S02E03 - The after-school school
Transcript
David Tran
I was sent to an Asian dude in a very dodgy upstairs from a very dodgy Vietnamese restaurant for physics and chemistry… He'd quiz you in front of the whole class, like he would ask different students different questions, and I would be the one student every single week who'd sit there and stare blankly at him and shake my head, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." Then, he'd try and pry an answer out of me and I still wouldn't know. I refused. I just couldn't learn that way.
Jay Ooi
Tutoring. A lot of us have been there, after school at a desk, doing more work so we can get better grades. But what sort of tutoring should we be getting, and when is too early to start?
Hello and welcome to Shoes Off, stories about Asian Australian culture. I’m Jay Ooi.
Like many of you, I spent much of my after school hours at some form of tutoring centre, be they group classes or private lessons, and whilst some white kids do go to tutoring, I definitely noticed most of my peers were Asian. Why is it that? And what place should tutoring have in our lives? On today’s episode I’m going to talk to someone who went through a lot of tutoring, as well as someone working as a tutor, but first up, a mum who sent their kids to tutoring.
Jay Ooi
Did you go to tutoring growing up?
Wan
I did. In Malaysia, it is a done thing. Everybody does it really. Literally everybody. You would have tuition for your languages. And then you have tuition for maths. And people who did science had tuition for physics and chemistry as well. But we weren't that well off. So we literally just had tuition for maths and that's it. It's so common.
My name is Wan and I was born in Malaysia and didn't come to Australia until 1977, when I was, oh, gosh, how old was I? I think I was 19. Yes, I was 19 years old and that was the first time I went on a plane, to come over here to Australia.
I was actually a pretty good student. I was a studious student actually, in Malaysia. But I wasn't really that smart. I wasn't smart, top, whatever percent. I had a feeling I could not get into the big university in Malaysia. And in those days, there's probably only two. And there's no way I would be able to get in. No way.
Jay Ooi
Wan grew up as one of 9 kids in Malaysia, but when she knew she wouldn’t be able to get into a good university there, she applied to come to Australia to study, and luckily she got accepted. Despite her family being quite poor growing up, they still knew that tutoring was important and prioritised their spending on that. In East Asia, tutoring is so ubiquitous that more than 70% of secondary school-aged kids in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea use private tutors, and in the US, Asians overall spend more of their income on extra education than housing and transportation, especially compared to the general population.
Jay Ooi
Isn't it interesting that even though you guys weren't that well off that it was still, I guess, a big priority for your parents?
Wan
Very much so. Because Chinese got a saying, if you don't study, you are a blind cow. So that means blind cow, what are you going to do? If you can't mow the land, you can't plow the land. You can't do anything. Literally. So you better not be a blind cow. Or you ended up sweeping the street, a street sweeper. So these are the things that you get told when you were small. So study hard.
Jay Ooi
So yes, it’s very Asian to get tutoring.
Are most, if not all, of your kids Asian?
David Tran
Correct. I've got one or two students who are of Caucasian background and everyone else is pretty much Asian. Yeah.
Jay Ooi
That’s Vietnamese Australian David Tran, once a student of tutoring, now he’s a tutor himself and also high school teacher.
Why do you think Asians tend to send their kids to tutoring? Why is it an Asian thing?
David Tran
I've always questioned this as well. When I visit Vietnam, for example, their education system, it's almost, it's a disadvantage if you don't go to tutoring. A lot of the time their school teachers will advocate for them to go to tutoring. The tutoring environment in Vietnam is almost a must. I think a lot of the parents, for example, have brought that mentality here and it's like if you go tutoring it can only add to your education, it can't detract from it in any way.
Jay Ooi
This obsession with studying has deep roots, with China having standardised testing continuously since the year 206 BC. And for a lot of Asians, studying hard and getting good grades means you’re more likely to get a good job. And especially when you’re from countries with very high populations and limited resources, Professor Ying Jie Guo from the University of Sydney says it’s hard to stand out.
