Thus, the key is to manage stress so as to ensure that it stays optimal and an advantage to your child! In the final part of this series, we look into effective ways of helping your child to manage stress!
 
Increase familiarity to decrease anxiety!
It is natural for us to experience anxiety when we are faced with unfamiliarity, such as a new environment, new tasks or assignments, a new workplace or setting, and so on. Children experience this even more than adults, as they have less experiences to fall back on to help boost their confidence.
 
Unfamiliar tasks or settings generate feelings of uncertainty and a lack of control, which can lead to unhealthy thoughts such as imagining failure or the worst outcome possible. Sometimes, these can become self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, a child may come to believe that he is going to fail no matter what he does, which leads to him not putting any effort to improve, therefore causing the failure he believed in.
 
Building familiarity is a quick and effective measure to reduce stress. This applies to all of us, in any situation. We can help to build two main types of familiarity for children in particular – physical, and procedural. Physical familiarity can be built, for example, by visiting a new classroom before the start of a new year, or an exam hall before an actual exam. Simply knowing how the place looks and feels will help a child to feel less anxious about being in it later on. Procedural familiarity is about knowing how things will progress. For instance, it can be developed by informing your child how a lesson is generally taught, or how an exam is usually conducted, or the general structure and style of an exam paper. This helps your child feel less uncertain about what she will be presented with in those circumstances and help her to focus on the task at hand.
 
Enhance achievability to decrease helplessness!
Another aspect of managing stress is achievability. As we have discussed earlier, stress is manageable when a person believes that she has available and effective ways to deal with an event. However, it is elevated when she believes she has little means to cope with it. What this means is that by increasing your child’s perception that she has the ability to handle a task or event, it is less likely that she will feel overwhelmed and helpless! There are therefore two ways we can do this – by decreasing the perceived difficulty of the task, or by increasing your child’s perceptions of her own abilities.
 
The task can be made less difficult by breaking it down into bite-sized chunks. To explain, large and complex tasks are tremendous and can make us feel clueless about how we should even begin tackling it. However, when they are broken down to smaller components, each component can be much more manageable. For example, if your child was asked to plan a class outing, it can be a very difficult task if your child views it as a whole. However, by breaking it down into food, location, costs, entertainment, and attendance; identifying the sub-tasks to do for each component, and coming up with a timeline to complete them, each task is far more achievable and will help your child progress towards a success.
 
At the same time, enhancing your child’s ability, whether actual or perceived, can also help to decrease stress, as it allows your child to handle tasks that are more difficult. For studies in particular, an effective way to do this to invest in additional education! These opportunities help to further develop your child’s ability and confidence in managing their studies. Furthermore, as external education typically adopts small class sizes, they would be better placed to guide your child at an appropriate level of difficulty to fit her needs and support her main school studies. As your child develops her skills, knowledge and ability in different areas, her confidence would grow and difficult benchmarks would become more achievable and realistic to her.
 
Build rapport and support to decrease feelings of abandonment!
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, build rapport with and support for your child! Psychologists have long recognised the importance of close relationships for child development. As humans, forming emotional connections with others is a basic need and has extensive positive effects on our physical and mental health. On the flip side, we feel sadness and loss when we become socially isolated.
 
It is notable that social support is closely related to stress! In fact, social support has been described as “a social network’s provision of psychological and material resources intended to benefit an individual’s ability to cope with stress”. This means that social support enables a person to deal with a greater number or intensity of stressors, and buffers her against their negative effects. Interestingly, this is particularly so during childhood!
 
What do all these mean for you? In simple words, your child will feel especially stressed if she feels that she is facing a difficult task or situation all alone, with no one to help her along. If she feels that there are people around her to guide and support her, she would likely feel less overwhelmed, even if those people cannot help her in her task or situation! This begs the question – how do I build rapport with them when I also need to discipline them and push them to study? Here’s two simply ways, though there are many others.
 
