Separation

Nothing grips my heart more than hearing my daughter's muffled sobs this morning, when my wife had to leave for hospital because of a major operation. That's her own operation, not her patient's. My daughter has been praying for mum since we told her the bad news six months ago.

The separation seized her in a difficult moment, the longest since she were born.

To be honest, we're afraid too.

We decided to bring up this issue during the teacher-parent conference last month. We told class teacher my daughter's symbolic act of throwing sand at the beach. Off the sand goes, and so does her worry about mum's operation - the way we've been taught to dispose our worries in a sealed envelope and putting through the paper shredder. Her teacher then remembered her teaching the class such skill not long ago. "Wow, she has been paying so much attention to my teaching and is putting it in practice." Her teacher was almost in tears when she recounted that, putting a lump in our throats.

After Work

Four days into the English Week in my daughter's school, I haven't got chance to join the activities until today. So what is it about the English Week that attracts bookworms like me? Partly, it's the book sale with discounts. Partly, it's the character dress up day when students are encouraged to dress like their favorite book characters. I missed this activity for two years because I happened to be on call in my hospital.

At last, I got the chance to read stories to the children today. I didn't sleep much during my night call, and took half day off this afternoon. This is unusual; I don't usually take half day off after overnight call. Yes, I know - we all know - this is my queer habit. Still, I think it's okay to take a rest once in a while. So I schlepped my bag with two picture story books after lunch, and headed to my daughter's school.

I knew I made the right choice when my daughter rated my story telling as entertaining as the other two invited authors, Mathew Cooper and Blair Reeve.

Therapeutic

Decades of research, as well as a recent Time magazine article, has suggested that reading a great novel can be therapeutic.

Come to think of it, stories might give us better insight than a scientific paper, or create a stronger bonding between the reader and the family than any counsellor.

For daddies too busy with work to spend time with children - and I count myself in - the best prescription is Richard Paul Evans' The Christmas Box.

The young man in this fiction has been working hard to build up his career. There is not much time left for his daughter Jenna.

"He's gone a lot" is the way Jenna described her dad.

"Starting a new business takes a lot of work," Jenna's mum explained, "and a lot of time."

Jenna looked up sadly. "Is working better than here?"

"No. No place is better than home."

"Then why does Daddy want to be there instead of here?"

So simple, yet so profound.

Procrastinate

Think about a choice you made recently. Any choice. Which you're 110 percent certain that it's a good choice. That way most people are guaranteed to agree with your choice because the correct choice seems so obvious that we don't have to prove it.

Now, here's the bad news: Most of such choices turn out to be wrong. Although we're confident with our correct decisions, the growing evidence from studies have shown otherwise. That's an inspiring lesson I learn after reading The Small BIG.

Okay, let's think about the gift cards. Those cards for redeeming coffee at a high-quality shop, for example. There are two options with the same cash value: one is valid for three weeks, another is good for two months. What would you choose? The three-week or two-month version?

Hang on a second. What is the odds that you will redeem the card before its expiry day? Put more simply, is there a better feeling to get a gift card that lasts longer? Many would say so, and most of us would bet that we're more likely to redeem that one lasting for two months. That's exactly what the researchers tried to test. It turns out that - no surprise - close to 70 percent of those who evaluated the two-month gift card said that they would use it, compared to about 50 percent who evaluated the card that lasts for three weeks. And no wonder: more flexibility means better terms.

Except that it's wrong.

Five times as many given the good-for-three-weeks-only card visited the shop to claim their coffee than those given the long-expiration date card. When it comes to opportunity cost of longer expiration date, the downside is more excuse to procrastinate. In reality, a closer deadline encourages us to get the job done earlier, rather than later. And much less excuse to procrastinate. To this I keep the habit of borrowing books from library. It is the due day that gives me a better chance to finish the book. The closer the due day, the better. I borrowed two books from the university library last Sunday, The Christmas Box and The Social Animal. The first one is due for return in one week, and the second one isn't due until four months later. Which book do you think I have finished earlier?

Name

I gave a few talks on creating common grounds recently. This idea is not new, and certainly not mine. One of the lessons I learned from preparing the teaching material is what psychologists call the "name letter effect" or "shared-initials effect."

Let me give an example. With my name beginning with the letter K, I would be way more likely to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief appeal than people whose names didn't begin with the letter K. The same applied to those R-initial donors after the Hurricane Rita, according to the findings by psychology professor Jesse Chandler. All of which is to say that there is overrepresentation of same-initial hurricane relief donors relative to the baseline distribution of initials in the donor population. Other researchers replicated and extended such experimental finding by including a patient's first name in an SMS (short message service) text reminding patient to attend a health appointment. Ahem. Adding the first name, such as John, in the text reminders led to a whopping 57 percent reduction in no-shows compared to reminders without a patient's name.

To put it simply - perhaps too simply - we simply love our own names. The upshot of all this advice is that we should never forget the attention-grabbing power of people's names. I know I should not make too many requests by email or text messages using mobile device; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And then - this is the truth - I have to make online requests when time doesn't allow face-to-face request. One potential solution, I believe, is to write short request like "Please let me know, Gordon, if you'd come across cases for teaching (and perhaps even better without my name KM at the end of this message, unless my name begins with G)."

Break

Laissez-faire term break, too loose? Not always. Our preoccupation with homework has deprived out children of what should have been some of the most nurturing experiences of childhood.

It's my daughter's school term break this week. When I say break, I mean it. A break without homework. Now that autumn is here, we chose to go outdoors. It's not hard to understand why the natural world is a child's favorite classroom. Can you imagine what we did at the last stop of our hike today? My daughter spent nearly an hour watching leaves.

With countless butterflies around, the leaf-eating caterpillars must have left behind lots of "footprints" for us to explore. Finding holes in the foliage gives rise to all sorts of patterns as long as we add a bit of imagination, much in the way that we name the constellation by linking up stars. My daughter studied those leaves the way astronomers viewed the richness of the sky - you can imagine a dolphin leaping out at you if you gaze at them for long enough.

Homework

Over the years as my daughter has grown from an infant to toddler to grade-schooler, I've read quite a collection of books on parenting. These books have given me a thousand suggestions, many of them insightful, and others somewhat run-of-the-mill. Rarely is there a book delving into pages after pages of academic papers, citing meta-analysis with critique. And no wonder: parenting isn't rocket science, after all.

I remember reading somewhere that parenting and plumbing have much in common. It's like stopping a leak in the dark with a duff torch while wearing mittens. You feel around to understand what's happening, make decision, and then after the event spend forever justifying it on the idea of sweet reason trickled over with a spoonful of authority. For that matter, anyone who have been in the dark can justify their authority and make claims nobody can challenge. And whether their claims are real or only in their mind, nobody knows because everything is in the dark.

I was lucky enough to have read The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn. As we all know, homework assignment can create havoc in the relationship between a child and his parents. And even when the parents feel squeezed by the homework (yes, conflict is inevitable), they still ask for more homework, and not less. All of these have to do with the myth that homework is good for their kids. That certainly does not have to be the case. Kohn hasn't reported, and I haven't found, any evidence that homework gives an iota of academic benefits for young students. Strictly speaking, we don't even have a whiff of research evidence to support or refute whether the assignment of homework fosters good study habits.

The takeaway: There is such a thing as too much homework.

Need I say more?