The final answer is...

Andre is now in the thick of PSLE revision, counting down to the dreaded exam (2 and a half months) and as you can imagine, it's a very painful period for everyone involved.

To me, it's a total waste of a year. He hardly learned anything new - the entire year is practically spent trying to perfect exam techniques by doing exam papers ad nauseum. And for what? PSLE is essentially just a glorified, high-stakes school placement test. It's extremely meaningless and experience-diminishing.

Not to mention, the stress has turned my happy-go-lucky boy into a snappish, angsty pre-teen. I can't wait for it to be over.

In the course of PSLE preparation, there are times when I've despaired over Andre's off-the-wall answers to exam paper questions. In Science, for example, there was a question: "Why are the butterfly chrysalises either brown or green?"

His reply: "Depends whether they ate brown or green plants."

Sometimes, his command of the English language lands him in trouble, like his answer to this question: "Why is it not advisable for a man to place plants in the room where he sleeps?"

His reply: "The plants will fight the man for oxygen."

Wah, monster plants, like Little Shop of Horrors.

One particular question stuck out in my memory. Andre was doing an English paper and as part of the comprehension cloze passage where you have to fill in appropriate words in the blanks, there was this sentence:

"The Trojan war was fought against the city of Troy in Asia Minor which is __________ -day Turkey."

The correct word for the blank is "modern". Andre however, took one look at "day" and "Turkey" (never mind that it's capitalised) and filled in "Thanksgiving".

I know I was yelling at him while shrieking in laughter at the same time. Talk about comic relief.

On a more serious note, I know it's PSLE fatigue when he cares more about getting the work done than getting it right. I'm despairing over his immaturity, yet part of me resents the fact that I have to force him to jump through hoops. And I know I'm not the only one going through this angst. You can usually spot the mum with a PSLE kid cos she's the one who looks the most frazzled.

This is even more so if her child is a boy. Generally speaking, boys mature later. Many of the boys in Andre's class talk and behave like 7-year-olds while the girls look like they've got their future all planned out. In that sense, PSLE favours girls because it calls for extreme discipline, meticulous care and the patience to do repetitive tasks over and over again.

My brother-in-law who has taught Sunday school for secondary level kids, recounts that the girls are usually very socially clued in whereas the boys, especially at sec 1, seem not to know what they're doing there and appear to live on their own planet. Only when they hit sec 3 or 4 (or even later), the boys will suddenly wake up and then outshine the girls.

I realise that we're sometimes in a hurry for our kids to grow up, for silly reasons like the PSLE. We let the system dictate the timetable of our kids' maturity, which is just wrong.

So I'm trying to tell myself to let Andre mature at his own pace. Instead of wishing away his innocence, I should enjoy it while it lasts. It will disappear soon enough.