Asim Qureshi

A Grilling from Colin…

I just got this email from Colin, who’s taken the trouble to get in touch with me. I’m honoured. But he’s grilled me, and here are my responses in bold. I thought I might as well blog them here, which he suggested I do, so others could read them too…

Hi Asim, I was reading your blog about homeschooling your children and I had a few questions for you. I’ve read all of your entries but found no answers to these questions. Maybe you could make a blog entry out of them.

1. What about the formal studies of history, geography, English literature and Art. Clearly your children are destined for similar professions as you and your wife. Do you not think these have any scholarly value?

We could learn everything from Ancient Chinese, Material Science, Modern day Ethiopia, History of Women’s Rights, Abacus Skills, French Art in the 1920’s, Buddhism, Early History of Judaism, Science of Cricket, Sumo Wrestling Techniques, Chess, Fertilisation Methods in early 18th Century, etc… Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could live forever and learn everything? But we can’t. Knowledge isn’t free. It has a cost – time – our most precious commodity of all.

And thus we need to be selective in what we learn (and learn efficiently).

Study for the sake of study? Well, I could spend the next 20 years learning the 1983 Karachi phone directory – study for the sake of study – but I’d call that a ‘waste of time’. Why? Because I can’t apply that knowledge. That’s a view I take – knowledge is useless unless it’s applied. It’s the application of knowledge that is important. You may disagree, many do.

So, what I’m saying, is that my kids are learning things that I believe they will be most likely to apply constructively in their lives. I believe we’ve taught them how to attain knowledge – for example, my two elder children have learned their Physics A-level pretty much by themselves. So if they want to learn about French Art in the 1920’s, or anything else, they can, if they’re interested (not everything has to be useful – you can do things for pleasure too). But I’m not going to make them learn it as part of their curriculum – they’ll learn it if they want.

2. Did you move back to Malaysia for financial reasons to start the home school was it always part of the plan?

The move to Malaysia was to pursue business opportunities as well as provide an environment that we thought would more likely bring up children with strong moral values.

3. Your wife and yourself are obviously of 99th percentile intelligence. What has been your experience of people with lesser skillsets than yourselves pursuing your aggressive timeline. Is it even possible if you don’t have the majority of the skills yourselves?

My wife is intelligent in most ways. I’m not. For example, when I was seven I failed to get into two private schools despite having tutors to help me.

Regarding other kids, I’m currently teaching an 11 year old who failed to get into a pretty normal school in Malaysia because of his test results. He’s learned in 5 weeks as much maths as what schools teach in about 3 months. I’m hoping he’ll do his 16+ exams when he’s 12, latest 13.

4. You mentioned life skills (cooking, finance etc). How do you ensure these have been transferred correctly.

Kids cook great food, the two elder ones have got iGCSEs in Accounting!

5. I imagine your lifestyle has been met with a wide range of criticisms. I, myself feel I failed my children in educating them in comparison. How have you dealt with the fallout from this radical approach.

I doubt you’ve failed your children at all – everyone has different goals.

I don’t get that much criticism! Apart from my parents who are completely crapping it that some of their grandkids may end up not having degrees!

I only saw my father cry in happiness once – when he found out I got my place at Oxford. For someone who came to the UK as an immigrant with nothing but a suitcase, discriminated racially, it was amazing for him to see his son get a place in the finest education institution in the country. Even to this day I feel absolutely honoured to have studied there – amazing memories and where I met Isabelle – those were good times.

But I want my kids to be able to achieve much greater things, and do more of what they’re really passionate about. And that means having to make certain sacrifices…

Change in plans again…

Sabeen, our youngest, who is 8, is now approaching her first iGCSE – Maths. She’s getting pretty much exactly the same test marks (low A*s) that the two elders were getting this many weeks before their iGCSE Maths, so Sabeen should also be getting an A* as long as she doesn’t mess up.

The other day I was chatting with Isabelle and we decided Sabeen will move straight to A-levels, and skip the other iGCSE’s. Why? Because if the goal is to get 4 A-level A*s, why not take the most direct route? Why go through all that extra exam preparation and stress? If she applies to university or a job it’ll be marketed as ‘the iGCSE’s were too easy for me so I went straight for A-levels’! If, for some stupid reason they do insist on her having iGCSE’s, she’d probably get them done in 6 months – it would be crazy for someone to be doing their iGCSE’s after their A-levels, but that could happen here (albeit unlikely).

With Maryam and Danyal we were a little less sure of ourselves – the iGCSE’s proved to be a good way of validating that our teaching methods worked, and I guess we didn’t think the kids would progress so quickly on to their A-levels.

