The Primary School Interview Diaries: Part 3

In an old Readers’ Digest, I read about an exquisite old briefcase with combination lock that went on auction. As the auctioneer talked of superb workmanship and quality, opening and closing the beautiful briefcase for emphasis, he mentioned also a caveat: no one knew the combination to the lock. There were no takers, until finally a guy sitting next to the author hesitantly bought it for something like a dollar.

After the transaction, he whispered to the author, “Was I the only one who figured if the auctioneer could open and close the briefcase then that was the combination on the lock?” What I got from that was the auctioneer had provided accurate information – that everyone had taken at face value only. This is why I deliberately stay away from parents whose logic, after some sincere effort on my part, continues to elude me. (Either their kids are simply way too different from mine, they’re just nuts, or I am.) Then there are the opinions that say everything and therefore nothing. Like when you ask a waiter what’s good in the restaurant and he says “everything.”

If given the chance at Meet The Parents, one question I like to ask is, “What happens if a child falls behind?” The way schools get oversubscribed, they already don’t – can’t – admit every child who makes the cut. So they look for ways to narrow it down. (Often the schools I have respect for are apologetic along the lines of no one liking that little kids have to be interviewed and/or turned down, “We wish we could take them all, but we simply don’t have the room.”)

Some application forms ask where the parents went to college, what degrees they got… (Which I guess might also be a tiny indication of whether the child is likely to also go ivy league…) Some schools don’t take the kids that are “too stubborn”…….

It’s n-ot easy to see the funny side of things when it’s your child who has to go for interview. But if you could, wouldn’t it strike you as a little odd that not a few schools’ evaluation criteria include things like whether the child can count to 100, write the alphabet, and so on – before admitting the child into Reception (the year(s) before Primary/ Year 1). Like, so what will you be teaching exactly, if you pick kids that already learnt all the stuff you were going to teach? 😀

(On an aside, it hadn’t occurred to me previously that I might then have to communicate to Rockstar that he’d done well in Kindy, gotten some coveted spot at a rabidly over-subscrived private school and – oh, he would now have to repeat the year before Primary/ Year 1. “Kindy year,” to him. It’s more significant because of what his personality is like -we don’t push Rockstar, he pushes himself. We kinda nudged him in that direction because at one point I thought it was either that or he’d feel lousy when kids around him go, “He’s too little, he shouldn’t be here.” (Wouldn’t blame him because last time a kid did that was bad enough before the kid’s mum then came over and asked me, “How old is he really?” Uh, my child can hear you guys…)

I figured communicating to Rockstar a way of “doing something” about kids calling him “too little” might help – The Rockstar is hungry to prove he deserves to be there as much as the bigger/ older kids. It’s more powerful a motivation than say, the proverbial cane or carrot-and-stick. In which case I’m not sure what communicating that he would be “held back” would have done to his motivation levels… Though the point is of course moot…)

Anyway. Back to the whole screening process for kids. That’s fine (erm kind of), in the sense everyone is looking for a way to narrow it down, there are so many applicants. BUT.

Then I don’t know how such schools would ever easily justify expelling students who fail to perform academically. Someone told me they knew a family whose child was given 6 months to improve academically, before the child was then asked to leave one of the more popular international schools – hang on, this is something I got while walking the dog. There could have been more to it than simply failure to meet up to academic expectations, though yes at the time I was told the problem was “poor grades”…

IF that is true however, I wouldn’t put much emphasis on the “results” such a school achieves. You’ve screened applicants to be academically sound, you get to give up on the ones that then fall behind under your watch, exactly what is your contribution again? (Bearing extenuating circumstances like say, you later discovered the child needs additional help with learning, that is not provided at your school.)

Call the parents in, ream em out for maybe not following their child’s progress closely enough (possibly I deserved this one when I worked), have a child do extra work, repeat the material, sure. Recommend the child get extra help, of course. But sorry – you don’t get to just give up and move on to the next eager candidate.

It occurred to me that schools with a “wide range” of personalities, results, abilities might (less intuitively) be the ones that don’t give up on the poor students – albeit possibly at the expense of a “track record.” And anyway isn’t that what “life” is all about, a wide range of personalities, results and abilities? These schools should’ve been commended – not the ones that give up on some of the kids. (Not to be confused with kicking troublemakers out for bringing drugs and smokes to school, or weapons of any kind, which is for the safety and well-being of all the other students.)

Sometimes I meet parents who border on the obnoxious when extolling how special their child is, but then they will swallow bad treatment from snobby schools/ school staff, and I think it starts to sound like a kind of downward spiral of Treat Badly Who You Can Get Away With Treating Badly. Which is actually very sad when you think about it because kids are already going to learn quite a bit of that from the world in general, without that extra lesson in competitive school intake. Coming from a very results-driven schooling background, I remember kids/ young adults around me who truly believed as long as they produced results, they could treat everyone else (including their parents) like they didn’t matter.

It’s wonderful to feel like your child is part of the elite. But what if God forbid, your child makes a mistake? Or say, falls behind because extenuating factors like I don’t know, you going through a divorce, death of family member, all manner of challenges life might bring… (I once flunked a subject in a major exam when my beloved grandmother passed away.) Would you feel the same way if God forbid your child were the one getting kicked out or punished too severely or etc?

This is why I don’t like when schooling appears to get too “commercial” – they compete for investors/ donors, charge superhigh school fees, that in itself is fine (ready buyer, ready seller, and HK is an expensive town) – but then I would think there’s at least a teeny risk that a natural by-product of that is they start feeling the pressure to produce results and consider kicking poor performers out so as to remain “competitive.”

Dubner and Levitt in Freakonomics talked about Bush’s No Child Left Behind inspiring education professionals to “cheat,” rather than say, kids to do well as it was initially intended to, and there’s an actual case in Atlanta here. Mentioning this to a girlfriend in Singapore, she tells me a top public secondary school there apparently requires poorer-performing students to sit for the public exams as private candidates so as not to pull down the school’s scores. (And really, that’s allowed? It’s not considered almost Atlanta-school-esque cheating?)

And then there’s my famous last phrase: Every school is going to be a package of goods and not-so-suitables. No matter how rabidly oversubscribed, they are still a package. The problem with the insanely popular ones is that because everyone is so crazy keen to get in, we forget that what works for some kids may not work for others. There’s a risk that we just think we’ve arrived if our kids can get in. And then we run the risk of making the mistake of assuming that they are a perfect fit, when all kids are different….