Day 2 of New School

B3 transferred to his mum and brothers alma mater. We were tired of parent-unfriendly neighbourhood school in SengKang. Actually, the school is below my fellow blogger, Boh Tong's apartment. There were 3 kids joining Primary 4 when B3 reported to the school yesterday. The school is in Toa Payoh and starts at 7:10am in the morning. He has to wake up at 5:30am to get ready for his school bus who picks him up at 6:05am. In the neighbourhood school, he can wake up at 7am and reach school by 7:45am. However he is home by 1:40pm in the new school compared to 2pm before.
He is spending longer time on the road. So why switch? We were fed up with the neighbourhood school. After the Principal change two years ago, all the original team of teachers left. We felt something wasn't right but cannot tell because non of the teachers who left said anything. We experience more and more change in the school where parents are treated as if they are sending their kids to a highly secured prison. The open and relaxed atmosphere and accessibility of teachers and Vice-Principal and Principal are gone.
Now in the new school, he is adapting well. The form teacher introduced him to the class and assign a buddy to him. He is introduced as someone who will give stiff competition to the rest of his classmates. His Chinese teacher says his attitude is "ren zhen" or serious and focussed. He also feel his classmates are smarter than in the neighbourhood school. By the way, he was in the top class so this give you an idea the standard in neighbourhood school. Rather it reinforce the view popular schools have higher standard.
It is still early days, for now we feel blessed the school accepted him and very glad our decision to pull him out of the neighbourhood school is right.