Yusof Family’s Official Blog

Learning should be enjoyable.

Many people have asked us how it’s possible to get children to achieve so early. There’s been a lot of guessing and very few facts, simply because in the past I never liked to talk publicly about the way I brought up my children. I’ve always preferred doing practical things instead of talking, but in any case, I think it’s better if people know the facts, so from time to time I’ll write about various aspects of my teaching philosophy on this blog.

Since there is so much to write about, it would be impossible for me to cover everything here, but I hope and believe that people — especially fellow parents and teachers — will find this information useful. I’ll be writing and talking about my teaching style in more detail elsewhere; this first post just covers one small (albeit very important) aspect of my general approach to teaching.

Let’s now go back to what I said in the opening paragraph: learning should be enjoyable. I started teaching my children from birth, and if you spend time with babies it’s easy to see that they are incredibly curious and receptive to new information. In other words, they want to learn!

If you are able to spend some time with a baby (preferably one who likes you!), here’s something simple you can do to see this for yourself. Hold up a toy in front of him — almost any simple and colourful toy will do — at a distance of about 20cm from his face.

Pay close attention to the way he reacts: depending on his age, he will do anything from focusing on the toy and tracking it with his eyes and head to reaching out and grabbing it.

In fact, if he’s able to, he almost certainly will try to take the toy from you, after which he might manipulate it and study it from all angles, or shake it, or put the toy in his mouth, or drop it, and so on.

What’s the baby trying to do? He’s trying to learn about the toy, of course! He wants to know what it looks like, how it feels, how it tastes, and what happens when he shakes or drops it. The baby is also learning about himself; among other things, he’s figuring out how to coordinate his movements and he’s also developing his motor skills.

Clearly, then, babies are very curious about the world around them. This innate love of learning makes them easy to teach, not to mention extremely rapid learners! Because of this, I consider the first five years of a child’s life to be the most important as far as their education is concerned.

Aside from developing fundamental skills such as speaking, reading, and writing, the first five years are a great time for a child to acquire good learning habits such as a high attention span, a strong bond with their parents/teachers, and a simple enjoyment of learning (whether it be from books, things he’s playing with, conversations with other people, TV, the garden, or anywhere else).

This blog isn’t the right place to go into all these areas in detail (unless anyone wants to read 20,000-word posts!), but I do hope to at least be able to give people some of the general ideas.

Making learning fun for babies and toddlers

“Making” learning enjoyable for a child is easiest if you simply get him to maintain his natural love of learning from his earliest days as a baby. All you have to do is spot the times when he wants to learn (e.g. when he’s showing interest in a toy or person) and then come up with some fun learning activities for him.

Don’t forget that you’re trying to get him to retain his existing enjoyment of learning, so it’s important that he associates learning with positive experiences. Have a sense of fun/humour, and don’t worry about setting goals or targets for your baby; just enjoy the time you spend with your child and seeing him learn for what it is.

Try to keep your learning activities exciting or at least interesting; to do this, you might have to be a little creative in the way you introduce new things to your baby. For instance, simply speaking to him in a sing-song voice will help keep him amused and interested.

Patience is essential. Only teach your baby as long as he is interested in the learning activity, and if he seems to have completely lost interest (e.g. he is looking somewhere else) or is no longer alert, just stop! There’s always another day.

Let’s now talk about what not to do: it’s crucial that you don’t make learning dull, tedious, or overly repetitive for your child, as this will cause him to start associating learning with negative experiences from an early age. These negative associations tend to stick with children for a long time.

Essentially, all you have to do here is not suck all the fun out of learning. One simple thing you can do is to make sure that the learning activity is interesting and pleasant for you, as your child will very often feel the same way. In fact, you’ll often find that you naturally communicate your interest and excitement in the activity to your child.

Making learning fun for older children

Let’s now talk about the case of older children; in particular, children who, for one reason or another, seem to dislike their studies or learning in general. The trick here is to get to know your child well and figure out what will make learning fun for your child.

So what does make learning enjoyable for a child? It depends on the child’s personality, of course, but here are some of the more common possibilities:

1. The child likes the challenge and resulting sense of accomplishment that comes from learning new things
2. He enjoys spending time with and/or receiving attention from his parent/teacher/carer
3. He enjoys learning informally through hands-on activities (e.g. cake baking or upgrading a computer) and/or educational-but-informal discussions (e.g. “why do some people have curly or straight hair?” or “where does the picture on the TV come from?”)
4. Positive peer pressure: he likes to compete with other children and tries to outperform his peers
5. His studies are integrated with something he already enjoys (e.g. he can write essays about computer games or see how maths is used in football)
6. A parent/teacher/carer has made learning fun for him at an early age, and hence he’s come to associate learning with good feelings
7. He likes to show off!