First, you can directly ask your child if there’s anything burdening them or that they’re struggling with, and do something about it! This act alone will build support by showing that you care for and are concerned about how they are getting along. It is important that we do not stop there – we must follow up on what they share. If we cannot do anything to help with their issue, we can at least assure them that we are there to help if they need us. That in itself is a powerful act and should be sufficient to let them know that you’re supportive. If we can actually do something about it, we can go beyond providing assurance to providing or sourcing for problem-specific support. For example, if their worry is about a weak subject that they hate, personally tutoring your child or getting help from trained educators might be options for you. On a side note, if you’re doubting whether you should proactively involve yourself in your children’s education, you should know that research has shown that children whose parents get involved in their education tend to have better academic performance, higher self-esteem and are better behaved!
 
Second, it is helpful to simply let them know that you care for them. This is particularly useful if your child does not wish to share her problems with you. Instead of withdrawing or feeling resentful, we can understand that they may sometimes have their reasons for not sharing! In this case, we can still help by expressing our care for them through other means. For example, allowing them to take time off from studying to pursue their own interests and talking about topics other than studies will let them know that you value them as a person and not just someone who produces good exam results. Spend quality time and having fun together will build love, rapport and openness, and let them know that you are someone they can fall back on.
 
What we believe
 
We’ve discussed three ways to manage stress extensively. These are part and parcel of our teaching approach at Polymath Learning Centre. As mentioned before, we emphasize the importance of our students’ well-being, as we are certain that students perform well when they in a sound state of mind and feel cared for. We trust that by increasing familiarity, enhancing achievability and building rapport and support, we can help our students to manage stress to optimal levels and not allow demands imposed upon them to overpower them. In doing so, we will create win-win situations where our students perform well and develop positively as individuals, and on our end, our teaching becomes even more rewarding and fulfilling! If you would like to find out more about our approach, feel free to contact us for a free trial lesson  today!

Practice Past Years’ Exam Questions

Past year exam questions provide an indication of the standards that you will be facing in the exam. Search for these papers and practice the questions. This will also help you develop your skill in answering questions that come up frequently in the past years. It is okay to get it wrong now, because it is just that — practice!

Create Cheatsheets

This is not for cheating! Knowledge that you generate, process and structure yourself is more likely to be encoded into your long-term memory than knowledge that is simply read passively. Psychologists agree that passive learning (re-reading notes), is inefficient compared to active learning (finding patterns, creating summaries, linking to other knowledge etc). Creating cheatsheets is one such form of an active learning strategy. Not only does it help you to remember key points which serve as memory cues to other related points, it also helps to summarize all the important points that you need to know in one quick reference!

Review What You Have Learnt Before Sleep, and Sleep Well

Did you know — your brain replays the activities that were encountered during the day while you sleep, and this replay strengthens memories of those activities overnight! This effect is stronger for activities that occur just before sleep.

Thus, reviewing what you have learnt during the day is not just a good learning strategy in itself, it is particularly useful if you do it just before sleep to maximize the benefits! In addition, this means that it is important to sleep well, and not to burn the midnight oil. Long-term memories are formed and reactivated during sleep, therefore helping us to retain information that we have learned during the day. When we stay up trying to cram as much information as we can, we will lose precious time to rest; will not remember what we read during the night effectively; and even what we learnt during the day will be lost in short-term memory. If the best way to retain what you've learnt is to sleep, why not enjoy your bedtime instead of midnight cramming?

Teach Someone Else (such as your parents!)

Teaching someone else allows you to adopt a different perspective — you are no longer just trying to understand a concept but are explaining it to someone else in a way that he/she can understand. When you teach someone else, you are forced to verbalize your understanding of a concept in a coherent manner so that your partner can understand. You would be able to see gaps in your understanding that may not otherwise be obvious to you. Besides, you are also revising while you are teaching!

Go Beyond Memorizing to Understanding

For Mathematics and Science in particular, it is important to understand the concepts. Plain and repetitive memorization will only help to answer specific types of questions using specific parameters. However, PSLE questions are designed to test your understanding, and you are likely to encounter new questions that have not been presented to you before. These questions demand your understanding and application of knowledge to solve the problem or provide the correct answer.

