I don’t remember my Dad ever coaching me in my studies. I only remember him reading stories to me when I was very young, and even that was a rare occassion. He’d sit me on his lap, and the story I remembered most vividly was that a big book on the story of Ulysses, complete with pictures of cyclops, sirens and the Trojan Horse. He is the type that allowed us to develop at our own pace.

He often finished his work in the office, marking exercise books, exam papers, preparing schedules and such. It was only laborious work like the annual plan and exam papers that he brought them home to complete.

When S asked me yesterday whether my father actually gave any tuition classes before, I told her no, definitely not after he married. The only time he ever did was when he was a temporary teacher in Bachok, Kelantan, fresh from teacher’s training college in Penang. Even then it was not a big tuition class, but a favour, and it was a short stint before he was transferred out.

The reason S asked me was she saw a Taiwanese TV program that interviewed teachers getting rich from operating tuition classes and tuition centres. But my Dad never bothered with it. He was never the type to enter into classes merely to go through the formalities just because pupils are attending tuition classes out of school. My father even rejected a headmaster’s request to give private individual tuition simply because “lessons should be learnt in a classroom school, not in a tuition class.”

One of the things we have in common between S and I is that our fathers were teachers, and both of them were not tuition teachers. It is something that S and I understood well the reasons and principles behind that decision our fathers made.

Both our family survived entirely on our fathers, and we weren’t rich, surviving entirely on the wages as government servants that still had the mark of British colonial rule. Despite the obvious economic benefits from providing tuition, our fathers never walked down that path.

To a certain degree, they were opposed to the idea of charging privately for lessons that should have been taught in school, even those from other schools. It will be like paying to get your car washed again after just returning from a car wash.

Although it is unfair to fault teachers or students relying so heavily on tuition for improving their odds on personal gain (money or educational success, it really doesn’t matter), I’m proud that my Dad taught all he could in school rather than waiting till after school to give tuition.

My only hope now is that J’s education, whether here in Shanghai, Malaysia or anywhere else in the world, will be blessed with dedicated teachers, knowing that apart from just a job, education is a privilege for both teacher and pupil – one’s to teach, one’s to learn.