GCE 'O' Level Art and Mother Tongue

GCE 'O' Level Art back in the 80s, is very different from GCE 'O' Level Art now. In my case, I was given a list of topics to pick and I just had to turn up on that very day and paint. Well, I wasn't very artistically inclined according to establishment and I scored really badly. I was a little surprised but not very disappointed because I didn't need to 'count' Art in my total points into Junior College.

My daughter on the other hand, isn't what I'd call UN-Artistically inclined. She's been able to draw freehand quite easily whatever you ask of her since she was a young kid. She used to write her own short stories (Enid Blyton style) and decorate her books with her own pictures. This is a sample of her freehand drawing on MS Paint. No fancy art programmes. Just MS Paint with a mouse.

Do you think she's a Grade C6 standard? Bloody Cambridge seems to think so. As a parent, I just want to smack the smart ass marker/markers who has/have no eye for talent. She's going to need lifetime therapy to recover from this shocker.

She'd spent a whole year on the art subject, only to score a C6. No, no, the final piece is not the above dragon piece. The dragon was just something she drew in a jiffy for fun.

GCE 'O' Level art requires a whole process of researching and developing storyboards. Given, my kid's not A1 standard but I thought they could tell from her drawings that she COULD draw. I could only tell her that the markers did not understand her intepretation of the topic. Her topic? "Segmented". She said, her friends who had chosen a more straightforward topic and painted straightforward intepretations, scored higher than she did. She thinks she 'thought' too deeply into the subject. Wow.

I can only tell her that C6 isn't an indication of her talent. I can't recall but I think I fared worse than her at O Level Art. Yet today, no one has told me I can't draw. Still, I'd strongly advice anyone taking GCE 'O' Level Art to DROP the subject in favour of less subjective subject. Don't waste your time unless you're very confident of the grade you're going to get.

The silver lining of this cloud is that Tessa's grades in her other subjects rescued her. Otherwise, the resulting outcome would have really been devastating. Shit. It's exactly what I had warned her before. It's so much easier to score in Science subjects than in Arts subjects.

Oh by the way, she passed her Mother Tongue B paper. That's the minimum requirement for entry to Junior College. If you've been following my blog, you'd know that I'm a parent trying to cope with my kids' less than stellar performance in Mother Tongue Chinese. If you're in my shoes, then know that IT CAN BE DONE. You can beat establishment if you give the necessary support to your kids. You need to dare to be different from the other parents. You need to give your kid other options. But believe that it can be done.