Happiness Journal 26/11/25 

My daughter practically tumbled out of the glass door, shrieking in delight, pleased as punch with her intricately braided hair. As if she didn’t display her joy clearly enough, she spun around like a ballerina on steroids.

She is loved at school.
I wonder how long her teacher took to do up her hair like that.

It also served as a signal for me to go the extra mile at work. When I take care of other people’s children, I ought to accumulate enough merit for my children to be loved fiercely by their teachers.

Happiness Journal  20/11/25

Trudged my way to the last day of school. Which is a remarkable feat in itself because any teacher who has had to teach students to sit still, focus and learn after their exams can attest to the excruciating pain involved.

Still, I spent two periods today modifying four questions for my Foundation Science class just to reinforce the concept of identifying changed variables. I must admit that I am aghast at how the new syllabus requires Primary 3 students to identify changed and unchanged variables from the get-go. Won’t this nightmare hit closer to home when my son grows up in the near future? Geez. 🙄

(I only managed to go through two questions with them, but no harm done. Sensei is professional this way.)

Also forced my English class to complete a comprehension exercise while I attended to two students and gave them pointers for their reading. Well, I hope they take some of these pointers to heart and improve gradually so that I can focus on their other peers next year. A public school teacher’s job is never done.

No worries. Sensei handles it well because he went straight home after dismissal to indulge in the last episode of Physical Asia.

Happiness Journal 21/11/25

The notoriously steep dip in results from Pri 4 to Pri 5 has been well documented and painfully lamented by parents.

Here’s the thing. Pri 4 Science is frightfully easy. I let my son try the first six MCQs of my school’s P4 paper and he got five out of six correct. The question he got wrong dwells on identifying the young plant in a diagram - hardly one to get right for someone unexposed to the mechanics of Science papers.

Not to say that my son is exceptionally brilliant, but it’s a testimony to how sophisticated preschool education has become these days.