My boy has reached that tiresome stage in which he peppers his speech with the ubiquitous term faeces. Incredibly frustrating, but it is what it is.

Today, when I picked him up, he was surprisingly in the mood to read aloud a Chinese book. It included a mention of bees and butterflies, so I asked him casually, “What kind of animals they are?”

“Pollinator,” he answered immediately, with nary a beat. In my country, the process of pollination is only introduced to 11-year-old 5th graders, so it gave me an upsized sense of pride that my preschooler already possesses a working knowledge of pollination, thanks to my instruction.

(It also made me realise how curriculum standards are an artificial construct by the state authority. I presume my son is of average intelligence. My point is, your child doesn’t have to be a prodigious genius in order to understand concepts that are exclusively the domain of upper primary school students.)

I’m also somewhat ashamed to report that after I nodded my head vigorously in approval, I corrected him, “Yes, they are pollinators, but they are insects first and foremost.”

I was trying to frame his mind to fit into the mental mould of a primary school student. You see, in our Science curriculum, children learn about six kinds of animals: mammals, reptiles, fish, insects, birds, and amphibians. I had wanted him to conclude that both bees and butterflies are insects. I can just imagine his future Science teacher frowning and crossing out pollinator furiously because the answer key demands students to write insect. 😜