The life of a private tutor (2020)
economist.com
economist.com
The implication left for a reader of the original article is that tutoring is mostly about exam-prep or that it is under-regulated, ineffectual, and a folly of the rich. But the truth is that the over-regulation of conventional time-based classroom learning is deeply flawed based on our understanding of how people learn. Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success, nor is moving everyone along at the same pace and calling the material complete after a semester of education regardless of the depth of understanding conveyed. We need intensive and personalized schooling with mastery based learning - and to answer the question of "where are we going to get that many teachers?" we need people to teach as part of how they learn. For some odd reason society only starts to embrace this in graduate school.
I've got a principle I came up with called LTD: Learn, Teach, Do.
The idea is to prioritize activities where I can be doing all three at the same time. An example would be pair programming with a junior on a new problem where I don't know how to solve every part of the problem. "Learn on the job together with a team, and share learnings as you go" is basically the kind of work that I mean. I've found LTD activities are awesome in so many ways. You build up the team around you, grow as an individual, and get shit done all at the same time.
I'm increasingly against activities which focus strongly on only one of these(school being the main example).
as for a school model, montessori groups children in age-groups spanning 3 years, and older children there routinely teach the younger ones.
In our area they seem to be for over-achievers. Want your 4 year old to learn to read, write, and do math? Send them to a Montessori. At least, that's the reason all the parents I know send them there.
so you have to look closely if the teachers are actually trained and certified by one of the training schools that actually provide proper montessori training, and whether the classrooms have the proper environment.
The problem here is that getting enough money to hire more teachers per student is like pulling teeth. The problem that we as a society are solving isn't "how can we achieve the best overall educational outcome?" It's "how can we avoid a disastrously uneducated population with a budget of $X?" I'm not entirely sure we're doing a good job on that one either, though.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/27/us/12-year-old-graduating-hig...
Sure it would be great to get rid of bullying, but I wonder if it's inherent in humans.
I'd focus on things we can control like that minimum competence problem you described.
On the other hand, I have had peers who rely on private tutoring almost entirely and almost neglect what is being taught in schools. And I have known parents who see schools as a necessary evil.
There is also, the world of preparing for 'entrance exams' (including IIT-JEE) which is where I have seen tutoring to the extreme. Students who 'drop-out' (still enrolled on paper but not attending in-person) of regular school starting as early as 8th standard (grade) and move to cities where there are mini-economies based on such preparatory institutes. They only go back to their home-towns to write the final exams which is usually subset of what they would learn at the institutes anyway. But the sacrifice they make to be away from family for most parts of the year and the hours they spend staring at a book is admirable.
Note: Please don't take this as a generalization of what happens in India- just what I saw growing up in New Delhi.
I want to teach my students how to follow their passions, how to strive for the life they want, rather than for hollow symbols of success.
It seems like hollow symbols of success are what the parents and institutions have agreed to create though. The number of schools and slots for students has apparently not changed much but the number of students across the globe who are competing for slots in a few, elite western schools has gone up enormously. That drives the value of the degree up through scarcity which seems to be what people want for their children, is ways to be more elite than their peers.
It's probably not surprising then that bribery happens. The schools aren't really selling an education anymore and the parents aren't really looking for one either.
My old school is now no longer the top in the country, slipping to 4th last time I looked. The student body is smart, but simply doesn't try as hard at anything anymore. I don't blame them.
Additionally, despite often being mentioned in the same breath/status, doctors and lawyers follow very different distributions of compensation. Attorney pay is shockingly bimodal: the ambulance chaser firm advertising on the back of the city bus is paying first-year associates <60k, if that, then there’s a huge gap, and then more prestigious law firms can offer 200k+, even in cities like Nashville, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, etc.
Modern life has the number of human signals daily, increased to stratospheric levels.. this is new, very new. It is not clear how intelligent, social people are changing under this communications environment.
other points omitted for the sake of brevity, but not the whole story here..
Students today do not have it easier. They are working less hard at school because they need to work harder in other areas. Grades don't matter. Everyone gets strait-As so as long as you meat that standard there is little point in trying harder. Even Going to a good school matters less and less. The things kids have to do today are very different than I faced. For me, grades were enough. For today's kids grades are only the starting point. For instance, social media presence is now very important. I never had to deal with that when I was applying to universities.
Care to elaborate on this?
https://ischoolconnect.com/blog/effect-of-social-media-on-co...
"According to a 2017 survey administered by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, 11% of respondents said they "denied admission based on social media content" and another 7% rescinded offers for the same reason."
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019...
"According to the 364 colleges across the United States we recently spoke with, 25 percent tell us that they have visited an applicant’s social media page, such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to learn more about them*."
https://www.kaptest.com/study/pre-college/college-admission-...
That way we, we do not have to play these signaling games and can focus resources elsewhere.
As these shows always showed the aristocracy, the aspiring hero/heroin had their private teachers "guiding them to greatness".