Thus, it is important to study with the goal of understanding, and not just memorizing. Clarify what certain concepts mean or how they work. Find patterns. Link it to other things you know. Draw analogies. These strategies will deepen your understanding of what things mean and how they work, and equip you with the ability to manage new questions presented to you.

Polymath Learning Centre’s approach

At Polymath Learning Centre, we believe in equipping our students with the right skills that will help them to study efficiently and effectively. It is not about studying hard and memorizing for long hours - it is about studying, playing, and exploring all at the same time, and doing these in smart and innovative ways. We teach and develop the right habits in our students from the start, and hope that these habits would help them not only in their studies, but also later in life.

If you would like to experience our teaching philosophy and approach, please feel free to sign up for a free trial lesson with us!

​Even the most significant scientists of all history were polymaths – Newton, Galileo, Aristotle, Kepler, Huygens, Laplace, Pasteur, Descartes, Faraday, Leibniz, Maxwell, Euler, Darwin, Ptolemy, Hooke. So, what exactly is a polymath? We describe five key qualities of a polymath below.

Problem solver
Polymaths are great problem solvers. Some people navigate challenges better than others and have an advantage in the path to success. When life hits a polymath with a challenge, he is able to identify the objectives, potential issues, opportunities and available means, get help from others, turn plans into actions and remain focused on the end-goal. A polymath garners respect and often becomes the leader among his peers by virtue of his exceptional capabilities and skills.

Broad and deep knowledge base
In acquiring skills and knowledge, we often face the dilemma of specializing in a particular field of knowledge or obtaining broad knowledge of the field in general. A polymath is able to pursue both breadth and depth. A polymath pushes the constraints of time and opportunity cost by being adept at extracting useful information from the vast amount of available knowledge and combining it with his own knowledge in a manner that allows him to become even more efficient in further building knowledge.
Having a broad and deep knowledge base allows a polymath to combine knowledge across fields to solve practical problems, learn a complex skill or pioneer a new industry. Take Steve Jobs for instance, who combined design with computing hardware and software to create a cultural following for Apple that goes beyond a typical phone company. In a study by Professor Brian Uzzi at the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management across more than 26 million scientific papers, it was discovered that the papers with the highest impact and influence typically had research teams that came from diverse backgrounds. In another study, Professor Brian also found that the best studies usually cited a diverse combination of other studies!

Analyzer and pattern finder
A polymath has strong analytical and pattern-finding skills – the ability to perceive, extract, organize and assimilate information. Polymaths tackle problems by using a logical approach to explore ideas, information and solutions. These skills are developed through practice and habit. Once acquired, they are highly useful, generalizable skills that are valued across all industries. Polymaths are able to extract useful patterns, creative solutions and alternative approaches to problems from disparate sources of information. This makes a polymath an invaluable asset to his team.

Well-balanced
A polymath is an intelligent, well-rounded and relatable individual. A polymath is not an elitist who is disconnected from societies and communities. Rather, he develops a character that is socially, morally, mentally, and intellectually balanced. A polymath keeps his life, mind and body in order. He maintains healthy relationships with those around him, while also nurturing a wide range of interests in multiple domains. He is open to new experiences and challenges, and is adept in communicating his ideas and passions. A polymath is not only proficient in knowledge and skills, he is proficient in life.

Accomplished
A polymath’s accomplishments are a natural outcome of his interests, demeanour. Polymaths get things done and push the limits of their talent. A polymath does not settle for mediocrity; his standards and expectations for himself naturally push him to do things better. A polymath is accomplished not only by societal standards; he is also accomplished by his own standards. By virtue of his vision, goals, demeanour, interests, pursuits and efforts, a polymath shapes his life towards a direction set by his choices, not by his circumstances. He is accomplished in a way of his choosing, be it a grand goal such as changing society, or a simple one such as having a meaningful journey with his family.

