Little Neuro Tree and the law of diminishing marginal returns

Last Thursday was supposed to be M’s last class at Little Neuro Tree. We had to miss it because of a less-than-cooperative M and the lack of taxis in rainy weather. M kept refusing to get changed and when she finally did, I failed to get a taxi. It was difficult getting through phone lines and assignment of taxi took forever. After trying 2 taxi companies, I gave up to save us a wasted trip.

Thinking back just nine months ago when we first signed up for the course, she was always so excited to go for class. These days, I usually have to coerce her to get ready for the class. During class, she is fidgety during the flash card and counting sessions and tend to want to spend longer time in specific activities like pretend play. As a matter of fact, a few other kids who started around the same time as us also seemed to have been losing interest in class.

Hence, we decided we’ve discontinue classes after December because I think we’ve gotten enough out of the programme and probably reached “a point beyond which each additional unit of the variable input yields smaller and smaller increases in outputs”, to quote Wikipedia on the definition of the economics law of diminishing marginal returns.

Nonetheless, I think we’ve benefitted and enjoyed the nine months we’ve been there. I see how M can now concentrate during the memory games and get them more and more often. The activities in class also provided me ideas of what we can do together at home. As usual, it provided us a chance to learn together, like the Japanese songs.

Overall, I would say the programme has a bit of everything for everyone, from brain stimulation to phonics to math to music and movement etc. But because of this, the amount of time they can spend on each segment can be very short. Given that M now spends half-a-day five days a week in a pre-nursery programme, I feel there will be a fair amount of overlap in activities.

At the same time, M is approaching her 3rd birthday very soon and that is when the human brain starts shifting from being right-brain dominant to left-brain dominant, more details in my earlierpost. I suspect the methods of learning will also need to be more hands on, more exploration in nature. Getting them to sit behind a desk for an hour will likely get increasing challenging.

Well, in truth, there’re so many other interesting courses out there that I’ll like M to try out so it’s time to move on!