(529) Enigma

While waiting for university admission, Elizabeth took on coaching a student for examination. Although she made him go through work book exercises of all subjects, she specialised in teaching him mathematics. After she moved into the hostel for the academic year, I took over the task on week days.

It was interesting that I found out a few contrasting facts about him. He is fifteen years old. He spent the first six years studying in a Chinese medium school with English and the National language thrown in. Next he transitioned into a school where he did all his subjects in the National language except Maths and Science. He still studies English as a second language.

By the time Elizabeth was summoned, he was barely passing all his subjects. I was appalled by the English composition he wrote for his final exam. I was shocked by the silly and careless mistakes he made in his Maths paper one. He worked sums in his head, wrongly. He read his question in part, leaving out the line that states that the answer be presented in two decimal places. And he left questions with diagrams that look complicated, when in actual fact it was easily solved by one single observation.

Yet, when I went through his many mistakes in science, I found that he not only read faster than I. He could reason out arguments, chose two out of four statements just like that, within the time to snap his fingers. Now, that was unusual! Although I read English more slowly than Chinese, I am not a slow reader. Of course I can't compete with my son, Kenneth, who reads five, six lines at one go. I have seldom come across any college students who reads fast, let alone a fifteen year old.

His grammar could be atrocious, but once he was given sufficient points for content; the composition he wrote was quite acceptable. Surprisingly, he could summarise both in English and the National language rather well. He could pick out main points, articulate in simple sentences that fall within the word limit.

And this same boy does not read, at all. He did not read his literature book through, not even once. He could not remember reading any non-text book at all, in his entire life. After having had dedicated and interesting teachers in his first six years, he gave up not listening to any of his class teachers the last three years. There is a point that he is right, most of his current teachers probably could not even be compared to those he had when he was younger. But not to listen to a single lesson tentamount to committing academic suicide. I wonder if there are lots of boys like that within our educational system? Is that the reason why each year we have increasingly more girls who made it to government universities?