Ying Jie Guo
Because there's a large population, resources are always scarce, including social and symbolic resources. Social respect, for example, social distinction. These are very precious and scarce resources. And they can't be distributed freely or evenly. There is a way of differentiating the amount of social capital, social prestige one person gets.
Jay Ooi
Okay, so you have migrants coming from countries where populations are high and tutoring is very very common, coming to a country where they’re looking to provide the best opportunities for their kids to excel in school, and so naturally you get situations like this.
Jay Ooi
what age did you start tutoring?
Ben
Don't know exactly, definitely when I was quite young probably like year four something.
Jay Ooi
That’s Ben, a child of Hong Kong parents, he grew up in Sydney and definitely had his fair share of tutoring.
Ben
Well, it definitely wasn't just one class. Like there were multiple classes for like different things.
Jay Ooi
How did you view tutoring at the time when you were doing it?
Ben
I hated it.
Jay Ooi
Why did you hate it?
Ben
Basically, you're just doing more school or doing more homework.
Jay Ooi
This is pretty common - a lot of tutoring places just give you more work on stuff you’re already doing at school, or they teach you what you’re about to learn in school, so how effective is it? Well, it does work. I asked Ben and David if it would have helped him get into these streamed classes and schools in Sydney.
Ben
Yeah, I think so. Like it is. Yeah, I reckon definitely like having the exposure, knowing what types of questions to expect and getting your mind to like start thinking about those things in that way definitely would have helped.
David Tran
The education that I got in primary school was not well differentiated, so it didn't cater to the fact that I obtained the knowledge quite quickly, and so my teachers definitely didn't push me hard enough. When I went into tutoring, I obtained a lot more knowledge in a very short amount of time. It definitely prepared me very well.
Jay Ooi
And even Wan knew it would help for one of her kids.
Wan
But on the other hand, if the child needs help, which one of our child did. So we actually got her into tutoring a little bit earlier. She had problems with her maths. She was doing all right until year seven, year eight and then you can see the literal plunging from the 90s, 80s, 70s, to 60s. And she was nearly failing.
Something was very wrong. And we know that this child is capable. So I thought we needed some help and we found her help… And she just picked up. With the next test she was up.
Jay Ooi
Yeah. Right.
Wan
It's amazing. I'm not saying a school system is not working right. But sometimes if you come across some teachers they're just not suitable for your child, maybe. So they become disinterested, then you need to do something about it. You really do need to. And we were just desperate with her.
Jay Ooi
Yepp, all three agree that tutoring definitely helped them or their kids do better in exams. I grew up being sent to tutoring with Wan and her kids, or as I call her, Aunty Wan, so I had this impression that her kids went to a lot of tutoring as well. Turns out I wasn’t quite right.
Wan
But I do not want to go to just any tutoring school indiscriminately. Because what I heard from a lot of people, they tend to just do academic stuff. So year seven they'll give you year eight stuff. You learn all this stuff.
You learn all this anyway. You're going to do it in the class. Of course you're going to get bored stiff. And then what you're going to do? It doesn't work that way.
Jay Ooi
So it's interesting because you came from your childhood where everyone did tutoring and they did lots of tutoring. What made you decide to do things differently for your kids?
Wan
To me you're shoving your kids over to somebody to babysit them and holding their hands to do their homework all the time, and it's not right. And it comes back to the fact that you're not teaching them to be self-reliant. And I'm really definitely against that.
How long can you keep holding the hands for? You got to grow up some time. They have to. And it has to come from them.
Jay Ooi
This hand holding and spoon feeding - it’s so common for a lot of us Asians. We feel more comfortable studying things that are right and wrong, things we can essentially memorise and don’t have to have an opinion on. So what’s a different approach to tutoring? I asked David, who started up his own tutoring centre because he experienced some particularly bad tutoring.
