hi parents !


i’ve graduated from yishun town and i did well enough to get into raffles jc. just wanted to share some of my thoughts and experiences on ytss and if you have any questions for me, feel free to ask!

i was never a stellar student in my 4 years in ytss (in fact by prelims, i was still failing a-maths and was put into some compulsory night study session due to my poor grades & my l1r5 at prelims almost hit 30) and to be really honest, i was simply not interested in studying. had some family issues here and there too but i’m not going blab on about it here. any person, if they saw my prelim results, wouldn’t have expected me to be in raffles today. i was that student who was always sleeping in class. but my teachers never gave up on me. they often spoke to and counselled me and honestly we are like friends (even after graduation). when i went for consultations, armed with ‘stupid’ questions with answers that i should have known if i was not sleeping in class, my teachers never once judged me. in fact, they would pay out of their own pockets to buy snacks for us to munch on during consultations. during night study sessions, our teachers would stay back with us just so that they can be there to provide emotional support and academic help & they always reply my texts, even in unworldly hours (even though they are not obliged to & btw for the students reading this please don’t do that to your teachers they need their rest hahahah). essentially, they just go out of their way to do all those small things that might be helpful to us, even though it doesn’t guarantee them a pay raise - in fact they have to pay for it. and it felt like we were truly a big family. when i got back my o level results, my teachers were all genuinely happy for me and they teased me while we reminisced the old times of me sleeping in their class.

perhaps that’s why so many of us go back even years after graduation. of course, i know that not all ytss students have built that sort of rapport with their teachers, but i must say that the number of students who have done that in ytss is quite high (i’m comparing it to my primary school friends from other sec schools, as well as my current jc friends).

while browsing through kiasuparents, i see that many parents are more concerned about schools’ COP, affiliations, etc. while i am not going to lie that ‘good’ schools - with the "brand" and COP - provide better opportunities and networks, they aren’t exactly the best place to spend your teenage years in. the amount of anxiety and mental health issues i’ve heard from my friends in rjc is really insane, it makes my years in ytss feel surreal and fluffy. my personal take on this is that unless you have the absolute confidence that you can mould your child into a confident young individual, it’s best to send your child to ‘band 3’ schools where they would not be pressured into doing well. these schools do not have that many ‘black sheeps’ that can stress out teachers (which results in more impatient and nasty teachers) / influence your child negatively and they do not have a huge concentration of high achievers that will make your child feel like they are never good enough. essentially, they are a good balance (at least in my opinion). perhaps the only flaw is that they don’t provide as much opportunities (like internships, partnering with organisations, etc), but honestly you can find that easily by yourself, as long as you take the initiative to do some googling here and there.