So next year all 3 of the kids will be doing 2 A-levels – Maths and Further Maths. The reason for this is so that they can have some fun studying together and also leverage the power of intensity – working relatively intensively for a year on mostly maths should increase the chances of them getting the top grades. They’ll be thinking in equations by the end of the year!

How come my kids have so much free time?

How is that my kids have so much free time? I remember when my kids were regular schoolers they were so busy. Not only was getting to school a daily grind, but they had their extracurricular activities that ate up most of their time outside school too. From football to Mandarin, Arabic to rock climbing, it was all one hell of a hectic schedule.

Forward to today and they seem to be learning so much more yet have so much more free time. Why? Well, let me compare how the day starts for my kids with another school child I recently met.

This is how the school child’s day started off:

6.30am – wake up.
7.15am – leave for school
7.50am – arrive at school
8.00am – assembly
9.00am – lessons begin

So that’s 2h30m from wake up to stepping on the gas. This is how it starts for a my kids:

6.30am – wake up.
7.00am – lessons begin (in PJ’s while enjoying their breakfast).

So that’s 2 hours of lost time by the time it’s 9am for the school kid. Poor child! Now, it works in reverse too. By the time school kids get home they’ve already lost 4 hours of study time compared to my kids. FOUR HOURS!

Time is our most precious commodity – we just can’t be THAT inefficient with it.

The world has changed. To get information 30 years ago you needed to go out of your house (and go to school) to get it. How could you get a hard past paper exam question answered? In the Information Age, getting that information is easy. Quora is just one website where you can post questions and have them explained by experts, for free.

My two older kids are learning Physics A-level – there is so much information out there on the internet that I barely teach them. Past papers, solutions to past papers by the examining board, lectures on YouTube (Dr Physics has uploaded some incredible lectures, all for free), forums, and they even have cheat sheets put up by other kids. It’s all there.

And the other benefit is that my 10 and 12 year old are learning without being spoon fed, a real life skill.

The kids have to learn social skills too, which they can’t do by sitting in front of a laptop, but I think there are far more efficient ways of doing that then sending your kids to school. An hour or two a day hanging around neighbours’ kids is more than enough to ensure a kid knows how to talk and develop friendships.

In fact I was recently speaking to one of the teachers that taught my kids when they were school and she told me she was surprised how much more confident my children had become since leaving school. Was pleased to hear that as it kind of confirmed what I felt.

Anyway, I’m digressing, so I’ll stop.

Accounting GCSE – don’t do it!

Great news! Maryam and Danyal both got A*s in their Accounting iGCSE’s, but it was close. Edexcel iGCSE Accounting is flipping hard, as Isabelle realised mid way during the course. The A* ground boundary is 90% and the papers are not easy. Maryam and Danyal managed 93% and 94% respectively – it’s by far the closest they’ve got to not getting A*s in all their iGCSE’s to date.

I can’t find stats on percentage of A*s for Accounting iGCSE, but A* rates do vary wildly between subjects. 6.5% of all GCSE’s are A*s, but it’s 40% for Latin, 3% for Business Studies, less than 1% for Engineering, and if memory serves me right, low for Accounting. I assumed that the disparity is because of the type of schools that do each subject – for example only the posh public schools do Latin, but I now think that is only part of the story – the other part is that some subjects, such as the Accounting, are simply much harder than others. So avoid them. It leaves us in a bit of a dilemma for Sabeen as Accounting is the only useful subject our dynamic duo have studied in their GCSEs so far.

So Maryam has got the 5 A*s that we wanted her to get and her GCSE’s are now history. Danyal still has 2 to go. Sabeen is about the start the journey.

A quick update on the A-levels – Maryam and Danyal are doing shockingly well with their physics. Bear in mind that it’s meant to be a 2 year course – they started work 6 weeks ago and are getting B’s in past papers in 40% of the assessment. We’ve covered the material in the other 60% too, but have’t done any past papers on them yet, so they are perhaps 4 weeks away from getting B’s in their past papers over the entire syllabus. 10 weeks to be getting B’s in past papers in an A-level?! I find that incredible – but it has all been about leveraging the power of intensity – they’ve been studying physics for around 3 hours per day, after all.

However, the Physics A-level seems to be an outlier – Maryam has been working for her Biology A-level for 6 months now and she’s not nearly ready for the exam. Physics is all about understanding principles and so if the child is fairly intelligent, has a strong foundation in maths, and is taught well (ahem, that’s me!), they can pick things up very fast.

