Pat's Schoolhouse

[Kabby]

LOLMum:

aiyoh, complain also must take queue no. cannot suka suka just complain.

with a certain group of firends, i realise that i need to give out q no. so that we could all take turns to complain and grumble........ otherwise i can wait till the cow comes home and still have yet to get a word out of my mouth.

:dancing: :dancing: :dancing:

:rotflmao: :rotflmao:

[zeezzen]

i’m not complaining at all what! zZzzzzz…

[LOLMum]

zeezzen:

i'm not complaining at all what! zZzzzzz....

we know, relax lah........................ :evil: :evil: :evil:

[zeezzen]

okay okay... chill chill...

so where are your kids studying at? praying hard there's vacancy for us at buckley / halifax / claymore.....

[LOLMum]

mine already passed that stage - phew -


it was easy to get dd into a school but for ds who is 7 now, the waiting list was a :yikes: . now if i know a friend has a bun in the oven, my first advice is look for a school now. dont wait.

pat's was on our list too but decided to stick to another that put more emphasis on chinese.

all the best.

better start looking at primary school too. very kiasu.............

[zeezzen]

Oh, I know where I want to put him liao. I will need to do voluntary work at Nanyang Pri when he turns 4 years old… kiasu kiasu… haha! but no guarantee a place.

[Un-Kiasu Singaporean]

As Singaporeans would say "Wah-Lau" you all damn kiasu sia." What’s next do volunteer work at Pat’s Schoolhouse before you fall pregnant to guarantee ourselves a place. Talk about money can’t buy us everything. National pastime…queueing and complaining.


(Quoting Pink Floyd’s Song Another Brick In The Wall)

You, Yes You, Stand Still Laddie!
When we grew up and went to school, there were certain teachers who would hurt the children anyway they could by pouring their derision upon anything we did
exposing every weakness however carefully hidden by the kids.
But in the town it was well known that when they got home at night
their fat and psychopathic wives
Would thrash them within inches of their lives!
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
Wrong, Guess again!
If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?
You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddie!"

C’mon guys we didn’t have the posh, luxury strollers and boutique preschool education in our generation and we didn’t turn out so bad did we? The education system nowadays has turned our kids into book-smart but not life-smart kids with no resilience to handle daily life. So what if we’re number 1 in mandarin? Local kids can’t think outside the box and it’s a trait we continue our spoon-feeding and mugging through to our uni days.

If you can show me a local preschool that can rival the international systems I would like to see for myself. Finland for example is the No.1 in the World in Education. They value the importance of early childhood education and their early childhood educators have Masters degrees not O/A Level students on holiday jobs. Teaching is a noble profession that truly requires a calling. Get it right!!

[Kabby]

Un-kiasu, you seem very creative though. You can write like that, but you were also a product of the Sg system. So that's not too bad isn't it?

So, what I see is that our kids have it better than us. They have more creative projects and assessments. They have more hands on learning and role play and exciting learn through exploration stuff. I look at the kids around me and they are truly more precocious than us during our time. They think out of the box more too.
Finland has a much longer history than us. Every country needs time to be developed. Singapore just reached \"developed\" status not too long ago. And every education system needs time to be fine-tuned and time to churn out generations of creative, critical thinking kids.

So give Singapore some time. And if there are more like-minded people like you and I, you can be an ambassador, spread the message to be less caught up in the stressful rat race, but allow kids to learn through play, there is lots of hope yet that we can be like Finland.

Already, Singapore is regarded highly. Finland, South Korea, Singapore have appeared in the international reports as having great education systems that value the teachers. We can do much more for the teachers indeed, and slowly and steadily we are moving towards having better qualified teachers across the board, isn't it?

In the past, our Primary school teachers need not have degrees but now all of them do.

And, I placed my child in Pat's because I didn't want him to be spoon fed and I don't want him to be a mugger. I want him to acquire concepts through hands on \"doing\" and hopefully he will be a more creative and critical thinker than me and Dh are!

[2boysmother]

what is the fees in pat school house

[Un-Kiasu Singaporean]

@Kabalevsky Thanks for the compliment about my writing. Doesn’t sound like that of sarcasm. About your point of being a product of the SG system, I only studied up to Secondary 3 here and then I completed the rest of my education overseas…hence I have a different mindset to the usual Singaporeans. I agree that the majority of local kids may have better literacy and numeracy skills compared to other Western countries but the majority of local kids here are unable to think out of the box or problem solve on their own. They are excellent at regurgitation but struggle to search for knowledge independently. I really believe in thematic units of work which incorporate the different subject areas of maths, science, literacy, technology, visual- arts etc… and the whole language experience thing the kids engage in during the process of cookery/baking.


Pat’s TCML Music Program is very well-written and thought out. It’s not like the usual boring theory/ ta-taa ti-ti-taa nonsense that is just too over the top. It’s really interesting coz’ the kids are exposed to very varied and different genres of music and really have the sensory experience in music creation. Who knows maybe next they will start composing their own songs on the computer with some advanced music-editing software or something. There are ways to further improve on the current Pat’s programs for sure…but that’s what their curriculum team is for isn’t it…Haha…

Speaking of countries that value early childhood educators, the realisation has only just dawned on ours that it is an area of uttmost importance. We can judge the importance placed of ECE by looking at the salaries we pay our childcare / kindergarten teachers. Come on it’s time to be realistic…We leave our children in their hands almost all day. Surely we want satisfied not disgruntled teachers. We want the younger Gen Y to choose teaching as a profession because there’s less of a generation gap and because we need new blood in every profession.

Everyone cares about how smart their children should become but no one really plans for their child to become a teacher. Especially in SG we associate brains and wealth with doctors, lawyers, accountants, finance, IT etc… It’s time to make it a first-rate profession that commands prestige and a high rate of pay. It’s really ironic…we worry about what school what Pat’s branch we must get into and how early we must start registering but what we don’t give enough importance to are our children’s teachers. They are the ones that really matter…the defining reason that we trust them with our children’s development.

@ 2BoysMother - With regards to your question about Pat’s fees all I can say is an arm and a leg so it’s up to each individual family to decide if it’s really worth your dollar. As they say good things don’t come cheap…The kiasu parents pay for the new house within the radius of those prestigious schools to ensure that the kids get in, luxury cars, posh birthday parties. For me, Pat’s joins the elite, luxury brand of childcare…Just quoting my friend on her description of Pat’s when I was deciding on preschools for my kids. Woah! Pat’s Schoolhouse…Isn’t that the Atas school in the Bukit Timah area. So depends how you wanna look at it.