Let Them Draw

3am Stories

A friend shared this over dinner a few weeks ago. She's a private tutor, one-to-one, English and Math. She's been doing it for nine years. She told us this story and the whole table went quiet. Nobody touched their food for ten minutes.

This is hers. I asked if I could share it. She said, "Please. Maybe one parent needs to hear it."

---

I'm a private tutor. Nine years. I've taught hundreds of kids across Singapore. Primary school, mostly. English and Math. PSLE prep. That's the bread and butter.

I've seen every kind of parent. The relaxed ones. The anxious ones. The ones who check their child's marks before saying hello to them. The ones who WhatsApp me at 11 PM asking why their kid got 87 instead of 92.

But I need to tell you about one kid. I think about him almost every day.

His name was Jun Wei. Primary 5 when I first met him. Ten years old. Small for his age. Quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn't come from shyness...it comes from being tired in a way that a ten-year-old shouldn't know how to be.

His mother hired me for English. Twice a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8 PM to 9:30 PM.

8 PM. For a ten-year-old. That's already late. But when I got to his house the first time, I understood why.

His schedule was on the fridge. Colour-coded. Laminated. Like a shift roster at a factory.

Monday: School. Math tuition 3:30–5:00. Chinese tuition 5:30–7:00. Dinner. Homework.
Tuesday: School. Science tuition 3:30–5:00. Piano 5:30–6:30. Me — English 8:00–9:30.
Wednesday: School. Math tuition 3:30–5:00. Abacus 5:30–6:30. Chinese tuition 7:00–8:30.
Thursday: School. Science enrichment 3:30–5:00. Me — English 8:00–9:30.
Friday: School. Math olympiad 3:30–5:30. Free time 6:00–7:00.
Saturday: Creative writing workshop 9:00–11:00. Higher Chinese 12:00–2:00. Assessment paper practice 3:00–5:00.
Sunday: Church 9:00–11:00. PSLE revision with mother 2:00–5:00.

One hour of free time. The whole week. Friday, 6 to 7 PM. That was it. That was his childhood.

I looked at that schedule and my chest got tight. Then I looked at his bag. It was by the door. A school bag. The kind with wheels because it was too heavy to carry.

Three different tuition centre logos on it. Plus his school badge. Plus a piano book sticking out the top. That bag weighed more than half of him. I know because one day he asked me to help him lift it onto the table and I almost dropped it.

"What's in here, Jun Wei? Bricks?"

He didn't laugh. He just said: "Assessment books. Ma say I need to practice more."

First session. I gave him a passage to read. Comprehension. Standard P5 stuff. He read it fine. Answered the questions fine. Then I asked him: "What did you think of the story?"

He looked at me like I'd asked him to solve something in a language he didn't speak.
"What do you mean?"

"The story. The boy in the passage who lost his dog. Did you feel anything?"
Long pause. "I'm supposed to feel something?"

That sentence stayed with me for weeks.

I'm supposed to feel something.

This kid had been trained at ten years old...to extract answers from text. Identify the topic sentence. Find the contextual clue. Underline the keyword. But nobody had ever asked him what he felt. About anything. His whole life had become an optimisation exercise. Input. Output. Score.

I kept teaching him. Every Tuesday and Thursday. Over the weeks, I started doing something his mother didn't hire me for. I started asking him questions that weren't in the assessment book.

"What's your favourite thing to do?"

"Study."

"No, I mean for fun. What do you like?"

He thought for a very long time. Like he was scrolling through a search engine in his head and getting no results.
"I used to like drawing. But Ma took away my sketchbook last year. She said it's a distraction."

"What did you draw?"

"Dinosaurs. I know all the species. I can tell you every dinosaur from the Jurassic period and what they ate and how big they were." His eyes... I'm telling you...his eyes lit up. First time. First time in all our sessions. Like someone switched on a light behind them.

"Triceratops was herbivore. Most people think T-Rex was the biggest but actually Spinosaurus was bigger. And Velociraptor...the real one, not the Jurassic Park one...was only the size of a turkey."

He talked for fifteen minutes. No stammering. No pausing to check if he got the answer right. Just talking. Like a kid. Like a ten-year-old who loves dinosaurs.
Then he stopped. Suddenly. Like he remembered something.

"Don't tell my mother I wasted time talking about this."

Wasted time.

Talking about the thing that made him come alive...he called it wasted time. At ten.

One Tuesday I arrived and he was at the dining table. Already sitting. But his head was down. On his arms. Eyes closed. I thought he was sleeping. I touched his shoulder.

He wasn't sleeping. He was crying. Silently. The way kids cry when they've learned that crying out loud gets them in trouble.

"Jun Wei. What happened?"

He showed me a test paper. Science. 78 out of 100.
78. That's not a bad score. Not by any reasonable standard.

But there was writing at the top. Red pen. Not the teacher's.
His mother had written: "This is not good enough. What happened? You need to focus."
Below that, in pencil, so light you'd almost miss it, Jun Wei had written something back. To himself. Not for anyone to see.

