Day +84

I am fine today. Today is the last day of my official transplant program.

My wife and I are very busy teaching our two boys to prepare for their exam. It looks like they have this “study-phobia” symptom. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to motivate them to sit down quietly to study. Every time, we have to spend “九牛二虎之力” (tremendous amount of effort) to just get them taking out their book and sitting down. They got very poor result on their last assessment, but they just don’t care about it.

The eldest boy, Daniel, has a very good memory but the second boy, Joseph is incredibly forgetful especially on remembering Bahasa Melayu (BM) and English spelling and pronunciation. I asked him to follow me to say the BM word “berhenti” (stop) a number of times until he could pronounce it himself. Then I asked him to make a 360 degree turn and asked him the word again. He tried very hard to recall how to pronounce the word but it seemed that he could not find a reference in his memory to do that. Sometime, after the 360 degree turn, he will pronounce the word as “berhati”. In the end I took out a cane and told him I would only stop to cane him if he said “berhenti”. He managed to remember it after this. I found out his technique of remembering is quite different from others. He tried to remember the spelling first and then tried to pronounce based on the spelling. As we know, remembering spelling is always more difficult than remembering the pronunciation, so it is very difficult for him to learn BM and English, even though he studied in English kindergarten. He could remember better the Chinese words because many Chinese words are formed with meaningful parts, which is a lot easier to remember than the meaningless alphabet.

In order to motivate them to study, I rewarded them with “Computer Game Coupon”. Every two hours of study will be rewarded with a 30 minutes of game play. Some bonus time will be given also if they behave well during the study. They can then use this coupon to play computer games on my computer after the exam. Since they like computer game so much, this coupon system makes our life a lot easier in getting them to study :-)

See you next post :-)