David Tran
Part of growing up in an Asian household means, that your parents want to send you to a reputable Asian tutor, one that their friends have sent their kids to. And so, I was sent to an Asian dude in a very dodgy upstairs from a very dodgy Vietnamese restaurant for physics and chemistry, and you basically survived through memorising the content each week and he'll quiz you on it. I have a very bad memory when it comes to things I don't enjoy. He'd quiz you in front of the whole class, like he would ask different students different questions, and I would be the one student every single week who'd sit there and stare blankly at him and shake my head, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." I just couldn't learn that way. But, he was cheap, as well. Because he was cheap and his methods had been proven to work on a vast majority of Asian students, my parents insisted on me going there.
Jay Ooi
Paying to send your kid somewhere where they just memorise stuff. Sound familiar?
David Tran
From that, I was like, there's something very wrong with this style of tutoring. Then, I went to an English tutor who allowed me to flourish with my own ideas, allowed me to be me. He nurtured my style of learning and made me feel comfortable. I was like, there is a huge disparity in the tutoring market between a good tutor and a bad tutor. They both can deliver results, but one delivers it more effectively than another. I was like, I want to be that tutor that makes kids feel comfortable because that's the whole purpose of tutoring. A lot of kids go to tutoring because school is ineffective for them, so you want to create an environment where the kids feel comfortable, they feel nurtured, they feel excited to go to tutoring, not what I was feeling in that bloody chemistry and physics class, sitting there feeling like I was being grilled. I wanted to create that safe environment for the students in the future. Yeah.
I don't know whether a lot of people out there will agree with this approach, but I see myself as sort of a mentor and a friend in the tutoring environment.
When they come in, I try to approach it, show them a level of professionalism, but then remind them that they can trust me enough to talk to me about the whole range of things. So, I'm there to guide them through. I try to make myself a very approachable person, whereas, there are other tutors out there who are very, I'm only here for your content and here to give you the content, and that's the extent of my job. I feel like that's ineffective tutoring. I breakdown that barrier and also make sure that my kids can approach me at anytime for whatever issue.
Jay Ooi
How does that work out?
David Tran
It doesn't work out financially. It works out for the students in that they do trust me, they do come to me for a lot of things.
Jay Ooi
So David’s approach is more as a mentor and he tries to create an environment where students want to learn. And Ben likes this more relational approach to tutoring as well.
Jay Ooi
And do you feel like it's helped you, not just for your studies, but if I could help you in, in life in general?
Ben
I think my maths tutor was more than just the tutor I guess like a bit of a mentor as well. He was definitely helped me more than just in like maths I guess.
And I think it's just nice. It's more this is like something more than just tutoring. It's like, someone you can ask for advice for more than just like, oh, you're paying them and so they tell you about, they teach you a bit of stuff.
David Tran
The downside is that sometimes they come to me for too many things. As you know, once you've created that environment where you want them to come to you, and you want to help them, it's hard to say no.
David Tran
Then, it becomes really hard to sort of like create your own personal space again, put those boundaries back up.
Jay Ooi
Right. So often, it just a little listening and advice giving?
David Tran
Yes. A lot of listening, a lot of advice giving because the content itself, it's not hard to give. If they don't receive it in school, I can give them that content, but often it's the fact that they have a lot of questions about the vast amount of content that they receive in school. Your job is to sort of help them approach that content that they've already received.
Jay Ooi
David, Ben and Wan all agree that the most effective style of tutoring is one that encompasses more than just feeding content to be memorised. And as someone who myself loves to learn but is terrible at just memorising stuff, I would have to agree. But still, why the need for tutoring? What is it that schools struggle to provide?
