Maui's new diet

Speaking of the cost to feed pets, Maui's special prescription diet alone costs $40 a week for 12 wet food pouches. Fortunately, the wife found a dry food alternative in KL. This pack of dry kibble also costs about $40 by rough conversion and it should last him weeks. This is the 3kg pack. Next trip up to KL, a 6kg pack is coming back.

The kibble are these flat disc-shaped granules that smell quite nice. The other non-UTI cats in the household would help themselves to Maui's share if he wasn't able to defend his bowl from foreign incursion. Fortunately, he is.

Kasey gave Maui an encouraging health report. His incision is healing nicely, struvite traces in the urine sample were very low and the bladder damage is no longer as extensive as it was a week or so ago. So now the daily dosage of anti-inflammatory is down to 1mg and Maui can look forward to having his Elizabethan collar (a.k.a. lampshade) removed in a couple of days.

Children? Costs? Carrots? A view from C-level

It's neither the costs nor the extrinsic carrots that make people consider whether to have kids or not. Costs are no object if you love your kids. If you have to be rewarded for having them, perhaps you aren't having them for the right reasons.

Above all else, when we become parents, we want to be the best possible parents to our kids. This means we want to provide the best possible chance of survival to our kids, and assure ourselves that our kids can grow up and live long and happy lives.

At our current level of social development, we tend to concentrate our available resources on raising one kid, or at the most two, for replacement sake. The fewer the number of kids sharing resources, the more likely the chance of survival. But that's literally putting all our genetic eggs into one (or two) baskets. The game we are playing is a gamble and the stakes are really high at the level we are playing.

The stakes are raised even higher when resources alone are not enough to secure assurance for the lives of our egg-baskets. We have artificially inflated the stakes even higher by pegging our kids' happiness and survival on personal achievement, evidenced by quality certification and documentation. Nothing less will do. Not for us, not for our kids, and certainly not for society whom we feel is beholden to us to help raise our kids, though how we arrived at this delusion is a mystery.

In a social structure like this, parental love becomes conditional. Parents love their kids when they score straight As, or their love is withheld until they do. Kids who need constant parental love are often made to feel they have to deserve it. Acceptance is gained by having to prove oneself again, and again, and again. Thus, within the household, relationships are strained all round. Given a choice, who would want to live like that?

The stakes aren't so high if you raise pets, though. General maintenance; medical expenses; treats; toys and the like are not cheap, but we spend without thought because we love our pets. Granted, they don't cost as much as raising kids, but that only makes things worse, doesn't it? The dog failed basic obedience; is probably as emo-psycho as any teenager and probably has a few undiagnosed learning disabilities as well, but hey, what the heck, right? Her future isn't dependent on stellar academic records, so we still love her just the same. She's done nothing to make us proud of her, but we still do our best to make her happy, anyway.

If we want more kids (the human kind), we have to make the C grade respectable again. My educational influences taught me that C stands for 'Competent', and that was good enough a benchmark to aim for. Achieving a C does not require kids to work unusually hard nor feel as unhealthily pressured, scared and hopeless as many kids are experiencing now. Aiming at a C allows a kid to develop interests, learn from other less academic sources and become more well-rounded as a person. By having time and space to see the world in all its horrors and wonders, a kid acquires broader perspectives and whatever knowledge is picked up in school falls into a useful context that helps make sense of the often weird and confusing things that happen around us all the time... if only we would look up from our books once in a while, busy as we are chasing an ultimately unappreciated bunch of As

But in our current society, encouraging your kid to aim for a C is the height of irresponsibility when all the other parents are making their kids score As by any means possible. This is not a game any rational person would want to play. And S'poreans are nothing if not rational.

No yelling at kids. Srsly?

So now a study recommends we don't yell at teenagers because the effect is as bad as hitting them? To be fair, I've not had the urge to yell at a kid, nor hit one for any reason, but then, I'm not a parent of one, either. Hence, it's not my prerogative.

What happens when kids get yelled at? Apparently, they "feel sad" and sometimes "angry". But isn't that the reason why we yelled at them in the first place? To make them feel sad and angry as a consequence of something stupid they did or said. If they're smart, they won't do it again. If they're not, they'll just have to repeatedly keep feeling sad and angry until they become smart. That's how some people learn, sorry.