I also found it cynical that instead of aspiring to get a PhD to earn a mediocre salary(in comparison) at FANNG, one could navigate the field of being the private tutor to the already-rich and probably earn more.
Random person: "What do you do for a living that has made you so wealthy?"
Elite Hong Kong tutor: "I tutor 12 year olds privately on mathematics."
As a PhD at FAANG[1], I mourn that the default aspiration for getting a PhD isn't staying in academia and advancing science.
And if you call FAANG salaries mediocre, I don't even know what you'd call academia salaries :(
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[1] Formerly. Left for greener and less soul-draining pastures.
The wording of the sentence wasn't ideal, but GP was implying you could potentially make a lot more as a private tutor than you would at a FAANG. I'd argue that is a bit of rose colored glasses as there are far more making 200k a year at a FAANG than there are million dollar a year making private tutors.
It almost certainly is for the vast majority of grad students. There are just way more newly-minted PhDs than tenure-track jobs, especially if you add some (reasonable) constraints like location, R1 university etc.
I personally know several aeronautical engineers (with doctorates) struggling to find work in their industry.
I know two folks with BAs in Environmental Science working as Product Managers (unrelated to environment sustainability).
Having goals we have yet to achieve doesn’t show a lack of specialists.
If anything the gap is in lower-level education.
Are our high schools emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis? Are they emphasizing the need to live sustainably? Are they encouraging space exploration?
And even if they did, the mars is not currently goal of those who provide funding. Nor should it be, honestly.
In a world where the upper middle and upper class has grown to all time high numbers, there is ever more adepts for prestigious titles and prestigious jobs.
But the Oxfords and Harvards of the world do not multiply themselves, and they have no incentive to. If the product that they sell grows in value and price, why should they do anything to reduce that value again?
We often criticize greed of capitalists, but top class universities seem to be engaged in something very similar, while mostly escaping the negative attention.
I think (hope) we're also starting to see a reaction to this. For example google is offering free education and at least claiming to consider their graduates as equal to university graduates.
You dont need Harward/Yale to tripple class, you need to stop looking at Harward/Yale exclusively when picking those career boosting clerkships.
Hopefully the continent will follow.
I believe students have said okay to remote one to many educators, with things like online university. But especially in math and chemistry and physics, people want in person tutoring.
Apprently not.
When it comes to standardized tests/certain career expectations you are expected to have a broad understanding of the orthodox views on the evaluated topics.
This is pretty much exactly what I experienced. I was a member of an online marketplace, so I wasn't necessarily an "elite" tutor by any means, but I found that most of my students just needed instruction that was more tailored to them. A lot of them were working towards AP exams (computer science), so working with someone who had taken that exam, knew what was on it, and intimately understood how it was graded proved rather valuable, at least from what the parents reported back to me.
That's like expecting coffee vending machines to have made baristas obsolete.
As an adult I can do self study just fine and since I work in tech that's expected of me, but as a kid I was way too thick to learn the school curriculum on my own.
It's why the rich don't manage their own money, make their own food, clean their own house, or care for/teach their own children. Instead they pay other people to do it for them.
.. but if you don't have that?
Besides, tutoring can be a bootstrap to that, especially in young people. I've found myself that exercise is so much more likely to happen if it's not on my own, such as a regular personal trainer appointment. The more it becomes a habit, the more I feel like doing some more on my own as well.
What is being purchased is the right to feel that they worked hard enough to deserve what they are certain to get anyway.
Unless they are uber-wealthy, then they'll just say "Johnny is sailing our yacht around the Mediterranean (and when we say "sailing", we mean there's an 8 person crew running the boat)"
The problem with most kids and adults I know is they either lack a depth of reasoning for why they ought to be doing something better, or lack the confidence that they'd be able to accomplish it if they put their mind to it.
If you can't come up with a convincing "why" for them, then you should reflect on how sustainable forcing them to do that thing will be once they have independence.
There were a lot of things my mom expected of me (similar to these kids with tutors). Some of them I agreed with, some of them I didn't.
When I finally got my independence at 18, guess which ones stuck, and which ones (where a lot of time and effort was put into cultivating them) evaporated?
Talk to your children deeply about the why, and, as the saying goes, they'll suffer almost any how.
In any case, to my actual point -- discovering those motivations is one of the things for which I was paid. Often, children do not understand education. It has been a flat "do this" chore for them with some nebulous payout that will supposedly happen twice their lifespan away, when all around them they see images of people who did not go the conventional route to success.
What you want is someone who works for the child, not the parent. They should have a rounded education but also be willing to admit that they do not know something and must research. They should understand a decent amount of child psychology and how people process/retain information.
Finding folks like that, I dunno!
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/exclusive-china-unveil-t...
Also, a lot of these kids are smart and hardworking and motivated. The money are an additional advantage and parents having resources to ensure they stay motivated and active is advantage too.
But, the assumption that they are all dumb or lazy is wrong.
I don’t think the article is fundamentally fictional, though clearly some of the retelling has been dressed up a bit.