Which of the above applies to your child? If you’re not sure, it’s a good idea to find out! Here are two examples to illustrate how you might use this knowledge to make learning enjoyable for your child.

Example: Focusing

Suppose your child has difficulty focusing on his schoolwork for very long, but is happy to play computer games for many hours every day. What you have to do here is figure out why he is willing to focus on computer games but not his studies.

If you’ve realised that the challenge-and-frequent-reward system in games keeps him interested for a long time, you could divide his work up into a series of small challenges and give him a reward after he overcomes each challenge. You could give him a sweet for each question he answers, or if he doesn’t even want to get started, reward or congratulate him for just writing his name down!

Alternately — or at the same time — you could offer to let him play games for as long as he likes provided that he finishes his work for the day. This will have the side benefit of helping him understand that doing his work now leads to rewards in the long term.

Depending on the kind of work he is doing, you could try to integrate his gaming hobby into his work. If he needs to write an essay, for instance, you can ask him to write about what he likes about his favourite games or to describe his favourite gaming characters.

If he doesn’t know why maths or physics are useful, you can help him find out how computer games are made so that he can see how these subjects are used by people who program games. Or he might just prefer to use computers in general, in which case you should let him do as much work as he can on his computer.

Example: Reading

If your child doesn’t like to read, there are many things you can do to encourage him. As always, your task is to use your understanding of your child to figure out what it is that might get him to like reading.

The easiest thing to do is to simply let him read about things that interest him. Since there is written material covering virtually every subject known to mankind, this should not be difficult!

Get him used to the idea of reading to find out more about the things he likes or is interested in. If he likes fast cars, ask him if he can find (via books or the Internet) the top speeds of the fastest cars, how cars are built for speed, and so on. You should also try to integrate reading into his daily life — if he’s going to the dentist for the first time, borrow a book on the subject so that he can find out what will happen during his visit!

Some children dislike reading because they can’t see how the text might be interesting or entertaining, especially if they’re reading a book that isn’t illustrated. If this is the case for your child, liven up his reading by acting out the book’s content with him. Be imaginative and read the book with a great deal of expressiveness; if he’s reading a story, make it seem like the story is actually happening in front of him. Over time, he’ll gradually start associating books with the excitement he gets from reading with you.

You might notice that your child likes to do the same things as his peers or the people around him in order to fit in. In this case, you could take him regularly to the children’s section of your local library — initially, he might not read anything, but if he sees that everyone around him is happily reading, he’ll be much more inclined to pick up a book for himself. Encourage him by showing him how to navigate the library to find books about things that interest him; at this stage, it doesn’t really matter what he reads, as long as he makes a start.

Bear in mind the fact that I haven’t covered everything in this example! There are lots of other possible reasons why a child might not like to read, such as being restless or having a low attention span; I’ve only discussed a few of the problems here. Likewise, there are many other potential remedies for reading problems that I haven’t been able to cover in this post.

We now have a Malay version of this blog, where I’ve translated all the existing posts into Malay. Hope I didn’t make too many mistakes! We’ll also try to update the site a bit more frequently in the future.

Kami kini ada blog versi Bahasa Malaysia, dimana saya cuba menterjemahkan semua kandungan matlumat keBahasa Malaysia. Saya harap tidak membuat banyak kesalahan kesalahan. Kami juga akan berupaya selalu menambahkan kandungan blog tersebut dimasa hadapan.

Some people have commented that the Corrections of Misconceptions post is a little hard to read. They’re quite right, so here’s a short FAQ that hopefully will be easier to understand. It’s still worth reading the other post, though, because it goes into more detail in some areas.

We’d also like to thank everyone who has shown their support and understanding thus far. Keluarga kami ingin mengucapkan ribuan terima kasih kepada semua masyarakat Malaysia diatas sokongan, fahaman dan segala nasihat yang bermanfaat.

As we’ve said a few times now, most of the news in the mainstream press regarding the Yusof family and Sufiah’s childhood is inaccurate, because the editors tend to filter everything we say even when we do agree to do interviews.