Yeah, I get the rationale for positive reinforcement for positive action ("more carrot, less stick"), but kids also have to experience negative consequences for negative behaviour because... that's life! Consequences come swiftly and unexpectedly. Very seldom will they arrive after a calm deliberation in which various strategies are weighed and debated before being regretfully meted out. Put one foot out of line, get your head bitten off. When parents snap and lose it, that's the lesson to learn. Once the kids leave the comfort and security of their parents' home, the rest of the world isn't going to treat them much nicer. They'd better get used to that reality fast.

And, anyway, why can't kids feel sad and frustrated? Why would we want to deprive them the right to feel sad and frustrated? A childhood is good only if the kid grows up feeling positive and happy all the time? No wonder the pharmacies are doing so well these days.

Make-up dinner with dog

Thanks to inclement weather, our plans for a morning meet-up with her doggy pals fell through. To make up, we took Tasha to Sun Ray Cafe (again) for dinner.

The menu looks quite different from before. They must be in the middle of re-stocking, or something, as some menu items were unavailable.  Anyway, instead of the lamb chops I settled for, I got a whole stewed lamb shank served with a side of Yorkshire pudding. The meat on the thing! Soft, tender muscle and tendon. See the bone opening? The knife was shaped just narrowly enough to probe all the way in and extract the marrowy goodness. It was all I could do to to stop myself from seizing the bone and gnawing the meat right off it. Not that anyone would mind my lack of decorum, but the sheltie who parked its forepaws on my lap and gazed longingly at me might have benefited from stuff I dropped if I was eating carelessly.

This is the wife's pork chop. A little on the dry side, served atop a bed of caramelized carrots and sweet potatoes. She liked it well enough, but because she doesn't eat fat, she left me the absolute best part of her dish.

And, no, this wasn't the sheltie.

Fly, little ones, fly!

And so we mark the end of the formal timetable with a graduation ceremony for the seniors. Three weeks to the first paper of the finals and they're on study leave: finally off on their own to prepare themselves at their own time, at their own pace.

The period of day-long consultations has also begun, the kids booking personal time with us; along with the practice mock exams (yes, for the first time we're introducing mock exams in the plural!) and focused skills clinics (another first!).

In yet another first, I lost a kid to a voluntary "U-turn", i.e., backing out of this year's finals in hopes of obtaining a better result in next year's. This one was a confidence issue and, through no urging from anyone, decided unilaterally to stick around for one more year. I might lose a couple more, now that this one has set the precedent.

There's probably something wrong with society when only meeting extraordinary expectations qualifies as meeting normal expectations.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. The unexpected purchase was the result of the S-III suddenly and inexplicably developing power management problems. Just today, something was draining power at a very high rate, causing the battery to overheat. I exchanged batteries and the same thing happened. Both batteries flat in just a couple of hours. Then they refused to charge, though this problem may be an unrelated one. The charging cable (and I tested with three separate ones) did not sit in the port tightly enough to keep charging for long. The warranty has just expired so there'll probably be a bunch of extra charges if it goes for repair, so... new phone time.

Big stretch

She held this position long enough for me to notice, activate my phone cam, zoom, adjust focus and put the shutter timer for two seconds.

Cone of privilege pt. 2

Sick boy gets to eat from these prescription pH-balanced diet sachets. The main ingredient is chicken, evidently.

Poured out, it resembles a pile of kibble soaked in gravy. Thankfully, this is one type of wet food that he doesn't upchuck immediately after gobbling it down. That was the trouble with the previous diet he was prescribed. All that diet accomplished was allow the other cats to have a warm dessert after their meal. 'nuff said.

And this is the advantage of wearing a cone. Even though his diet food smells so nice, by covering his dish with his cone, no one else gets to share his dinner.

Cone of privilege

I bet he's picking up alien signals with the dish he's got around his neck.

One of the perks of being sick is that he gets to occupy the dog's bed, no questions asked. Capisce?

The dog looks very happy to capisce. No animosity between these two, as far as I can tell.

The ICT-grade correlation

Despite the inroads that have been made so far, Education and Info-comm Tech (ICT) are still rather uncomfortable with each other. On one extreme, a school district willy-nilly hands out iPads to each kid as a substitute for text books, but is embarrassed when the delighted recipients break board-approved security settings and play games on them instead. Obviously iPads are not books and if you have to cripple an iPad so badly so that it can only function as a book, you might as well just stick to books. Or be prepared to discover that kids are smarter than you (give them credit for).

