Teacher Mama

Being your chid's teacher is exhausting.

My son's teacher reminded us to turn up his Chinese writing assignment since it's been 4 days and we still haven't done so. Turns out, his new mainstream kindergarten regularly gives assignments. To me it's shocking because he's just in nursery. Aren't they just supposed to learn through play?

But regardless of my mental objection, it was there and it needed to be done. I looked at the sheet of paper and it was mocking us and intimidating even myself for 2 good reasons: first, my son does not even like writing; second, none of us can understand what these Chinese characters meant.

The Chinese character "yun," meaning "cloud"

So, I brought the assignment to work and asked my Chinese colleague what it is and what it meant. She explained it meant "cloud." I asked her to say it aloud so I can instruct my son properly and tell him what it means and what it sounds like.

With the best Chinese accent I can muster, I repeated the character's pronunciation to my son as we practiced writing the character.

It took us an hour to write that character 15 times.

But wait, there's more...

The Chinese character "jin" meaning "now"

This time, we needed to write the Chinese character for "now," which is "jin". I was close to tears because both of us were exhausted and we still haven't finished.

Thankfully, my hubby arrived and I told him to take over the assignment. Javier managed to write this character only 3.5 times. It's in half because I don't think he finished writing the last character properly.

After almost 1 and a half hours of Chinese writing, we decided to end it.

And today, my son turned over an incomplete Chinese assignment to his teacher.

One thing a lot of people don't realize is that we need to work twice as hard to even make our child do the things they take for granted in their kids. A lot of energy, patience and creativity is required to even make my son sit still. It's a pity that my son's assignment can't talk and tell the teacher how hard we worked for that. That incomplete assignment, which is imperfect to most is actually a proof of my son's hard work. And for that, we are proud.