Yeah, I know - we all say that about our children, but in one small way, he is exceptional.
He's quite happy to get uo at 4.30 in the morning and be ready for the school bus which comes just over half an hour later. That his school is in Bekasi, just beyond the city boundary means that he doesn't have to be there until 7. Travelling against the incoming traffic flow, a regular journey takes about half an hour, but then we live at the furthermost reach of this particular school bus route.
He says he's happy because he gets to socialise with his classmates en route.
That's as maybe, and I suppose I'm fairly happy that we didn't enrol him in a school here in Jakarta. As I've noted before, rather than expanding and modernising Jakarta's network of public transport in order to minimise private transport, school hours were unilaterally changed by Deputy Governor Priwanka, so that children and their teachers have to start studying at 6.30am.
What makes this worse is that no consideration appears to have been given to the biological clocks of children and, especially, teenagers here who would actually benefit from starting school at, say, 9am.
This is the start time of UK schools, but it is proposed that they should start at 11am.
Russell Foster, an Oxford professor of neuroscience, tested the memory of 200 secondary pupils at 9am and 2pm using pairs of words, and discovered a 9% improvement in the afternoon. Students correctly identified 51% of word pairs in the later session, compared with 42% in the morning.
Tayler McCullough, 15, one of the test subjects, said the majority of students would welcome the extra hours in bed. "I'm extremely hard to get up in the morning. One or two people like to get to school early, but most of us would be up for going in later. I'm sure it would make a big difference to our learning ability."
What students actually learn has to be the topic of another post, but do spare a thought for the stressed out students here in years 6, 9 and 12 who are undergoing intensive training, brain washing almost, in order to 'pass' multi-choice tests next month in order to graduate to the next level.
They could certainly use a lie-in, if only because sleep is the best way to memorise the 'facts' that their teachers are trying to inculcate.
