kids Can Sing Ave Maria In 4 Different Languages and over there Those Other Kids Can Juggle Three Balls While Playing Rachmaninoff On A Violin* and it’s not like they – the aforementioned school – might’ve done a good job, it’s that those kids get a lot of tuition outside anyways. So. Calling the Emperor Out. I mean, if you had the whole stringent interview and picked kids who knew all their ABCs and Planets and Numbers before admitting them into Kindy, then exactly what is your value add again? Hang on though – the biggest irony is there are actual places who first do that, and then kick the child out if they don’t improve enough, academically? (Isn’t that just SO Emperor Has No Clothes??? On whose watch did the child fall behind during?)

*Any resemblance to someone you or I know is purely coincidental 😀

You guys remember Mom of Cherub? For those of you who haven’t been reading that long, C is a friend I made 5 years ago who has a Masters in English from Yale.  Also 100 cardboard boxes of real books of the Caxton sort, and in the duration of her stay in Hong Kong (it was several years) never got round to hooking up their tv. Seriously. Cherub has never watched tv a day she was in Hong Kong. Because of, among others, all that research about screen time for babies and toddlers.

Beautifully written, I waited for C’s reply giving me permission to share parts of her most recent email that I received last week. She’d gone totally Type A with Cherub, and applied to everything. Cherub was then accepted into everything, save one. And so she writes:

” …I found the whole admissions process objectionable. Whenever an interviewer asked me to describe (Cherub)’s abilities or tried to assess her, I had to stifle my irritated questions: “If your institution is so extraordinary, why does she have to be so advanced and talented? Couldn’t you make any old clod into a superstar?” …..As soon as (Cherub) started writing her last name, I found the people who asked her to write her first and last name more reasonable. Then, once she was scrawling bizarre little phonetically-spelled sentences in her serial killer ransom note handwriting, I felt less aggrieved by the admissions officers who asked her to write sentences…. …For a few months though, I mostly wanted to teach her to reply “Step off! I’m four years old!” And I still think that plenty of kids who aren’t competent at those tasks until the advanced ages of six or seven will turn out to be brilliant….

…The whole ordeal stirred up all of my reverse-snobbery class prejudices. I began to feel as if several schools were just incubators for established privilege, churning out bland, sheltered, well-crammed kids who excel at standardized testing and find it commonplace to spend the winter break skiing in Gstaad…”

Mom of Cherub is currently based in Cambridge. They were previously in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. In other words, not Hong Kong. They’ve still experienced Interview Insanity. It would appear this isn’t just a Hong Kong thing – the world of early education has pretty much all gone mad. And while we’re at it, know what the next question is going to be? “What about the places that are not “mad”, are they being left behind?” What if the Emperor really is wearing something you are not worthy enough to see? And this is why perfectly “sane” parents still subject their kids to all of this. Just In Case. Because we are parents, and so to us the stakes are just too “high.” Fine. Sure. But I still have a public service message:

It’s possible all of this is necessary just to keep up nowadays – BUT if you don’t like schools who are additionally snobby about it, why encourage it by allowing them to treat you this way? Support the schools that don’t power trip. (Then again I don’t think anyone should ever get to power trip. And there should be world peace. Where’s my crown?) 

Sandra Bullock, FBI agent undercover as a beauty queen in Miss Congeniality answers the standard beauty queen pageant question when every other pageant contestant before her has answered “world peace” …pic from chaosandgrace.com.au

After the interview comes our experience from sending Rockstar to the ESF Kindy – when he first started, he was the kind of kid who “shut down” from interaction with other kids, really small things would bother him to the nth degree, and his little school communication diary would be really filled. School staff were attentive to the diaries, I got responses for the “little things” – because initially he didn’t talk that much, I pounced on each nugget he shared about his day and would write in the diary beseeching school staff to follow up the next day… They would comply. But by the end of the first year, we needed a whole extra booklet because we ran out of pages.

By which I mean maybe some people in the school thought I was Total Crackpot First Time Mum but no one treated me as such 😀 “Crackpot” or no, they listened anyway. NOW here comes the money point: After having two children and supposedly calming down somewhat I still believe Rockstar needed it. The Miss has her own mummy-anxiety-producing issues but they are very much not the same as Rockstar’s. I wonder how Rockstar would’ve turned out if the school had shut me down. (We’re really happy with how he’s doing by now.)

The huge difference in the rockstars’ personalities really drove home the fact that you really have to work with who your children are. There are some things that Rockstar would struggle with even today, that the Miss simply does naturally, and vice versa. And perhaps one of the most important things in choosing a school for your child is how they listen to you about who your child is, and work with that – it really is both nature and nurture.

Rockstar’s entrance pic on the left and what passes for about as “angelic” as I could possibly get from the Miss. YES even from the pics you can see they have very little in common in terms of personality (OR colouring). No?

Take another look 😀

Exciting times ahead…