A-Levels

We’ve decided to press ahead with Maryam and Danyal’s A-levels despite Danyal having only done 3 iGCSE’s – he’ll probably do two more this coming November and January.

Maryam has been working on her A-level Biology with Isabelle for a few months. I’ve decided to keep the momentum (ha ha!) with their Physics iGCSE and go for the Physics A-level rather than a Maths A-level, which we’ll do later. Also, given I have a degree in physics, I feel a little nostalgic about it all, so physics it is.

We have 4 months until their Physics A-level exams – it was either that or drag it on for an extra year. 4 seems like a good a challenge.

A lot of people ask me why the urgency? My response is why the complacency? We’re not doing 12 hour days – we’re doing a total of 5 or 6 hours of study during each weekday, no homework – and there is tons of time for sport, reading, meeting friends and pissing about.

I told them on the day they started studying for their Physics A-level that the spoon feeding needs to stop – they can grab me if they don’t understand things, they have the text book, they have Google, they have each other. They work when they want, if they want. It’s their lives and it’s up to them, not me, to get the A* so not have to go through the pain of a resit.

The pep talk has worked. The physics text book is 166 pages, and four days into it they have gone through 65 pages – so that’s 40% of the syllabus (hello?) – but bear in mind it’s the first 40 pages so it’s mostly covering iGCSE stuff they’ve already done – and at this stage there would be some gaps in their understanding of the material they’ve covered. Hopefully they’ll be done with the text book in another 2 weeks and then it’s just past papers, which will fill any gaps, until they do their exams.

How can my kids even have a chance of doing an A-level in 4 months? Trust me, they’re not geniuses – it’s just that they are leveraging off the power of intensity.

I’ll keep you posted on progress…

Someone has already asked me how the kids will do the practical exam. I’ve found out that although the board, Edexcel, says it’s ‘compulsory’, it is really optional – it doesn’t affect the grade, and if one does the practical they just get an extra 1 or 2 next to their grade, which no-one cares about. Do I care that the kids will not learn how to do physics practicals? No.

Physics iGCSE – they creamed it!

We got the Physics iGCSE results yesterday – Maryam and Danyal got the A*s they were aiming for! In fact both managed exceptionally high A*s.

Pretty cool that from the day they started studying physics for the first time to the day they took their exams was only 5 months – it’s typically 10 years at most UK schools.

Unfortunately the kids have no time to celebrate. They have their Accounting iGCSE next week.

Retired teacher…

As of a few weeks ago, Maryam and Danyal are done with their Physics iGCSE. During the last 2 weeks I took them to cafe after cafe, moving on once getting bored – I’d do my work and they’d do physics past papers. I wanted to make sure the last few weeks would be as intense as possible, for reasons highlighted in an earlier post.

Towards exam time they were both averaging around 85-90% in their exams – the A* mark is 77-83%, so hopefully they’ll get the grade, but of course anything can happen.

The way the kids learned Physics iGCSE was, from day 1, by doing past paper questions. That was it. For each question when they got stuck, which at the beginning was pretty much all the time, I explained all they needed to know to do the question. They then moved on to the next question, and by doing questions after question they eventually understood all the concepts. In fact that’s essentially how I was taught at university. The benefit of this is that all learning is done with a purpose – which is to answer the question at hand – and that makes one focused and it also sticks in one’s mind. It’s also a bit more like life – you have problems – and you just need to solve them – you don’t need to understand everything around the entire subject.

For their A-levels instead of teaching them I’ve decided to let them start learning things on their own, a skill which is perhaps more important than the knowledge gained from any iGCSE or A-level. I think they’re ready for it. I’ll set them past paper questions every week, they will do the research from a text book and the internet, they will then mark their own work as the exam board provides answers, and when they don’t understand I’ll explain it to them in the evenings and weekends – I doubt it will take more than 10 minutes a day.

I have also adopted the same system for my youngest daughter, Sabeen. She’s just doing foundation level Maths iGCSE past papers, hopefully moving onto higher level in a few weeks. I just set her work which she needs to finish. Whenever she gets stuck she’ll ask either Maryam, Danyal, or her mother, Isabelle.

This is pretty much how it works at my company, LaunchPad. Deliverables or targets are set and I do not care when people come into work or when they leave – I care about those deliverables or targets.

Anyway, so with me no longer teaching, I’m a retired teacher! How am I taking advantage of my free time?

I am focusing my time on business – it’s beginning to take off and I don’t want any distractions – I want my energy and mind to be intensely focused.

