Every school, a good school...

The statement "every school, a good school" is by Heng Swee Keat, when he was Minister of Education in 2015. It has been over 10 years since then, but this still remains a topic of conversation among parents, educators and even amongst students themselves...in many cases, almost like a ridicule. Whether it is a statement of the education system, or a hope for the future, this statement requires some serious consideration.

From the speech by Minister Heng in 2015, he explained that to make it a good school, the system requires 3 things: every student an engaged learner, every teacher a caring educator, every parent a supportive partner.

The "good teacher" part, is the task of the Ministry of Education. In many cases, I think the government is doing a good job based on the opinion that the Singapore system is among the best in the world, especialy for Math. In addition, Singapore is also ranked highly, and even #1 in a some years, in the OECD PISA ranking for students.

What we need to do more is the student and the parent part. How to do we make our kids engaged in learning? And how can we as parents be supportive of their development through the infancy to primary/grade school or when they become teens? The toughie is of course, the challenging teen years when hormones are raging and our children have to find their path in life. Can we even start their path earlier to prep for the teen years?

In view of this, I am doing my part by writing my experience in Infancy to IC. I share my parenting experience in guiding my kids thru the Singapore system, through the (supposedly) top school in Singapore (Raffles Institution) and then to the top universities...yes, they made it.

Available in e-book, softcopy and hard cover.

Time Management or is it really Project Management?

We have been told since young by others that in order to do something well, we need to have good time management. As one who leads projects for a living who knows a thing or two about this, I will say that time management is a fallacy. Purely speaking, time management (just like managing people) refers to managing time in which we control time, i.e. we can accelerate it (to make it go faster), slow it down, or to stop time. We can do this with a lot of things but we cannot manage time - it continues to chug along, whether we like it or not. If you were to ask me the time and my answer is, say 9:00am, that time is already gone because it is 9:01am when you continue with what you are doing. Time is like a freight train or a subway that we can only latch on to and hope we can do things within the allotted time. Ask the student who needs to submit the paper at 11:59pm Sunday night or the employee who need to submit the report Mon morning 9:00am. In truth, what ...

The Mental You - Reducing Stress part 2

Just like there are always 2 sides to each story (the good and the bad), we can tackle issues in 2 ways - either head on or perhaps we can do something opposite altogether. The previous post is primarily concerned on how to overcome stress by reducing it. Another way is to focus on something totally unrelated to stress. So, rather than looking at fixing the bad, we focus on the good such that there is little room for the bad. Let's work on this together... Positive Thinking What do you see if you turn on the news, or start looking at social media? More often than not, aside from the beautiful people and cute cats, the news is mostly gloom and doom. There are wars and rumors of wars, climate change due to global warming causing floods, and other disasters, earthquakes at various parts of the world. So, it's no uncommon for us to no longer see the world in rose-tinted glasses but glasses with murky lenses. And yet, to reduce stress, this is the one thing we must do - to think ...

Parenting

How did you do it? This question has been asked by many of my friends and colleagues when they found out about my children. We had initially thought that what we went through is typical. But as we talked to more and more people, it is only then we realized that the journey is not so common after all. Singapore has been ranked amongst the top countries in the world by PISA, short for the Program for International Student Assessment that is under the OECD umbrella. In some years, it is actually ranked number 1. In other words, to be able to get through the Singapore education system is difficult enough as it is. The Journey to College By the grace of God, both my kids did well in the system by being selected into the Gifted Education Program (GEP) - for the top 1% of students - and then getting into Raffles Institution (supposedly the number 1 school in Singapore), and achieving straight As in the Singapore-GCE Cambridge "A" levels, and then receiving offers from a few o...

Paving the Wei

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