Its about the challenge

This is the last year my son will be Level 1 of primary school. Next year, he joins his sisters’ rank of the morning session in level 2. Next year, he will be the junior amongst the seniors. Next year, he starts a tougher part of his primary school days.

Nonetheless, he ended his level 1 academic life in a very commendable way.

From the beginning of the year, he has been asking me to get him an X-Box…or a PS3…or a PSP slim 3000. He began the year pretty good, getting good results in his 1st monthly test…and the 2nd monthly test. Come to the mid-year exams, his results were rather deplorable. He dropped to the bottom 10 of his class! That didn’t rattle him much for come the next monthly test following the mid-year exams, his results dipped further.

Now, under normal circumstances, I would have freaked out and screamed my head off at him for this state of affairs. But I became realistic and have to admit to some degree of responsibility over his showing. It so happened that the past 2 assessments coincided with a period when my husband and I had to be out of KL. Hence, we were unable to sit through with him on his revisions; we also did not pay much attention to his dietary needs as we had done for the previous tests in previous years.

So this time round, I decided to play his tune. I challenged him to beat his own “record” and dangled the carrot for him to bite. Top 5, he gets his PS3, top 10, an X-Box and top 15 he gets the PSP slim 3000 model.

However, we couldn’t wait for the results to be tabulated as we had taken both he and his sister with us outstation. So our communication with their class teachers were limited to short text messages on our mobile phones. Thank God for technology.

A week into their early school holidays, I contacted his class teacher, a young single male teacher who taught him Math. When I didn’t get an immediate response, I grew apprehensive. It wasn’t until late evening the next day that I finally got a reply to my query.

Guess who now has to go get a certain young man his PSP Slim 3000 model? Let you in on a secret, he traded the earlier promised PS3 for the PSP….