On the other extreme are schools that believe ICT is nice to wave around as a publicity thing, but don't actually maximize its potential because old suspicions still prevail. This is especially apparent when school authorities strongly advise the kids to cut themselves off social media a month ahead of the final exams in order to concentrate on studying from books. Such pronouncements ultimately undermine the value ICT has for learning, and so once again we have a might-as-well-not situation.

The suspicion of ICT stems from the initial (wrong) assumption that the increased use of ICT will result in a commensurate increase in 'A' grades. When the number of 'A' grades doesn't rise, it is considered sufficient proof that ICT is not as effective a learning tool as 'they' claimed after all. Suspicion confirmed.

It is indeed true that ICT use does not increase 'A' grades, but it is a seriously flawed assumption that the two share a direct correlation. If we're chasing 'A' grades we expect to find evidence that ICT has an effect on learning. No evidence will be forthcoming because ICT has NO effect on learning.

Shocked? Does this mean that ICT is of no use, then? Obviously not, because in not seeing what you want to see, you are also not seeing what there is to be seen. ICT may have no e-ffect on learning, but it does a-ffect learning. ICT use does not make people smart in the way that a crippled iPad does not make people book smart. ICT affects the way people learn, if you use the array of tools available to encourage self-directed, collaborative learning. ICT use changes the learning game from solo play to co-op play, and co-op play gives learners the ability to learn better, faster and more meaningfully than solo play.

So if people using ICT correctly become smarter faster, then why does it not translate into a bumper crop of 'A' grades? Because when they return to the exam hall, they're cut off from their learning networks and they're forced to play solo once again. How they are tested is not reflective of the kind of learners they have become.

I don't foresee the end of the solo exam format anytime soon. So schools must ask themselves: given the cheap availability and potential of ICT to build strong, affective learning networks throughout the entire learning organization, is our primary goal to produce kids who know how to get things done by working together and managing a broad, diverse range of networked knowledge curated according to individual interests and tastes; or kids who are divided by their ability and lack thereof to score 'A' grades within a narrow band of knowledge that has no contextual application outside the exam hall?

UTI cat back in hossie

Poor Maui's back in the hospital, his UTI having relapsed. The docs will probably highly recommend surgery this time. Because of the relapse, I don't know if refusing the procedure a second time is in his best interest. There are pros and cons, but I still think that's the absolute last resort. We'll know more when the ultrasound scan comes back and we can confer over them.

I dropped in on him during the evening visiting hour bearing a can of wet food. He's not been eating and we hoped a rare treat would perk up his appetite some. It worked! He perked up immediately and was a happy boy the whole time I was there.

He is one cat that doesn't get overstimulated by petting. I kept rubbing the top of his head and scratching the bottom of his chin. When I stopped to rest, he sought out my hand for more. Any distraction, I guess, is good to take his mind off the drip and catheter he's been fitted with, and the awkward cone that prevents him from ripping them out.

Perhaps when I visit again tomorrow, I'll be clearer about what options are viable for him in his condition.

The difference between dog and human

This is the face that greets me every morning. It's a face that says, "go back to bed. It's not worth it." Then I say, "do you still like eating kibble?" With no reply forthcoming, I drag my sorry butt off to work and leave her to sleep the day away.

Dog x-change

What's not to like about III Cafe? The food's cheap-ish, the customers and staff are friendly and the furniture accommodates both two and four-legged patrons. There are definitely worse places to spend a weekend afternoon.

And sometimes, other people's dogs become yours. Now, where did Tasha run off to?

'Just teach'

When I hear calls for fixing the system so that teachers can 'just teach' and not have to juggle administration, CCA, committee work and a myriad other tasks that a modern day teacher is expected to perform, my impulse is to give the complainant a smack and a reality check.

If the teacher's only job was to 'just teach' we're limiting what a student can learn from our one-dimensional existence. In preparing our kids for life, we too have to experience life in all its facets, whether they are to our liking or not. The kids are eventually going out into the world where they are going to face a variety of demands and a job scope beyond 'just work'. So here's a steaming mug of fresh coffee for your somnolent state. Inhale deeply.

Then there are days like today when I'm buried under a host of other tasks besides my timetabled expectations. Feh. All one can do is priortize. Some people will just have to live with disappointment.