David Tran
In tutoring, I have the luxury of a small class size, and that's one advantage that I have over schools, is that our max class size is six. Whereas, a school, even in your 11 and 12, the max size is still 24, so it's four times the amount, and so it's very hard for the teacher to give enough individual attention. If you think about it, the high school structure is, the one teacher might teach the one subject to four, to five, to six different year groups, so that's almost 1:200 kids that they have to teach a year. There is no way 1:200 kids is going to get enough individual attention from the one teacher. That's the downside of the education system, is that the class sizes are way too big for any individual support to be given. Yeah.
Jay Ooi
Okay so class sizes definitely impede the ability for individual differentiation, especially in high schools, but what else is problematic?
Jay Ooi
One criticism of tutoring. Because you hear about cultures that didn't grow up with tutoring or that's not part of their culture. Is that it's, I guess, giving these kids an unfair advantage and it's gaining the system. What do you think about that?
Wan
Okay. That I think is partially true. Because I think what it does is, also in the tutoring system don't forget that they actually do look into the testing systems. So the kids doing tutoring, will be quite more familiar with tests.
One of the things that I found with the school system here was, coming from Asia, everything was you get a test, you get a mark, how many percentage. You always get graded. But here nobody grades you. You just say working towards or what is it, satisfactory or something. Nothing you can really put your finger on. How your child is doing really.
Tests is something that you don't have to do all the time, but at least if you let the kids be exposed to it before the test. I know some schools do run a few sessions or whatever. Let the student get the taste of it. And so that they actually get an idea that hey, I can't just daydream. Once I sit on the test, I need to just concentrate and get it done.
Jay Ooi
Because I remember when I was in, I think I did selective school in preparation classes.
These are streamed classes and schools that are supposed to create a nurturing and challenging environment for “high achieving students.”
But I think the big thing I got out of it was practicing test-taking because it's knowing that you have an hour to answer 60 questions and you don't want to be stuck in a question for five minutes because you don't have enough time.
Wan
That's right. Yes.
Jay Ooi
But if you don't take enough tests, and essentially they know the formula, the statistical tests. So if the selective school test is 60 questions, they're going to give you 60 questions as a practice. And so you already know what to expect when you go into the test, which is something I guess you lose out on if you don't have that.
Wan
That's right. Well that is something the school could expose them to, why not.
Jay Ooi
So schools could help us prepare for tests a little bit better, but David reckons as long as schools are focussed on testing our knowledge of content, tutoring is always going to have a place. So when is a good time to start? Wan has a particularly strong opinion on this.
Wan
But I would actually just think about in terms of, rather than just sending them indiscriminately to any school, you’d be better off to actually sit down with them. And maybe even learn with them, why not?
Primary school maths, how hard could it be, really? So it can be fun... So to me, if you learn something with your child, you're actually building a bond and relationship. And if you do it when they're younger, they let you. High school, they might not let you. They think, oh gosh, parents they don't know anything? No, I know more than you do.
I just don't feel that you should pile the kids with too much tutoring when they're young. Partly because a child should be a child. They should have time to play. They should have time to do something else. So we encourage a lot of extracurricular activities rather than just tutoring itself.
David Tran
A lot of people feel like it's unnecessary pressure on the kids, for example. So, by sending your kids to tutoring and telling your kids that you want them to do well in exams or in schools, that's the message that you're pushing onto them, and so a lot of people are of the view that you should just let kids be kids, and that whatever results they get, don't define them as a person. And so if you send them to tutoring, you're pretty much sending the message that they are defined by the results that they get, and that they need to get good results.
Jay Ooi
What do you think about that?
David Tran
I think there's a healthy way to look at it, which is that in the real world, anyway, you are judged on your performance, regardless of where you go, you've got various different performance indicators in different sectors, and so this is one example of that. We need to teach kids to look at that in that way, in a positive way, as how to self-improve, and what does this mark represent? Like a lot of the time, that mark is attributed to your worth as a human being. It's too big of a worth given to that mark. But, if we teach them that this mark is indicative of your ability to do x, y, z, or your skill level in x, y, z, and so you can improve in this way, then we have a much more healthy approach to it. Yeah.