The Grand Plan…

A lot of people ask me about university – if my kids get their A-levels done early do they go straight to university (where they would be social misfits as they’d be too young) or wait 5 years (in which case what do they do for those 5 years?).

People make the assumption they’re going to university when they probably won’t.

The thing is, my kids are already passionate about business, which isn’t surprising given they are influenced by me, and they will also have many advantages in business. The following list of people have all had incredible success in their respective fields because they leveraged off their parents’ careers or passions – Andre Agassi, George Bush Jnr, Tiger Woods, Benazir Bhutto, Michael Douglas, Indara Ghadhi, Serena and Venus Williams, Jahangir Khan, J.F. Kennedy, Jaden Smith, Alec Stewart – the list goes on and on. It would be wise for my kids to emulate.

My kids have been watching me run my businesses since they were born, I can help them both financially and in terms of mentoring, and my company LaunchPad works with smart young people with no business experience to launch new tech businesses – so they would be a natural fit there. And the elder two, Maryam and Danyal, are already fascinated by business, how it allows them to just think of an idea and make their own journey. They really want to go for it. In fact one of the reasons they study hard is because I’ve told them only once they get 5 A*s in their iGCSE’s and 4A*s in their A-levels they can then do what they want – i.e. business (or spend the rest of their lives smoking ganja, if that’s their thing).

Further, they are dead set on not getting jobs. They see the freedom their parents have, and have already had a lot of freedom in their own lives, and so it’s natural they want to keep it.

The best way to learn business is by doing business. A university degree could help, but not nearly as much as 3 years of trying business (whether succeeding or failing).

So hopefully Maryam will start running a business late next year, once she has gained a few months’ work experience, and the others would also follow after they’re done with their A-levels.

If they do develop chips on their shoulders, they could do an executive degree later on in life. They’d get a great brand on their resume, they typically only take a few months to complete, and the connections one makes can be many times more valuable than in your average undergrad programme. Also they’d pay for it, not me!

By the time the kids are 21, they could have 8 years of running businesses, managing people, dealing with failure, managing a company’s finances, leading teams, taking responsibility for their own lives, backed up by some hopefully great grades 5+ years ahead of their time, together with an ability to speak 5 or 6 languages, and possibly lots of cash in their bank account that they might have made from their ventures.

Not that I’d expect them to go for a job, but if they do, possibly because I’ve gone bankrupt and so have they, I think that with that kind of CV, they’d comfortably be ahead of your typical Oxbridge grad in terms of employability – they’d be the purple cow – the ones that stand out. Cutting-edge employers including top investment banks, management consultancies, tech companies would love someone with their kind of CV – the person making the decision would be patting himself or herself on the back for being willing to take the risk, the company would use it to show how their graduate programme challenges conventions.

It is worth noting that ‘business’ might sound narrow, but it’s just as diverse as employment, which is what conventional education sets kids up for. Business could mean tech, education, retail, green tech, F&B, farming, microbiology, property, medicine, or running a vet clinic (both my girls love animals) etc… and it could be very passive or intense depending on one’s ambition.

If the kids, at any point, feel business is not for them, they’ve got plenty of time to change direction and go to university.

As for me, I would have saved about US$400k per child, or US$1.2m for all 3 children in education costs. That’s US$220k per child up to A-levels (a top private education in Malaysia less home school costs), and the annual cost of educating someone at a top UK university as a foreign student, including living expenses, works out to be around US$60k per annum, which is US$180k over a 3 year course. So I won’t be complaining!

The power of intensity…

I have this American friend who learned to speak conversant Malay within a few months of coming to Malaysia. In Malaysia very few expats learn much Malay because everyone speaks English. We’re spoiled.

My friend told me that according to a study he’d read, which I’ve never been able to find on the internet, the pace at which you learn a language is exponentially related to how much time you spend per week. So if you have 2 Malay lessons a week, you’d learn more than twice as fast compared to if you have 1 Malay lesson per week. Have 5 lessons a week, and you wouldn’t just learn 5 times faster than if you have 1 lesson a week, but you’d learn perhaps 15 or 30 times faster. So he said the secret of his learning Malay was by having lots of lessons per week.

Whether such study actually exists, the recommendation he gave makes sense. The longer the gap in between the lessons the more forgetting between lessons and the more you have to spend re-learning what you learned in the previous lesson. And it explains why people learn languages so slowly from regular lessons. I learned French for 10 years, averaging 2 lessons a week yet I did not reach a level where I could comfortably talk to anyone in French. But people who migrate and are forced to speak the local language, who probably speak around 1-2 hours a day, are typically beyond conversant within months.