A closing note
Do you want your child to have the above qualities - to be a problem solver, have an extensive knowledge base, adept at analysing and understanding patterns, be well-rounded, and accomplished? It sounds like a lot of work, and yes, it is a tall order, but not an unreachable one. At Polymath Learning Centre, we strongly believe that children are born with the necessary curiosity and energy to become exceptional, and they only require appropriate guidance to do so. We believe that children are capable of embracing knowledge and being intrinsically interested in learning and developing their skills to the fullest possible extent. We aspire for every child to be a polymath. Curious about how we do it? Contact us for a free trial lesson today!

​p.s. So no, we do not teach mathematics to Polytechnic students 😊

What is stress and how does it happen?
 
Today, we often refer to stress loosely when we feel angry, overwhelmed, tired, fatigued, or troubled. Some see stress as something presented to us, such as a demanding or threatening event or situation (e.g., examinations, complex tasks, and interviews). Others see stress as our body’s responses to those demanding or threatening situations (e.g., increased physiological arousal, heart rate, sweating).
 
A useful perspective is to see stress as a process in which an individual perceives and responds to events that he appraises as overwhelming or threatening to himself. Importantly, this means how we react to events that occur around us is determined by how we appraise or judge them. Such events can be appraised as a threat if it could lead to negative consequences, or a challenge if it carries the potential for gain or personal growth. For example, a student may appraise being appointed as the class chairperson as a threat if she believed that this could affect her studies or friendships, or as an opportunity to gain new skills and grow in character.
 
This appraisal is compared with the options available to cope with the event, as well as perceptions of how effective such options will be. An event would be viewed more positively if one believes something can be done about it. For example, a student who thinks “I can be a chairperson because there are teachers to guide me” versus “Oh no, I don’t have time to do all these things!” would react very differently, even though the event is the same.
 
Thus, stress is manageable when an event is appraised as a challenge, or appraised as a threat but there are available and effective ways to cope with the event. Stress becomes high when an event is appraised as a threat and there are little means to cope with it.
 
How does it affect my child?
 
Stress can be a positive and motivating force that improves our lives. At the appropriate levels, stress would prompt your child to take actions that would improve her situation, such as studying for exams, exercising, and listening in school. However, at high levels, stress can become draining and debilitating. Such stress would cause her to feel burned out, exhausted, and these would have negative effects on her performance and health. This relationship between stress and performance is widely known in psychology as the Yerkes-Dodson Law (see figure below).

How can we manage stress?
 
Think about what we have looked at so far – managing stress is not about erasing it completely! It’s about ensuring that stress levels do not become excessive, such that it crosses the optimal level. Considering how stress occurs, there are two ways this can be done – first, by reducing the likelihood an event would be seen as a threat, and second, by increasing the means to cope with an event if it is perceived as a threat! In the next part of this series, we will share some ways that are useful to help your child manage her stress!

At Polymath Learning Centre, we believe that it is important to understand stress and to be vigilant for symptoms or signs of excessive stress in your child. We feel that it is important to care for our students and not mindlessly push for them to perform well without considering their well-being. This is part of our overall approach, as we are certain that students perform best when they are in a sound state of mind - alert and challenged to improve, but not overwhelmed. Want to understand stress more or know more about our approach? Give us a call or sign up for your free trial lesson today!

Communicate openly and respectfully. This is the basis for anything else – a child will only communicate their thoughts, experiences, fears, challenges, joys, and hopes if they believe what they share would be received well. Create a safe environment for them to speak their mind. Let them know that they won’t be judged. Never criticize or be spiteful, that will push them to withdraw anything they wanted to tell you almost immediately. Instead, reflect what they said, ask questions to clarify, empathize with their emotions, and correct them when needed. Opening the channels of communication leads in to everything else below.
 
