One of our teachers on a Primary 3 student whose Science marks were being eaten by something that had nothing to do with Science.
The child could say the key words and key phrases out loud. Written down, she was stuck — and it looked, from the marks, like she didn’t know the content. She did. What she didn’t have was confidence in the spelling, so she would write an A, then an X, then stare at the page. Class tests dragged.
The strategy: get the first letter right and it is marked correct. The rest of the letters can be a guess. The point is to get the child writing at all, and to take the fear out of the page, so the spelling can be fixed later from a position where she is willing to try.
It is worth knowing this one as a parent, because the same thing hides inside a low Science mark at every level, right up to PSLE: an answer that never got written is indistinguishable, on the paper, from an answer that wasn’t known.
Filmed at our weekly teachers’ meeting, 21 September 2026.
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