How Different Is School Depending On Where You Study: What Parents Should Know When Moving With Kids
The first thing my 10-year-old, Lila, said when she walked out of her new elementary school in Singapore was, “Why did they yell at me for forgetting my hat?” We’d moved from Portland, Oregon, just three days prior, and I’d already walked her through her new bus route and packed her extra snacks in her backpack. A hat rule hadn’t even crossed my mind.
Back at her old school in Portland, forgetting a hat or a water bottle or even your homework once meant a quick reminder, not a public correction and a black mark in the discipline log. Three black marks, Lila’s new teacher told her, and you lose your spot on the end-of-term field trip to the water park. I fumed on the walk home, already drafting an email to the principal about how unnecessary that was. That’s when I started learning just how much school changes, depending on where you show up.
Over the next few months, the small differences stacked up fast. In Portland, Lila’s class had 22 kids, and her teacher spent half the week on project-based work—they’d spent two months planning a fake community garden, writing grant proposals and measuring out plots on the playground. Homework maxed out at 20 minutes a night, and tests were rare before middle school. At her new school, her class has 36 kids, homework runs close to two hours on weeknights, and every Friday brings timed spelling and math tests that get sent home ranked from highest to lowest score. When Lila raised her hand halfway through her first math unit to say she still didn’t understand long division, her teacher told her to pay closer attention next time—she’d already explained the concept once at the front of the room. I was shocked; back home, teachers would pull kids aside for extra help immediately if they said they were confused.
But it wasn’t all frustrating differences. Back in Portland, our school cut art and music programs for third graders and up due to budget cuts, so I was paying $60 a week for private violin lessons outside of school. Here, every kid learns an instrument twice a week for free during school hours. PE is every single day, not twice a week, and the school runs free after-school sports teams that don’t require tryouts. After a year, Lila can hold a 10-minute conversation in Mandarin, something she never would have gotten at our old school, where Mandarin class was just 45 minutes a week.
A month after we arrived, I met another mom at the playground who’d moved here from Canada five years earlier, and I ranted to her about the hat rule and the long division incident. She laughed and pointed out that Singapore gets up to 95 degrees with 90% humidity most of the school year, and just 10 years before, a kid had passed out from heat stroke during recess after going out without a hat. The rule wasn’t about punishing new kids—it was about keeping kids safe, and the school doesn’t make exceptions because exceptions turn into arguments over who gets to break the rules. As for the teacher not re-explaining the lesson, she said that’s just the norm here: kids are expected to ask for help after class, not interrupt the whole group’s lesson. It’s not that teachers don’t care, it’s that the priority is keeping the whole class moving, not slowing down for one kid.
That conversation changed how I looked at everything. I’d come in assuming our way back in Portland was the “right” way, that any difference was a flaw. But what I’ve learned is that every school builds its rules and routines around what the local community values. In the US, our old school prioritized individual flexibility and making kids feel comfortable asking questions in front of the group. Here, the priority is collective safety and keeping pace for all kids, and asking for help one-on-one after class is the norm.
For parents who are getting ready to move with kids, whether across the country or across the world, there are a few small things that have helped us that I tell other people now. First, before your kid starts, find a local parent whose kid goes to the same school (most local parent groups on Facebook make this easy) and ask three specific questions: What’s a rule most new kids accidentally break in their first month? How much homework should my kid expect every night, and how much help do most parents give? Is it common for kids to ask teachers for help in front of the whole class, or do they ask after class? Those questions will tell you more about what school will actually be like than any test score or school website will.
Second, when your kid comes home upset about something that feels wrong, don’t jump in agreeing that it’s bad. Instead of saying “That teacher is being unfair,” try “It makes sense that this feels really weird right now—this is just how they do things here, let’s figure out how to work with it together.” That helps your kid separate “different” from “bad” instead of feeling like they have a bad case or that the world is out to get them. Third, don’t rush to complain to the administration in the first three months. Give yourself time to learn the context behind the rules that frustrate you.
We’re here for another two years, then we’ll probably move back to Oregon. Some days I look at Lila’s two hours of homework and think this is too much for an 11-year-old, that she’s missing out on the unstructured play time she used to have after school. Other days I watch her play violin for her grandparents over Skype, or order our own food at the hawker center in Mandarin, and I think this is a kind of learning she never would have gotten back home. There’s no clear winner, no “better” school, just different schools shaped by the people that show up every day. I didn’t expect that when we moved, but it’s the biggest lesson I’ve taken away so far.
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