"I tried my best."

Three words. Written in the tiniest handwriting. Hidden under his mother's red ink.
I tried my best.

I sat next to him. Closed the paper. "Jun Wei. 78 is a good score."

"Ma says anything below 90 means I never study hard enough."

"Do you believe that?"

He looked at me. Ten years old. Dark circles that belonged on a university student during finals. Shoulders that should've been carrying a water gun, not three tuition centre bags.

"I don't know what I believe. I just know I'm always wrong."

I'm always wrong.

I taught him for a year. Every week I watched this kid shrink a little more. Not physically. Something inside. The light behind his eyes that flickered on when he talked about dinosaurs...it came on less and less. He stopped volunteering answers. He started saying "I don't know" before even trying. He developed a habit of erasing his work before I could see it. "It's wrong," he'd say. Before I even checked.

He was becoming afraid of trying. Because trying meant possibly failing. And failing meant the red pen. The schedule. The look on his mother's face that said you are not enough without ever using those words.

One evening I arrived and his mother met me at the door. First time she ever did that.
"Jun Wei's PSLE is next year. I want to increase to four sessions a week. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday."

"Mrs Lee, he's already doing tuition almost every day. He's exhausted."

"He needs to get into a good school. If he don't get into a good school, his future..."

"His future is already being affected. Just not the way you think."
She stared at me. I'd crossed a line. I knew it.
"What do you mean?"

"He cried during our last session. Not because of the work. Because he got 78 and he thought he was a failure. He's ten. He should be outside. Drawing dinosaurs. Running around. Not sitting at a table for six hours a day after school wondering if he's good enough."

"You don't understand. Singapore is competitive. If I don't push him, he'll fall behind."

"Fall behind what? He's a child. He's not a stock portfolio."

She didn't hire me back.

I got a polite text the next day. "We've decided to go in a different direction. Thank you for your time."

I think about that text a lot. "A different direction." She probably found another tutor. One who wouldn't ask questions. One who'd just drill the papers and collect the fee and not notice that the kid was disappearing in front of them. That was three years ago. I never saw Jun Wei again.

But six months ago something happened.
I was on the MRT. Evening. Probably around 9 PM. The train was half empty. I was heading home from a session at Bishan.

A boy got on at Toa Payoh. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Secondary school uniform. He had a bag on wheels. Heavy. Multiple logos. He sat down across from me, put in his earbuds, closed his eyes, and just deflated. Like someone let the air out. I stared because something about him looked familiar. The dark circles. The shoulders. The way he sat like rest was something he had to steal in small moments on public transport between one obligation and the next.

Then he opened his eyes. Took out a notebook. Started doodling in the margins.
Dinosaurs.
I don't know if it was him. The hair was different. He was taller. Three years changes a kid completely. I'll never know for sure.

But he was drawing dinosaurs on the MRT at 9 PM. And honestly? That broke me and healed me at the same time. Because it meant that somewhere inside that overscheduled, overtested, overoptimised kid...the light was still on.

They couldn't kill it. Not with six tuition centres. Not with the red pen. Not with the laminated schedule. Not with the crushing message that 78 out of 100 means you're not enough.

The dinosaurs survived.

—-----------------
That was her story. She told it in one breath, like she'd been carrying it for three years and needed to put it down.

Here's what I can't stop thinking about....

Singapore spends almost $2 billion a year on private tuition. 70% of our kids are in some form of tuition. 86% of our students say they worry about poor grades...that's higher than almost any country in the world.

We are building the most academically brilliant, emotionally broken generation this country has ever produced. And we're doing it on purpose. With laminated schedules. With colour-coded timetables. With assessment books stacked so high a ten-year-old needs wheels on his bag to carry them.

We say we do it for them. "I want the best for my child." And I believe that. Every parent who pushes their kid believes it. But there's a question we're not asking:

Are you raising a child? Or are you building a résumé?

Because a child needs to draw dinosaurs sometimes. A child needs to stare at the ceiling and think about nothing. A child needs one hour where nobody is measuring them, grading them, ranking them, or telling them that 78 isn't good enough.
A child needs to say "I tried my best" and have someone...just one person say "I know. And that's enough."

If you're a parent reading this, I'm not here to judge you. This system built us too. We're all products of it. The fear of losing out is real. The competition is real. The pressure is real.

But your child is also real. And they're not going to remember their PSLE score when they're 40. They're going to remember if you let them draw. If you sat with them without an assessment book. If you ever looked at a 78 and said "well done" instead of "not good enough."

They're going to remember if you saw them.
Not their grades.
Them.

Somewhere in Singapore tonight, a kid is on the MRT with a bag that weighs more than half of them. They're exhausted. They're wondering if they're enough. And they're drawing dinosaurs in the margins because that's the only space they have left that nobody is grading.

Let them draw.

Please.

Let them draw.

— 3am Stories. Pass it on.