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   Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jul-2026 09:16:03 JST Adrianna Tan

   when i try to describe what growing up in singapore was like to people in the bay area

   i go with

   'imagine everybody you know went to lowell high school or studied in cupertino'

   now imagine an entire country like that but 5x worse

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jul-2026 09:18:06 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     and in this analogy i suppose

     i went to the most high pressure of all the high pressure places ' (i was apparently the slacker in all of those places, which is also maybe how i survived)

     did that help me achieve things generally? yes

     would i be less likely to still be seeking therapy for academic / national trauma in my middle age? also yes

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jul-2026 09:38:50 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     Looks like it hasn’t changed much.

     https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/o0f5kw/whats_the_academic_stress_situation_here_in_sg/

     They’ve changed some of the worst bits of the system, but basically we had life-defining examinations since we were 10. Yep, 10.

     When you were 10, you sat for a super important series of exams. If you weren’t academically inclined at that time, you got put on a less academically intensive track. It’s supposed to be more vocational, but

     Who the fuck knows what you’re doing at 10? Doing poorly here (known as the primary 4 streaming exam) also puts people into a sorting hat. I got put into an academically intensive track but people who were in ‘EM3’ basically have a near impossible path to getting into good programs later in life. At 10.

     WTF

     There’s a whole movie about this called I Not Stupid. It’s about the kids who are deemed not academic (and therefore worthless in our society).

     It’s not surprise that this society is full of untreated mental illness (we also don’t believe mental illness exists, or if it does you’re weak for not just ignoring it).

     Things are changing but very slowly

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jul-2026 12:50:51 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Ken Butler

     @nxskok yeah pretty much based on that

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     Ken Butler (nxskok@cupoftea.social)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jul-2026 12:50:53 JST Ken Butler

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte that sounds like the old British 11-plus exams that determined whether you went to a Grammar School (academic) or a Secondary Modern (vocational). They don't exist any more. (I went to a Grammar School that was probably not supposed to exist any more, and it was terrible, at least until the upper years.)