Tutoring

Just got back from teaching Japanese private lesson to 2 students.

The tutoring thing can never be seized to amuse me, even though I had been living through it for all my high school lives. It's impossible to escape through this STUPID (repeat 5,000 times) vicious circle, if you're a Thai student.

When I was in high school, though, I never wanted to have a private lesson with a college student. I mean, who do they think they are? Just because they go to Chula or Thammasat doesn't mean they can teach or are qualified for teaching experience. I had never been trusted in Thai college students' abilities because I hadn't really thought they were "mature."

But some kids don't think so. That's the reason why I am - both an (possibly) "immature" college student and a tutor at the same time.

But this part is even funnier. Last night I talked to the student's mother and she asked if I'd be interested in teaching English to her daughter in addition to Japanese, even though we hadn't met before and I hadn't taught her kid yet.

I was lost for words and suggested her that maybe we should try our first lesson first to see if the student and I can get along. In fact, I was really wondering how she could trust me that easily.

Other than that, if I can choose what to teach between English and Japanese, I'll definitely go for Japanese, even though I'm much, much more comfortable with English. With Japanese, there's a fix scope of grammatical patterns/vocab/Kanji/idioms to cover in high school level. But with English, I really don't know where to start because you can basically teach EVERYTHING, considering many Thai students have been studying English since kindergarten or 1st grade.

There's also a pattern when it comes to remembering vocab in English from those tutoring schools. Usually the tutors give students tons of synonyms to remember while teaching some prefixes/suffixes.

I can't really do that. I can't just make a big list of vocab because that's not how I study English. Mostly I read, read, and read. If there's Thairath and Bangkok Post newspaper, you bet I'll definitely pick Bangkok Post. If there's a free English magazine offered, I'll pick it up and read in BTS or at least flip through it. I don't remember millions of vocab at one time because it's really easy to forget all of them in the next day. Instead, I learn from the context and try to guess what it means even though I might not understand the vocab's meaning exactly. And when I see it from times to times, I eventually memorize.

But the problem is most Thai students hate to read. When they don't have much time to prepare for exams, they just have to squeeze everything and memorize them all in one time.

I've had experience in teaching English before and it looked like the student trusted me SO much. One time she wanted me to correct her writing and I wasn't really confident doing so. Of course, when she wrote "I interest English", I can fix it back to "I'm interested in English", but it's not that I can correct every single mistake because I'm not a native speaker.

Apart from that, I must say the tutoring rate is really good. That's why I never consider working as a cashier at McDonald's or waitress at Swensens and get paid like 25 baht/hour. Isn't it funny that an hour of working at McDonald's can't even buy a Happy meal?