Give the girl an Oscar

If this dog were in the movies.... Here is Tasha after a scolding for trashing our bedroom by chewing on the stuffed toy display and upsetting the air-freshener thingy, spilling its contents over the carpet. After taking an earful of choice words from me, she sat here watching the pains I had to undertake cleaning up the mess. When I returned to her she was still immobile -- and she was looking at me with tears in her eyes! No joke, her bottom eyelids were puddling with moisture, though you can't see the detail from the pix. Such a little heartbreaker, this one.

This is Tasha immediately after I forgave her. A conciliatory pat on the head and a hug, and all is right with the world again. Naughty girl!

Managing exam stress

Here in S'pore, exam stress is stratospheric. It's evident in the teary eyes that received the graded prelim exam papers from me this morning. It's hard not to feel for them that didn't do well. They have been working themselves hard and are still not getting the results they are hoping for. Stress, according to one student, messes with the mind during the paper and while the question is worded one way, they read it in another. The result is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

I say again, exams are not a bad thing. However the way in which we prepare students to take exams is strategically ineffective. What we have done is to set up the year-end exam as the hardest thing a student will accomplish in the year. All the preparation, training, practice and revision programmes are engineered to give the students the impression that this is it, do or die. They may have been futzing around in the past but this one last hurdle is make-or-break, good luck and I hope to see you on the other side.

Although we believe that this is the way to motivate the kids to make that final push, for the majority of the kids, all we've accomplished is to develop a phobia for the final exam. Hence the stress, paralysis and everything else bad associated with final exams.

The person who can figure out how to make exams less stressful, yet maintain standards of academic rigour could stand to make some serious bucks. That would be me. However, I'll dispense my advice right here... which means no one will ever take it seriously. Regardless, here goes:

Never set the final exam up to be the hardest thing a student will accomplish in the year. Instead, make it the easiest thing they will ever do in your class for the year. If the kids are sitting for H1 GP make them submit undergraduate-level research papers on a regular (though less frequent) basis. Make them write 2000, 2500 word essays, with full and proper citations from the latest, most up-to-date sources. When they're used to that, sitting for H1 GP would be relatively chicken-feed. 500-800 words, argumentative, current affairs-type essay in 90 minutes? A comprehension paper on one or two short opinion pieces? Pffft. I've synthesized more demanding stuff in Mr X's classroom exercises.

If we set the exams up to only test the most rudimentary basics of what we teach in class instead of portraying them as the year-end Monster we make them out to be, no more exam stress. But it will be a new classroom dynamic to manage. I never said it was going to be easy for us teachers to make such a radical paradigm shift.

Education: how the Finns don't do it

We're still talking about Finland? There's no point, really, because we're not prepared to do (or not do) what works for them in education. We won't leave things alone; we won't stop trying to control everything; and we won't trust that the system works; and we will keep trying to fix what isn't broken.

First, who are the 'we'? 'We' are everybody who wants a say in the education process. The teachers, the management, and the officials represented under the Ministry (as a collective whole), the parents, the employers and the students themselves, all stakeholders, all wanting to put their fingers in the pie so that they can manipulate the system to their own benefit. Not that it's wrong to expect education to benefit society, which it does, but when it comes to specific stakeholder goals, we can't please everybody.

We who are in the education Ministry want to be trusted as competent professionals who are doing our best for our charges. We're not getting this trust when parents insist on sending their kids for after-school tuition classes to tip balances in their favour. The employers want a competent, smart, reliable pool of prospective employees, but what comes out of our system on the whole are grads who study all the time and haven't invested time and resources in developing themselves as self-motivated individuals with a variety of interests that are relevant to working adult life -- or even life in general. The kids themselves want a less stressful life and opportunities to express themselves and their interests in non-academic pursuits but sacrifice them all chasing after the almighty 'A' grade in every subject that could conceivably 'land them a good job'.

The only ones who benefit from this chaos are the agents who can offer the best strategies to game the system, and they're not even stakeholders: the side-industry of after-school tuition who see the opportunity to profit by being the only ones who offer the most stakeholders what they want: 'A' grades. And since 'A' grades seem to be the compromise position, that's all we ever aspire to achieve... while the employers go find employees elsewhere. Why else would we need a moratorium on foreign worker employment if it wasn't so highly in demand in the first place?

