You'll Never Convince Them and You Can't Have a Rational Argument with Them; Because Everyone Does It; For a Better Future; No WeChat Moments; Two Realizations; My Father Had a Gardening Hobby

• I was angry all day after a morning argument I had with my wife during which she told me that I shouldn't listen to foreigners who had similar thoughts about how mad Chinese parents were about educating their children. That evening, in a Speaker's Corner, I told my students what happened even repeating the curse words I hurled at my wife, and the curse words that came to mind when I thought of the madness of Chinese parents. A colleague witnessed my rage and told me that I was basically pissing against the wind. Exasperated I asked why they did have to use such bullshit arguments to try and convince that there was reason to their madness.... Well, said my colleague, you can't have a rational argument with the Chinese.
• Because everyone does it is the first argument the students use to defend their behaviour. Exasperated by this argument and pointing out its silliness, I did get some students a the SPC to admit that there was too much homework, but they then said that there was nothing they could do to change it. (But there is, which is to no go along with it!) I thought later of the example of massive holiday traffic jams at Yellow Mountain and the stupidly enormous amount of holiday Chinese trudging the Great Wall. These are examples of how not doing what everyone else is doing would save one a lot of aggravation. Life, I should have told the students, was full of aggravation; and there was no need to add it.
• For a better future is another one the students parrot to me. Well. the future doesn't exist. And it isn't progress if what you are doing now is worse than what you did before. And I would like to see a present, not a future, where Chinese children don't have their childhood stolen from them by their parents, where they have free time on evenings and weekends to be kids and not be tormented by their parents with a quixotic desire for a better future.
• Three weeks in December and I have successfully withstood the urge to post on WeChat moments.
• Two realizations hit me unawares on the day of my near meltdown caused by arguing with my wife. One, is that there is a new Star Wars movie is in the cinema. I hadn't known it was coming. I have heard that it features a gay kiss in it, and I am thinking – call me prude, I don't give a fuck – to not bother taking Tony to it. (Which is too bad because taking Tony out of school on the 25^th and watching the Star Wars movie would have made Christmas 2019 tolerable) Two, we are at the end of a decade. I knew 2020 was on the way but I never thought to think of it as the arrival of a new decade till I heard someone mention it in a podcast 
• According to the Chinese parents way of thinking, my father was a bad parent because he spent a lot of his free time gardening, and thus not helping his three children to do homework nor giving us extra homework; my father was a bad parent because he took us on Sunday drives instead of making us do weekend classes; and my mother who had housework to do and three children to look after was a bad parent because she didn't tutor her children every night.