If you’d like to know what’s really happening, though, this site is the place to go; we’ll try to update it as often as possible so that everyone stays informed. We’d also like to ask that you spread the word about hyusof.com whenever Sufiah or the family are under discussion online or elsewhere, because it’s good if people know the real facts!

The easiest way to stay up to date with all the latest news is through our free newsletter. It’ll include all the news updates posted here, and occasionally Halimahton will write a little about her easy-to-use teaching methods. Sign up here.

The site was looking a little bland, so we added a gallery to liven things up a little. At the moment they’re just random family pictures, but they do give some idea as to how things were when the Yusof children were young.

Much has been written in the press about Sufiah’s current occupation, but to be perfectly frank, the vast majority of news articles out there are completely misleading on a number of crucial points regarding the family history. Sadly, it seems that most journalists would rather entertain their readers than focus on writing factually accurate articles; it’s not entirely their fault, though, as Farooq often talked nonsense to journalists and sometimes seemed to be actively trying to cultivate the appearance of eccentricity. Most of the family were embarrassed whenever he gave an interview to the press. In any case, let’s clear up some of those inaccuracies right now.

Misconception 1: All the Yusof children were taught via Farooq’s “accelerated learning methods” — a tortuous regime involving studying in the freezing cold, punishments for answering questions incorrectly, and “stretching and breathing exercises”.

Actually, Farooq wasn’t even responsible for the majority of the teaching! For most of the Yusof children’s early life, Halimahton was practically a single parent as Farooq was in prison (having been convicted of mortgage fraud) or on the run for six years — he only returned to the household when Iskander, the youngest at the time, was seven years old. By this stage, the Yusof children were already prodigies and were also anything from three to seven years ahead in most academic subjects, in spite of the fact that they spent most of their time engaged in less bookish activities (such as tennis or playing with other children).

So who really taught the Yusof children? Why, Halimahton of course! That said, she never intended to “create prodigies”, hothouse/homeschool her children, or in fact do anything other than bring up her children as well as she could under difficult circumstances. But even though she was on her own, Halimahton had a unique skillset that made her ideally suited to the role of caregiver, teacher, and provider for four young children. She quickly recognised that all babies are naturally curious and enthusiastic about learning, so it made perfect sense to not waste the early years of a child’s life by failing to give them any mental stimulation. And in a nutshell, this is why all the Yusof children became prodigies — Halimahton was able to develop a special bond with each of her children that made it very easy for them to learn from her.

Eventually, when Zuleikha was born, Halimahton realised that she had developed something resembling a “method” without really meaning to, but rather than being comprised of a strict set of rules, her techniques were flexible and varied depending on the personality, interests, and mood of the child. She didn’t call it an “accelerated learning method” because she believed it was foolhardy to try to teach a child faster than they were already willing to learn, and there is considerable evidence to suggest that in the long run this only hinders a person’s memory and understanding. In fact, Halimahton wouldn’t even try to teach any of her children unless they were in a good mood and interested in what she had to say, because she felt it was important that her children associate the act of learning with pleasant emotions.

The end result was that by the time the Yusof children were old enough for school, they were already many years ahead of their peers, but like most parents Halimahton decided to enroll them at the local Northampton school anyway — she had no intention of trying to homeschool her kids. Unfortunately, at that point in time (around 1989) most UK schools made absolutely no serious provision for highly able students who were so far ahead. While the school did make an effort to provide resources so that the Yusof children could keep themselves occupied, all that happened in practice was that they were left to study on their own and Halimahton invariably needed to supplement their schoolwork at home. In the end, Sufiah said that she no longer wanted to go to school and wanted her mother to teach her at home; Halimahton was dubious, as she was a single parent with limited finances and she knew that homeschooling would require a substantial commitment of time and effort. But after a long discussion with all her children, it became clear that they were all adamant about the fact that they would rather learn at home, and Halimahton enjoyed teaching (and learning with!) her kids so much that she eventually agreed.

After this decision was made, Halimahton resumed teaching her children; essentially, she just taught them according to her own comprehensive curriculum at whatever rate at which the children wanted to learn. There was never any need to try to get them to learn particularly quickly, as they were already many years ahead. All the “prodigy stuff” had been done in the first five years — the kids just worked for one or two hours per day, and that was it as far as formal schoolwork was concerned.