Organize study and homework projects. Teach your child to be organized in her study and homework projects. Plan for days to study and days to rest. Mark important dates, which could be exams, reports, or other days such as outings and fun. Keep the pace realistic – not too overwhelming, but not uninspiring or unchallenged either. Besides learning how to organize her life, this schedule would instill discipline and consistency, serving as a reminder that things would snowball if she were to procrastinate.
 
Encourage educational habits. Teach your child that studying is more than just doing homework assignments. There is a difference between studying and doing homework assignments. Encourage your child to do things like:

• Taking notes while reading – drawing links, ideas or identifying patterns
• Studying tables and charts, or making his own
• Summarizing what he has read in any form he prefers – mindmaps, lists, acronyms etc
• Making his own flashcards for quick review of dates, formulas, spelling words etc

 
Develop note-taking. Note-taking is a skill that is often overlooked and left to develop on its own. Students typically start out taking notes verbatim by simply writing down what the teacher says, word for word. Some learn to process the knowledge and write important points, or go beyond the materials taught to link it with their own knowledge base and generate new ideas, links or concepts. Some fail to learn to take notes at all. It is best to guide a child to learn to jot down notes and important ideas that come to mind. This instills a habit of skillful note-taking, and allows knowledge and ideas to build up other time.
 
Work closely with her teacher. Teachers are the best go-to person to find out about your child’s behaviour in school, where she is excelling, what her potential is and what her challenges are. Your child’s teacher would see your child in a setting that you do not have equal access to – the classroom, where she may be a different person altogether. Get feedback. Be involved. Gain new perspectives and understanding of your child. And also, be realistic in your expectations and mindful of what a teacher is and is not able to do – teachers are not parents after all.
 
Encourage reading. Reading is an increasingly difficult habit to nurture in today’s digital age. Yet, reading widely is a characteristic of all successful students, and it’s something that parents can easily encourage from a young age through small acts. Taking your children to the library for joint reading sessions, issuing them their own library cards, having plenty of books available in your own home, and buying attractive or interesting books as presents are all possible ways to instill a love of reading in your children. Once she discovers the joy of reading, it will carry the habit forward from there.
 
Make conversations, exploration and debate a way of life. Conversations are perhaps the best way to learn – through free discussion and exploration of ideas and concepts. Find time to talk to your child (perhaps at the dinner table!). Ask them what they’ve been studying, and perhaps ask them to explain things to you (but not in a way that is pressurizing or intimidating). Ask them what they think about the subject, and challenge those opinions. Learn to think through arguments and ideas. This teaches them different perspectives and that the world is often not black-or-white. It also teaches them that complex issues have many answers, and different people may agree to disagree. Importantly, it also develops their skills in academic discussion and debate, which would be important for university and beyond. The conversations can span any topic beyond what your child studied – current affairs, how people around you behave, thoughts about life etc; what is important is that the conversation goes into deeper understanding and perspectives.
 
We've presented some tiny acts that generate big returns in shaping your child’s habits and demeanour! At Polymath Learning Centre, we practice what we preach. Open and respectful communication, close and healthy interaction with teachers, and an open-mindedness to exploring ideas and opinions are, to us, a way of life. Organized projects and positive educational behaviour are also imbued in our lessons to inculcate such habits in our students. If you would like to find out more, feel free to sign up for a free trial lesson with us!

We hope that these would be helpful! Next up, we would be writing about managing stress in exams!

2. Will there still be letter grades assigned to each subject, such as A and A*?
The new scoring system will not involve any letter grades. Only ALs will be assigned for each subject.

3. Can you help me estimate my child’s PSLE score? She usually gets (so and so) marks. 
The new AL-based system makes it a lot easier to estimate your child’s PSLE score, since her raw marks are directly translated into ALs which are then are summed into the PSLE score. You may refer to the first section on “HOW DOES THE NEW PSLE SCORING SYSTEM WORK?” to learn how to do an estimation!