Our education landscape is nothing like Finland's. We believe in fast-tracking. The faster the train we can put our kids on, the better. The fastest trains are in our estimation the most successful, while the slower trains are to be avoided at all cost. It's almost as if we can't wait to get rid of our kids and send them out into the world as quickly as possible, while holding their hands the whole time. If we, heaven forbid, happen to catch a slow train, it's our kid's fault... or our own fault and we prefer to spend the journey berating everybody responsible instead of spending the extra time with our kid just enjoying the journey and each other's company.

I don't really know what it's like in the mythical land of the Finns, but I believe that they have two key advantages over us. Yes, their teachers are allegedly the best, but the 'best' teachers here don't last too long in the industry -- many of them prefer to step out and operate their own business instead. What the Finns have are what we will never have: Time and Trust. Time to learn, time to make mistakes, time to grow, time to play; and Trust that no matter what -- even without our meddling -- it'll be all right in the end.

Photo credit: Amy ('cos I couldn't find a non-subscription link to the article)

I'm not calling the fire department

Pebbles is making himself comfortable on the giant cat tree. This is the absolute first time I've seen any of the cats up there voluntarily.

And where there is one cat, there will be another. Except Momo is content to scratch the hemp and leave it at that.

Eat, sleep, work, plan

The big planning pow-wow for this year has yielded a new direction for the industry to take: make learning relevant to the lives of the students. Take their interests -- whether in music; astronomy; robotics; theatre; or whatever -- and use their interests to make their lessons come alive for them.

Sounds good in theory, but I can imagine my kids moaning in disbelief. 'You want us to pass ace our exams AND develop an interest in something TOO?' It seems the kids can barely keep up with their meals and exercise and sleep already, what with the different subject demands of preparation, revision, practice, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. Ask them what their interests are and they stare blankly back, wondering what the politically correct answer should be. Then hesitantly... sleep? Eat? Sigh. Those aren't interests, they're bodily functions.

The end-of-year exam and the build-up to it is taking every shred of energy from the kids so they have none left to develop a sense of self beyond believing they are mere cogs in a machine that will continue grinding them down until they have reached the end of their usefulness... and we don't want to contemplate what happens to them after that. Their objective is to delay that eventuality for as long as possible. Every step up the academic ladder, every promotion they receive indicates that they are still useful, and that's what they live for. To feel that they have to deserve to exist can be quite demoralizing in the long run.

And we wonder why they seem so dense and naive; colourless and listless; and quite unwilling to think for themselves. Life isn't learned through rote, which is what is taking up so much of the kids' time and energy, life is learned by living it which, if we look at their daily schedules, many of them are not. There also seems to be a lot of guilt when they do admit to having one interest or another; almost apologetic as if confessing to grand theft tempus when they feel they should be keeping nose to grindstone instead.

Frankly, I don't blame the kids. What we have is a systemic problem perpetuated by ever-increasing academic success rates which keeps kids and their parents, and us in the industry as well focused on improving year after year. Our system encourages the study-now-develop-interests-later approach to academic qualification, so now the industry bosses have decided based on public feedback that it's time to reflect once again on what we are doing and why we are doing it.

Well, we aren't supposed to be preparing the kids for the end-of-year exam. We are supposed to be preparing them for what comes AFTER the end-of-year exam. We're not supposed to be manufacturing cogs in a machine but people who have a sense of self-worth and who see the value in working together so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. We're not making kids study subjects to pass exams, we're teaching them to understand life's little mysteries by supporting that understanding with subject knowledge that guides them to figure out answers to their questions about life and how they perceive it.

The exams don't have to change, though. What does need to change is how we appreciate their functionality. Exam questions don't ask 'what do you know?' Why we spend so much time on endless meaningless content drills is because we automatically assume that regardless of the question, it's always about the 'what?' Exam questions really ask 'given your knowledge about such and such, what would you do with that knowledge given new condition and context?' So, exam questions are mostly about applying subject knowledge to life experience. And the kids sweat bullets to answer that question because they haven't got much life experience to go on.

The industry's new direction is hardly new. It is a reminder to compare our roadmap with the terrain again and check if our current course is taking us where we really want to go. For us in the JC system, there doesn't seem to be any specific directive for us to do anything right now, probably because it's too late for the next couple of cohorts. But if in the next few years we're expecting a breed of kids that have grown up in the new learning environment the bosses are envisioning, we'd better start moving in the same direction to align with everyone else at the right time.