Unfortunately, everything changed when Farooq returned home in 1993. The children were initially very enthusiastic about his returning home — aside from just being happy to see him, they all wanted to show him what they were capable of. Halimahton had considered divorcing him, but her children’s excitement about their dad being back home made her feel that it was not worth proceeding with a messy divorce, as long as he learnt from his mistakes and avoided any criminal activities in the future. But things quickly took a turn for the worse. Farooq’s conviction made it difficult for him to find a job, so he decided to stay at home to “help” Halimahton raise the kids, and this was the beginning of all the problems.

Farooq’s ego proved to be the biggest problem — he believed himself to be more intelligent and knowledgeable than his wife, so he took over the children’s tennis coaching from her (but their academic work continued as normal). Unlike Halimahton, Farooq knew nothing about how to relate to children and he frequently grew impatient because he could not get them to do what he wanted them to do; the public nature of tennis would also often hurt his pride, as he would feel personally embarrassed whenever they didn’t perform. This would lead to outbursts on the tennis court where he would shout at the children and occasionally smack them. Again, Halimahton considered divorce but because of her precarious financial situation and the fact that she was pregnant with Zuleikha, she decided to try reasoning with him instead to persuade him that his behaviour was wrong. In retrospect, this was clearly a bad decision but at the time it seemed like divorce would only have lead to extreme hardship and an uncertain future.

While Farooq was coaching the children in tennis, their academic work was still progressing (independently and with Halimahton) and eventually they were ready to start working on their A-levels (apart from Iskander, who was much younger than the others and preferred to study for his GCSEs with his mother). Most of the childrens’ A-level work was undertaken independently; Farooq did not spend much time teaching them except when their exams were near. He was just as bad at teaching maths as he was at tennis coaching, and his inability to relate the material to his children caused the same kinds of outbursts as on the tennis court. Fortunately, the work Halimahton had done with the children previously had given them the ability to work very effectively on their own, so in spite of Farooq’s poor behaviour they still performed very well in their A-levels.

In summary, Farooq contributed very little to the children’s education and academic achievements before university — probably about 75% of their education was with Halimahton when they were still young, and the rest was due to their own independent work. Without him, the Yusof children would have done things just as early but without any of the scandals that he so often created for himself.

Misconception 2: The Yusof children only became prodigies because they were forced to work unreasonably hard and/or were homeschooled.

False. Halimahton never worked with them for two hours per day, and during their A-levels the kids studied as much or as little as they wanted to.

As explained above, the children were only homeschooled because they were already prodigies by the time they enrolled at their local school and it was unable to provide for them. Today, though it depends to a certain extent on the area, many good schools are better-equipped to handle such highly able children.

The children were not born prodigies, but Halimahton’s ability to figure out lots of ways to stimulate and encourage their natural love of learning helped them achieve the potential that she believes is innate in every child.

Misconception 3: TV and pop music were banned in the household.

This isn’t even remotely true. All the children regularly watched many TV series like Fawlty Towers, the X-Files, and Star Trek, in addition to the usual movies, sports, and so on. Their tastes have changed a lot since then, though!

Pop music certainly wasn’t banned either — everyone in the family likes music and it was common to hear anything from rap to classical all over the household. Halimahton actually considers music, singing and dancing (not to mention acting) to be an excellent way to relate things to young children.

Misconception 4: The Yusof parents put tremendous pressure on their kids to succeed.

Untrue, because they didn’t need to — high achievers naturally tend to have correspondingly high expectations and thus they put a lot of pressure on themselves to do well. Most of the truly ridiculous expectations were held by people outside the family, who often seemed to believe that a prodigy should be perfect at absolutely everything; in reality, prodigies fail just as often as anyone else, which isn’t actually a bad thing as eventually everyone needs to learn to cope with failure in a sensible manner.

Misconception 5: Sufiah’s abilities were unique, even within the family.

Not really — while she was very good, she’s just been in the media spotlight much more than the others because of what happened after she went to Oxford. Iskander was a year younger when he went to university and Zuleikha was considerably younger than either when she completed her A-levels (although she already has the qualifications, Zuleikha has not yet applied to university as she wants to explore many of her interests and further develop as an individual before entering uni). Of course, the media like to portray Sufiah as a unique case because it makes for a better story.

Hi! This is the Yusof family’s official blog. We’ll be adding content here over time from Halimahton, Iskander, Zuleikha, Abraham, and Aisha; see the About page for our respective profiles.