T2 woke up at 7 a.m. sharp on Saturday and told me that I had to help him with his Eye Level Math homework. Wow. This one’s completely different from T1 who would take about a ride to the heck and back before he would even pick up a pencil. At 8 a.m. sharp, T2 brought in 3 worksheets, 16 pages each and settled down on the bedroom floor and did his work.
After a few pages, he ran into trouble because he couldn’t read the instructions, so he hopped on the bed, prised open my eyelids and shoved the workbook under my nose.
“Mummy, I need your help. What they say here?”
Bleary eyed, I read: “Count the number of objects and write the number of objects. Circle groups of 10 objects.”
He hopped off the bed and continued. Then he bobbed up again, this time he was in the sort of trouble that’s going to take me more than 4 seconds to solve.
“Circle the biggest number. Count the number of objects and write the number of objects”. Except this time, the objects aren’t arranged neatly in rows. They are scattered.
I guess there is a reason why I could never ever homeschool the kids. I don’t have the patience. T2 counted several times. Then he counted again. Each time he’d miss one or several objects out or he’d double count them. Why in the world would they scatter the objects and confuse the kids like that at this age?!
It’s 8 o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud!
I got up, and sat beside him.
“Look you have to start counting from the corner and work your way towards the other side.”
T2 counted and missed out the scrambled ones in the middle.
“Okay, look, you gotta mark the ones you’ve counted so you won’t double count them and you can see which ones you haven’t counted.”
T2 counted again, and this time he made a small slash over the objects he counted. He lost count after seven and recounted, and got confused whether the marked objects were already counted or not.
So I told him to write out the numbers instead for the ones he’d already counted. Then he missed counting the ones at the top right corner. By then, I was all worked up and well and truly awake.
“For heaven’s sake, T2, use your eyes! You’ve left out the ones at the top right corner. Count again!” T2 counted, and recounted, and after me close to decimating my zen completely and him almost losing his nerves over counting 16 pairs of glasses, he finally got all of them numbered and accounted for. He went through all the three worksheets, doing exceedingly well except in the ones involving counting tiny scattered objects. Seriously, the pictures were purposely designed to hide the objects rather than to display them. At his age his eyeball tracking capability is still being developed. He deserves a medal for doing all 3 worksheets in one go, yet, listening to me you’d think it was unacceptable for him not to count them all correctly at first try. Because he had done everything else with so much ease, not getting the counting down pat is just not trying hard enough. Such is the unfortunate hymn of the tiger mom.
Later, we were at the mall coming out of the DVD shop when T2 grabbed my hand and asked
“Mummy, are you clever?”
“What do you think, T2?”
He looked up at me and nodded with his dimpled smile.
“How about you, T2. Are you clever?”
“Almost” This answer surprised me.
“I can do critical thinking, I’m good at that. Teacher showed me the AB, AB, AB and I can identify them all in the right sequence. I’m good with patterns.”
Poor baby. He’s *almost* clever because he couldn’t count all the tiny scattered objects all by himself. And my impatience didn’t help either. He’s four, and he’s telling me about critical thinking and identifying things in sequence. That ain’t bad at all.
You know what the crazy tiger mom routine does to kids? Sure, some kids may get better and improve, some even achieve great success. But you’re always going to risk hurting the self-esteem of the sensitive ones. I’m gonna hightail myself out of Mars and move back to Venus. Self-esteem and self-worth are fragile treasures in every child that parents, especially tiger moms take for granted. You don’t realize it until they are gone.
It ain’t worth it. And I don’t care what Amy Chua says.
momsterthoughts 