Tuition teachers are NOT the enemy.

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

This past year has seen the publication of numerous articles on Singapore’s S$1.1 billion private tuition industry, a significant portion of which paints the tuition industry (and tuition teachers) in a bad light.

We have Ryan Ong from The Middle Ground (TMG) saying:

WANT to know how long it takes to destroy a childhood? Here’s a rule of thumb: it often happens by the time you reach the “E” in “Your tuition teacher is here.”

We have The Straits Times with the panic-inducing headline:

Fear factor fuels tuition industry

And there seems to have arisen a consensus that:

The growing prevalence of tuition is a worrying sign

Let me stick my head out and say this: the discussion surrounding our tuition industry borders on idiocy at times isn’t of the highest quality. Some writers may be indulging in disingenuous hyperbole, but my head feels like exploding when I see things like this (from the TMG article):

The thing to grasp about ad-hoc tuition is that it almost always degenerates into rote memorisation. It’s practically impossible for it not to. Here’s an example from English literature, which ad-hoc classes usually cover one book at a time (yes, it’s basically paying $85 an hour for Cliff’s Notes)......So the ad-hoc lessons just ignores the context: don’t bother knowing all that, just remember to write that the lion and the lamb are important nature images in the essay..... there’s isn’t time to get a holistic picture, so you just have to memorise the details on topic X and not ask why.

Firstly, any teacher who avoids explaining the whys and wherefores of any interpretation of a text simply isn’t doing his job. As far as I’m concerned, I’d fail a student who gives me a series of interpretations similar to that mentioned in the article (e.g. Hamlet is indecisive; Hamlet is insane; the ghost is important) without actually being able to show me why.

Read More at Tuition teachers are NOT the enemy. Bad teachers will be bad teachers, whether in the school system or not.


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