Jay Ooi
Perspective matters. How much are grades being emphasised by parents and tutors? Are test scores the be all and end all? If so, maybe a different lens would help ease the pressure.
Wan
And if you want to do something extra, let them learn another language. Do something else, go and play sports or whatever. There's extracurricular activities. It doesn't have to be tutoring.
See the thing also is, that's why I feel that extra curricular activities is also very important when you do that. Because what it does is it actually introduces different types of population into their life. So they will have something else, not just the school. So it won't be the same type of people.
So I think the child will actually grow up much happier and more balanced. And what you do is, you also expose them to so many different things and it opens up their eyes.
Jay Ooi
Okay, so tutoring is a big part of many Asian cultures and good grades are seen as a stepping stone towards a stable career. But not all tutoring is equal. Whilst rote learning and being spoon fed might get better exam scores, it doesn’t necessarily foster good learning patterns and can remove some self autonomy, which can come back to bite us later in life. But as long as schools have classes the size they are and test the way they do, tutoring will always be around, whether we want to go or not. Let’s just hope we pick better places to send our kids.
Would you send your kids to tutoring?
Ben
I might consider it actually. Yeah, I don't know. I definitely wouldn't do as much I'd say. And it'd be, how much would also probably be driven by them as well. But I'd consider it, I'd have to think it through.
Jay Ooi
I asked David the same question.
David Tran
A lot of people are big critics of tutoring, but for me, it's simply a matter of, you obtain more knowledge, more skills, you develop your abilities. I don't see any negative in it, so if I feel like my kids can be further developed in any way, for sure I would definitely try and put out the time and the money for them to be able to develop those skills.
Jay Ooi
And do you have any regrets in terms of how much tutoring or what tutoring your kids had growing up?
Wan
I think we pretty much got it right. I don't think we overdid it. Partly because we actually did talk to them and see which areas they actually need help in… So I think we pretty much balanced. We were pretty good because we did not just do everything.
David Tran
I think in terms of the Asian thing, it's funny because a lot of people, I think, are also now realizing that it gives you a good advantage, not necessarily an unfair advantage, but it actually helps build you and your ability to approach academia, and so a lot of other nationalities are starting to send their kids to tutoring, as well.
So as long as we continue to look at it in a positive way, and that tutoring is fostering the right skills in kids, in that it's all about building their character and how they use knowledge, then it's a positive thing all around. Yeah.
Jay Ooi
That’s Asians and tutoring.
This episode of Shoes Off was written, produced and edited by me Jay Ooi.
Special thanks to all our guests Wan Chung, David Tran, Ben Heung and Professor Ying Jie Guo.
How was your tutoring experience? Let me know at facebook.com/shoesoffau
If you liked Shoes Off please subscribe, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts, or head to shoesoff.net
And if you know someone who used to go to tutoring all the time after school, why not reminisce with them and share this episode.
Thanks, and catch you next episode.
David Tran
I spend a lot of time talking to my students about how their teacher has taught something or how their teacher has disseminated information, for example. Then, I'll try and help them reconstruct that knowledge in a way that's meaningful for them because sometimes they'll walk away with, like I said, all this knowledge, but they don't know how to use it. So, my job is to give them tables, and scaffolds, and questions to guide them through the knowledge that they already possess.
Guests
David Tran
Wan Chung
Ben Heung
Ying Jie Guo
Resources
Where Asians spend their money in America: https://qz.com/970130/asians-spend-15-of-their-family-income-on-extra-education-and-tutoring-for-kids-americans-spend-it-on-cars-and-gas/
Selective schools and the tutoring industry: https://www.smh.com.au/education/selective-schools-drive-tutoring-industry-as-students-race-to-keep-up-20170126-gtz9ft.html
What we get wrong about smart Asian kids: https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/culture/article/2018/10/15/what-we-get-wrong-about-smart-asian-kids
