I’m amused that the Ministry of Education, having jumped the gun in announcing that it was looking at adjusting the weightage of Mother Tongue (which, by the way, is not just limited to Mandarin but also includes Malay, Tamil and other minority languages) in the PSLE, quickly backtracked after pressure was applied by the legion of Mandarin teachers in its stable and sought refuge in the motherhood statement that its earlier statement had “created the wrong impression”. Funny, I think it was very clear what kind of impression we were supposed to get in the first place.

I would have been happy to see the weightage reduced, simply because my kids have as much interest in learning Mandarin as they do bird-watching or deep-sea fishing. Contrary to MOE’s nomenclature, their “mother tongue” is not Mandarin. It is English. English is the language of entertainment, of education, of interaction. Mandarin, on the other hand, is the language of struggle for everyone in our family. It is despised by K, who does not like having to tutor Alison in her homework because he is the only person who can read more than 10 Chinese characters. It is mangled by me, not having any formal education in the language. It is abhorred by Alison, who has written “I hate Chinese” all over her wardrobe door in fits of frustration while doing homework. As for Zoe, she mixes up the smattering of Mandarin she knows so that it sounds like a cross between Elvish and Klingon. The one with the strongest command of the language in the house is the Besta English/Chinese electronic dictionary, whose abilities were bought for a pretty penny at Popular Bookstore.

K and I are very realistic about our expectations of the girls when it comes to Mandarin. It may well be the rock on which their dreams of higher education in Singapore are smashed. There are already signs that things are worsening. After getting stellar results in the subject in Primary One, Alison is now having issues as the syllabus gets tougher. Even though she attends Mandarin enrichment classes, it’s not enough to simply learn the subject on an academic level. To do well, she has to live, breathe and be interested in the language the same way she has English for the last eight years. And that is an impossibility.

But will we actually consider leaving Singapore just because of this? I doubt it. If people are going to uproot their families because of a language policy, well, more power to them. But being forced to learn Mandarin is not the same as being forced to live with ethnic warfare. Besides, it’s not like learning Mandarin is bad for a kid. Au contraire, learn it well and he is likely to become a poster boy for doing business with China; which, as you know, is very important to Singapore. But if your child’s abilities in the language are more accidental than oriental, there’s nothing to do but help him make the best of it. Hopefully, he will come out on the right side of 50 in each exam to get him through 14 15-16 years of formal education in Singapore.

Both had mostly good things to say about the Allycat. Her English is excellent, her Maths is good and her Chinese, well, her reading and writing are good but her speaking, not so much. When the Chinese teacher found out that we never speak Chinese at home, a light bulb came on and he told K he now understands why Alison is so reticent about speaking up during Mother Tongue class. However, she is otherwise “very communicative”. “You mean she’s talkative,” K said to the form teacher, which earned a chuckle and assent.

The form teacher also told Alison that she really enjoys reading her English compositions, and that she found Alison’s habit of whipping out a book to read as soon as she finished her work a very good one. However, because Ally wants to get to her book as soon as she can, she tends to rush through her work – which results in mistakes, of course. We see this at home too, with her homework and Kumon worksheets.

I love how politically correct this progress report is. EE stands for "exceeding expectations", ME for "meeting expectations" and AE for "approaching expectations".

Then the issue of making Alison a prefect was raised. Alison’s teacher told her, “I wanted to make you a prefect this year but I think you’re not ready. You keep forgetting to bring things to school!” K explained that this was because she had us and Emily to pack her bag for her last year, which reduced the incidence of forgetting things, but this year we have been making her pack her own bag to instill personal responsibility in her. So inevitably there are days when she goes to school without a textbook, or a workbook, or some other item that she is supposed to bring for class. When her form teacher heard K’s explanation, she said it’s a good practice to make Alison responsible for her own stuff, but she won’t put her up as a nominee for prefect until she sees that Alison can make improvements in this area.

So, the gauntlet is thrown. Will Alison get to be a prefect as she has been hoping since last year? Stay tuned.

In other news, Alison walked to the shops to buy something for the very first time last weekend. We’ve been rather reluctant to let her because heaven knows our neighbourhood has some weird stuff going on (in the night, at least) and she’s still rather young to be traipsing around by herself, but she looked at us with pleading eyes and so we said, fine, you can try just the one time. She went with four dollars in her hand and returned safely with a carton of soya bean milk, pleased as punch at having the chance to play the grown-up.

Alison's deep tan is throwing off my camera's auto colour balance.

Of course, after that, K started making her do things like fetch him a drink – after all, when you’re grown-up you do the shitty stuff along with the good stuff, right? But I don’t know if we’ll let her repeat this exercise. She knows about stranger danger, but as my mum pointed out, she has to walk past a few doors on the way to the shops and there really is no telling what could happen even if she takes precautions to stay safe. A friend reminded me today to teach her about safe touch – I must find an opportunity to talk to her about that too.