4. My child is exempted from Mother Tongue. How will her PSLE score be calculated?
​According to MOE, students who have been granted an exemption from Mother Tongue will be assigned an AL score for her Mother Tongue that takes reference from those of her peers who were (1) offered Mother Tongue; and (2) who have similar AL scores in the other three subjects of English Language, Mathematics and Science. In other words, the non-exempted students who performed similar to her for her remaining three subjects are used as a proxy to assign her an AL score for Mother Tongue.

The assigned AL score for Mother Tongue will be added to her AL scores for the other three subjects to obtain the student’s final PSLE score.

5. What is the average PSLE score under the new PSLE scoring system?
The new scoring system is non-comparative and reflects a student’s own performance. The average PSLE score will therefore be dependent on the cohort’s performance and will differ across cohorts. It is impossible to pre-determine what the average PSLE score will be for a particular year.

6. Under the new PSLE scoring system, how do I know if my child did better than others or not?
The new scoring system is non-comparative and reflects your child’s own performance, not that of her cohort. Thus, the only way to know if your child did better or worse than others would be to (1) look at her AL - MOE has stated that on average, about half of the students will score AL4 or better; (2) look at her streaming placement, which serves as an indirect indicator or her relative performance; and (3) look at national statistics released by MOE, though it is unclear at this point whether such statistics will be available.

 7. My child is now in Primary XX. Will she be affected by the changes?
Your child will be affected by the changes if she takes her PSLE in 2021 and onwards.

8. My child is a top-scorer and would have achieved a high PSLE score under the T-score system. With the wider AL bands, how should she compete against other top-scorers?
​With the reduced differentiation among students, top-scorers will find themselves placed in the same category at AL1.

Your child may have to take on additional commitments to increase her chances of attaining a spot in her desired secondary school. One way to do this is to take on Higher Chinese (HCL). When applying to SAP schools, students who have taken HCL will receive an advantage. Among students who obtain the same PSLE score and are competing for the same spot in an SAP school, those who have better HCL scores will be given priority over those with poorer HCL scores or did not take HCL.

Also, as explained above, her indicated choices of schools will be highly important in determining the priority given to her.

Lastly, admissions by affiliation will remain in the new PSLE system. Students who are applying to an affiliated school will be granted priority if they indicated the school as their first choice.

9. Will the PSLE curriculum change due to the new scoring system?
MOE has indicated that the new scoring system will not affect the curriculum, the subjects tested at the PSLE or the demand of the PSLE on students. Nonetheless, MOE will continue its current practice of reviewing the curriculum regularly to ensure its relevance.

10. What if my child does not meet any of the streaming criteria?
We hope this does not happen to anyone, but if your child gets AL8 for English or Mathematics, or has a PSLE score of 31 or 32, she would have to either retake the PSLE, or join the NorthLight School or Assumption Pathway School which are specialised secondary schools for those who did not pass their PSLE.

11. Why are there 8 ALs? Why not more or less?
The number of ALs determine the level of differentiation among students. If students are differentiated too finely (more ALs), it causes excessive stress on the student to score that one additional mark even though it is not educationally meaningful. If students are differentiated too broadly (less ALs), students who are academically different will be put in the same programmes. This means that some students will be overchallenged and discouraged while others will not be underchallenged and not reaching their potential. Also, it will cause greater usage of randomised computerised balloting as a tie-breaker.

MOE deemed that having 8 ALs provides a good balance between overly fine and overly broad differentiation among students. Thus, the 8 ALs are designed to reflect broadly different levels of achievement.

A closing note
As we have mentioned earlier, the change in PSLE scoring should mean little  to your child's studies and the most important thing is (and has always been) for your child to give her best during her PSLE examinations! At Polymath Learning Centre, we believe that the focus of education should be to nurture the character, aptitude and attitude of children to give them the best chances of success in the future, not just in school but also in life. Good results and high scores are a natural consequence of successful education, not the other way around. The best thing we can do is to focus on helping your child to do her best! We discuss this further in our other blog posts so do give them a read. If you're curious to find out more about our approach, feel free to contact us or sign up for a free trial lesson today!