It occurred to me that the benefits of intensity probably apply outside languages too.

So I decided to try teaching Maryam and Danyal Physics iGCSE with a high intensity. I started teaching physics 3 months ago, one hour every weekday, so had to put Maths A-level on hold. The results have been really surprising. Both recently got just over 50/80, around a D grade, in the basic/core physics paper, Paper 2, the first time they attempted one, without any revision. With even greater intensity I think A*’s in their Physics iGCSE is achievable, in as little as 5 months from the day they started studying physics.

What’s even more interesting is that it’s reasonable to assume that if the kids went on a super-intense course of physics – perhaps 8 hours a day – they’d be ready to go from never having been taught physics before to taking their Physics iGCSE in 3-4 weeks flat. Unfortunately not practical for most, including us, but it certainly does make one wonder how effective the 12 years of physics lessons I had leading to my GCSE Physics really were.

So we’ve now modified our home school once more. We try to make the courses more intense. That means no more 18 months to learn a GCSE or an A-level. It’s more like 5-8 months to go from zero to taking the exam, cranking up the intensity towards exam time. Unfortunately schools are hardwired so school kids would struggle to benefit from this – schools force kids to spread themselves thin – but homeschoolers can take full advantage of the power of intensity.

[An update a month after writing this blog: Over the last month I upped the intensity of physics, so the kids have studied around 3 hours per day. By the way they’re as motivated as I am, in case you think it’s some slave camp at my home. Anyway, as of this weekend Maryam is consistently getting low A*’s while Danyal is averaging A’s, that’s from D’s only a month ago.

I’m impressed but not entirely surprised. It’s taken them around 155 hours from never having studied physics before, 4 months ago, to around A/A* level in their iGCSE!!! Forget 3-4 weeks, the idea of doing an iGCSE in 2 weeks flat seems very plausible!]

Some benefits of homeschool…

Some benefits you may not have thought of…

You decide exactly what the kids learn, and if you have any complaints about the syllabus or their progress you address them. Not enough drama lessons? No problem, arrange them! Want your kids to excel in public speaking? Find some courses!
No school entrance exams or end-of-term assessments, so life is a lot less stressful. You just have to get the kids to pass their public exams, and that’s it.
If you have a late night, the following day the kids can get up late.
No school run and stress in the morning to get out of the house by a certain time.
You can go on holiday when you want. And when you have visitors staying over the kids can take as much time off as needed.
Teachers you hire are personally selected for the kids, and you can ensure every minute of the lesson is being used effectively.
No class projects which are a waste of time, and the parents do half of it anyway. And if you think class projects are important, you can find homeschool groups that do them.
Kids have so much time it’s ridiculous. It means they can do whatever they’re passionate about. Reading, sports, technology, rock climbing, horse-riding.
Kids learn to socialise with people of different ages. I’ve noticed my kids are able to get on with kids both older and younger than them, and enjoy chatting with adults. My own view is that modern day school, where a bunch of, say, 10 year olds constantly spend all day with each other, is not good.
It can be great fun for the parent that stays at home. Ensuring the kids socialise can be by having a coffee with friends that also homeschool. Not exactly hard work!
The kids stay away from negative influences at school. We choose the kids our kids spend time with, and they’re all decent kids we think ours can learn from.
No bullying. Being bullied kills a child’s confidence. If my kids went to university and were bullied, I doubt they’d just shrivel up and die on the spot. It might be a little more difficult for them, but they would manage, especially if they’ve been made aware of it in advance. Humans adapt fast.
The family unit becomes very strong. I feel our family is a lot more closely knit than most. We feel like one team with a common goal, and homeschool makes us feel different and special. I guess if everyone did it, it’d no longer be the case!
Healthier diet. Schools, like restaurants, mass produce food with focus on keeping costs down. That means processed food, high in salt and refined sugar – a diet that studies show causes development problems and shortens life expectancy. Homeschool can address that. And it also means that if your child has special needs, such as being overweight or underweight, it’s easier to provide a customised diet.
Compared to a private education, you save a lot of money. I’ll break down our costs in another post, but we are spending around US$4k per child per year without making any effort to save costs. A good private school in Malaysia costs around US$20k per annum. Hopefully we will take 5 years to do what schools do in 12 years, so we’d be saving US$220k per child.
And let’s not omit the obvious, homeschool kids do way better academically than school kids. See this, which comes from a major US study.

So these are the key reasons we like homeschool so much.