Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ivy League School: Anything But

When I told a friend of mine that I worked for a private after-school program in Torrance, he asked me what it was called.

"Ivy League School," he responded

"How pretentious!" He fired back.

I was summarily burned up by that insensitive comment.

Yet looking back on that moment, I now could not agree with him more.

It was a pretentious, fastidious little place, a hole in the wall in a tiny strip mall next to an over-priced burger joint on Hawthorne Boulevard.

There are a lot of these niche after-school tutoring programs up and down the main thoroughfare in Torrance, and I happened to get hired at one of them.

I was assigned to teacher six graders and first graders English. Most of the books I used were primer with lots of dittos. Our primary job was to train these students for the standardized tests in May.

Most of the students were Asian, kids mostly Chinese, with a handful of students Japanese of Korean.

Suffice what some may say about Asian students, most of the students were some of the most entitled, spoiled, and unpleasant children I had every had to deal with. They were rude, crude, with a lot of attitude, convinced that they were God's gift to humanity.

They simply had no manners. In the first grade class, I was assigned two students who talked all the time, and one kindergartener. Even these students were expected to do homework. The parents would assist on homework, but their sons and daughters never did the work.

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