A few days had passed since the UPSR results came out. Idlan didn't want me to go into anything specific but suffice to say that he did fine.
He had settled well at his new school and the UPSR results did not carry much weight for his immediate future plans. We won't be applying to any other schools and most of my friends who had children at a similar age with Idlan must be feeling the pressure now. The results would determine which school they would enrolled for their secondary years.
On reflection, I was glad that Idlan wasn't put through the pressure of tuitions like most of his classmate had to go through. We had tutors coming to our house but they were mainly to help him with his concentration and exam techniques. He did most of the revising himself, but he got bored easily. The tutors came and helped him think out of the box and relate the subjects to real life situation. He enjoyed that.
We also had a BM tutor coming over because frankly his Bahasa Melayu was pretty weak. We always made sure that his weekends were free and he had time for his video games and other things.
Yes, we had a lot of pressure from others for not taking him through extra lessons but I always believe that going to school was not just about passing exams. At the beginning of the year, I gave him the choice of either to sit the UPSR or just go straight into I-GCSE. He decided for the former because most of his friends were taking the exams as well. His school had been putting too much emphasis on exams and I was never comfortable with that notion.
So, the deal was to change school as soon as he was done with the UPSR. Within a few days of completing UPSR, Idlan was gone. He went into Year 8 in another school across town.
When the exam results came out, we were more excited about it than Idlan himself. We always believed that exams are to gauge knowledge, not memory. We were happy that there were plenty of KBAT (higher level thinking questions) rather than the standard ones. Idlan felt that the result should be OK, and it was.
His new school is something completely different to Sri Utama, his previous one. There were more emphasis on character development and extracurricular activities. He was doing experiments rather than reading about them. When he had arts class, everything was provided down to the crayons and papers. He was really enjoying his class - despite having to get on the bus at 6.30 in the morning.
Last Thursday for instance - the day the UPSR results came out - he didn't want to follow us to Sri Utama to pick up his results because he had a class event. The class was having a poetry day with a "slam poet" coming all the way from England.
With his UPSR done, it looked like we would be taking a sabbatical from the National Curriculum. I hope that one day, the emphasis would come back to character-building, leadership and extracurricular activities. We were building a human being, not a machine ...
