{"id":21084,"date":"2015-08-26T07:55:06","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T23:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=21084"},"modified":"2017-02-25T00:24:57","modified_gmt":"2017-02-24T16:24:57","slug":"hannah-and-homework","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2015\/08\/26\/hannah-and-homework\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannah and Homework"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every week, Hannah at Kindergarten 2 has two spelling quizzes; Chinese spelling on Monday, and English spelling on Tuesday. Each quiz requires the kids to write several words – usually three for Chinese and five to six for English. Hannah often practices for them at her nanny’s, and also at home from the weekend onward. Hannah genuinely seems to enjoy school work. And getting the words mostly if not all correct at the quizzes is often a source of great pride for her. She’ll often gush with joy when she reports her results to us on Tuesday and Wednesday late afternoons when we pick her up, and we’ll also draw additional ‘stars’ and smiley faces in her report book as a reward for her.<\/p>\n

\"Practicing
Practicing her English spelling.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our girl normally does pretty well for English spelling, but Chinese spelling is a huge hit and miss. Like what Ling muses – Hannah simply doesn’t get sufficient Mandarin speaking practice at home. Mommy’s Mandarin is decent, while Daddy’s on the other hand is… – well, the less said the better! So Ling had a grand idea the other day: print the Chinese words of the week using that new Epson L550 printer, and put them up in her bathroom (of all places).<\/p>\n

\"Subliminal
Subliminal learning!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In both language cases though, Hannah still doesn’t take well to failure, and an early morning incident today brought this to the fore again. Today’s English spelling quiz involved the words: ‘lizard’, ‘caterpillar’, ‘worm’, ‘snail’, centipede’, and ‘spider’, and Hannah did her usual practices last night. This morning just before driving off from home, we got her to mentally rehearse the six words again – and when she had difficulties recalling how to spell ‘caterpillar’, we could see her tears starting to well-up. A quick reassurance and prompting helped her recall, but it reminded us of what her kindergarten teachers often share when we meet them: that our girl has very high expectations of herself and her work. Yes she takes pride, but she also gets super emotional at failures.<\/p>\n

We’re not sure what to make of it, especially since Peter, even at just two years old, shows no such perfectionist tendencies. In fact, if nothing else, he has that curious if also destructive streak when he rampages about the house.<\/p>\n

It’s indeed something to think of and reflect: on the one hand, we beam with pride when Hannah’s teachers share about Hannah’s academic accomplishments in class, her sociability and her natural leadership tendency to take charge, but are also a little worried if she doesn’t grow to better handle not being good at everything and failing as she grows older.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every week, Hannah at Kindergarten 2 has two spelling quizzes; Chinese spelling on Monday, and English spelling on Tuesday. Each quiz requires the kids to write several words – usually three for Chinese and five to six for English. Hannah<\/p>\n

Read More Hannah and Homework<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-at-home","category-children-blues","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-7-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/hannah-spelling-02.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}