The tuition hamster-wheel (or the tragedy of 'normal')

This tuition necessary-or-unnecessary debate ignores a key issue: we operate on a market economy. Whatever people want in large enough numbers, there is a provider -- for a price. The desire, in this case, is an academic qualification that appears to be getting increasingly difficult to obtain. The schools, apparently, aren't handing them out like they are supposed to. No, unlike Christmas candy, those coveted 'A' grades are only obtainable through hard work. After-school tuition has since arisen to reassure parents that their kids will get the A's that they need by making sure they don't have time to do anything else but work hard.

What a dilemma. Schools are incredibly stingy with their 'A' grades, but every kid wants them because every other kid -- it seems -- can get them. Parents don't understand when the schools tell them that tuition is not necessary. Likewise, schools don't understand when parents insist that it is. Why are schools so callous towards the plight of parents? Because the job of the school is to educate thousands of kids a year. Why are parents so intractable? Because they have to educate only one.

In the S'pore system, schools educate thousands of kids taking a national standardized exam every year. Given a number of students to qualify a year, they train, assess and apply Quality Control procedures for the benefit of their future employers. Statistics tell us that given a large enough sample, plotting particular data about it will yield a normal distribution curve. That is to say, there will be a small number of high results, followed by an ever widening number of mid-range results, tapering off with a relatively small number of low results. A variation in the shape of the distribution curve indicates an abnormality or irregularity in the data. If the data bunches low, there's a lot of soul searching to be done over procedures, methodology, and to some extent, input. But it becomes a bigger problem if the data bunches high. Standards too low? Test too easy? Cheating? Or more interestingly, are standards being surpassed on a large scale?

The increasing trend of after-school tuition may well be causing overall academic standards to rise. More kids, working hard, guided by competent tuition agencies, are likely to raise academic results at an increased level. For the tuition agencies, the target market is different. Tuition caters to parents who have that one kid to educate, promising an 'A' grade for that kid. Even if there is a group of kids that attends tuition classes, the agency works to bunch results at the high level. Anything less, and the agency can shut its doors forever.

Why can't schools do the same? Because schools provide mass education for the entire population. Schools must maintain a normal distribution result curve or they are no longer trusted as being able to provide the nation with quality education. To bunch low is clearly not meeting standards; but bunching high means that standards are too low to trust the school's ability to produce quality new employees.

So what happens when previous standards are being surpassed by more and more kids? Keep raising the standards until the distribution can become 'normal' again. So are our kids working too hard to meet current standards? Under normal circumstances, they don't have to. But to achieve the higher bands, they will have to. That too is normal. So the mass consumption of tuition services may be helping our kids become academically smarter cohort after cohort. But it is also raising the standards and expectations every succeeding cohort has to meet and exceed in order to be considered better-than-normal.

This is the tragedy of everybody doing their jobs well. We always have to do one better the next time. Nobody wants to be thought of as just 'normal'.

Not into tuition

I don't have fond memories of tuition. In secondary school, my grades were atrocious. The parents tried to remedy the situation by engaging tutors for me. Each hour spent with one tutor or another was such a drag.

In the classroom, I was only one of forty kids. We were all terrified of being called upon to answer the teacher's questions, but there was always a thirty-nine in forty chance that we wouldn't be called. At the tuition table (on Friday evenings, it became Dad's mahjong table) there was only me and the tutor, and I had to answer all the questions.

I wasn't terrified of any of the tutors. It wasn't that personal. What I dreaded was having my freedom of movement curtailed, having to sit still for that hour, hour-and-a-half chained to the table while life went on around me... elsewhere.

I didn't have as much tuition as today's kids. But having to sit through each interminable experience every week was traumatic every time. I realize now that I'm a better kinesthetic learner than a sit-down-and-mug learner, so maybe that had something to do with my sensation of claustrophobia while making my poor tutor earn every last 1-cent coin of his or her monthly paycheque.

Was it worth it in the end? Well, without tuition, I was failing. With tuition, I failed anyway. And I'm talking about the big exams. My best subjects were the ones that didn't require extra tuition in, so I didn't get the benefit of having tuition pull my Bs to As. Knowing me, I'd probably get them pulled down to Cs with tuition.

I can't speak either for or against the mania for after-school tuition as it stands today. All I can say is that if I didn't want to learn something, no amount of tuition would have helped. But maybe the tuition allowed my parents to think that they did their best for their kid who liked to read (garbage), yet didn't have the smarts for school.

But they also paid for my college tuition years later, and for that, I will always be grateful.