Daniel Harris

Your child was fine for the first few minutes, answered the greeting, maybe waved at the screen. Then the tears started, and you were left holding a decision you had about four seconds to make: close the window, or let the lesson continue. In most cases with children aged four to seven, you do not […]

Keep the lessons, change one variable. That is the short version, and the variable you choose matters more than most parents expect. By the second week of Ramadan the household clock has moved. Suhoor pushes bedtime late, the afternoon between Asr and Maghrib is the flattest part of the day, and the evening after iftar

Not by as much as most families expect. If a neighbour keeps telling you that every month you wait is a month lost, the honest answer is that a child who begins at three and one who begins at six usually end up much closer together than the two dates imply. The early starter gets

Your nine year old spells “restaurant” without hesitating and scores well on the vocabulary section of every school test. Then a cousin visiting from London asks a simple question at the dinner table and the same child looks at you with a blank face. That contradiction is not a sign that the vocabulary was fake.

Most of what your child seems to have lost over the summer is still there. That is worth knowing before the new school year starts and you sit through a first lesson that feels like a step backwards. A child who paused in June and restarts in late August usually sounds slower, quieter and less

No, and the reason is not that mistakes do not matter. They do. The reason is that correction is not free. Every time you stop a five year old mid sentence to fix a missing plural, you spend something: her willingness to try the next sentence. Spend it on the wrong errors and you end

The report lands on your phone minutes after the lesson ends. A star rating, a percentage, a coloured bar, a word list, and a paragraph of teacher notes in English that moves faster than your reading speed. You see four stars out of five and close the app. After three months you have twelve reports

Six months into lessons, most parents cannot answer one simple question with any confidence: is my child actually speaking better than in February? The report says the level moved. The teacher says he is doing well. At the dinner table he sounds the same as before, so you end up deciding whether to continue on

For a child of about eight taking two live lessons a week, the move from A1 to A2 usually takes somewhere between nine and twenty months. That is the honest range, and the width of it is the point. Two children who start the same week with the same teacher and the same books can

Yes, you can keep the lessons running, and for a trip of two or three weeks it is usually worth the effort. What breaks a travel month is almost never the child. It is three practical things that nobody arranges in advance: the lesson slot lands at a useless hour in the new country, the