Tuition
As an Indian student, you sort of went to two schools. School one is affiliated with an education board and school two being the tuition class in somebody’s apartment. School had sixty students per room, the tuition class had up to a dozen.
Jail would release prisoners at around noon and an hour or two later thousands of kids around the city could be seen commuting to other neighborhoods or houses with their schoolbags. Many reasons have been proffered, but the most common reason for parents committing their kid to a tuition class is, “The teachers in school don’t often give personal attention to the child”. Yes, personal attention can do wonders. Like understanding that complex math formula or understanding something simpler without fear of a public parade when wrong. I have been going to tuitions since class 1. You could say I never quite learned to study at home on my own until college. My dad especially never had the patience for the kind of maths taught in schools then. Most things were too different, too simplified for him. His methods were not wrong but guaranteed me scoldings from my teachers. The system wanted to control everything, even how you went about getting the right answer. No ant could walk their own way in their own way.
Some nearby schools gave slightly different notes on the same subject and if your notes were not the same as ones taught in your class, you would be summoned for an explanation. Suspicion being that you could have copied the notes from students of another school, which meant you were mingling with students of other schools, which indicated you probably went to a tuition class. Students from practically every school in the city would mix under one roof, it sounds progressive and cool and it probably was.
My school’s second most persistent nuisance was that no student was ever to take on private tutors. In fact, it is one of the admission terms and is printed on one of the first few dozen pages of the school calendar. Yes, they were that asshole school trying to go against the norm, a healthy secondary schooling system that fed the mouths of many and unburdened stress of innumerable parents. My school would not have this though, it was bad for their business it seemed, but my, what creative reasons they came up with! “If a student gets an external tutor then they may end up unwilling to listen to the class teacher”. Sounds fair to a degree right? I mean, why pay attention in class when you could go over to the tuition teacher and learn it more conveniently? But it is not black and white and everybody’s situation wasn’t the same. Kids from other schools openly talked between themselves about where they took tuitions. I on the other hand felt like a noir gangster, hands stuffed in my overcoat, avoiding eye contact with other school’s kids so that my allegiance to a certain tuition teacher was not exposed.
Interestingly, some of the teachers in my school itself took tuitions to earn some extra money. I was under one such teacher and amid lectures, she would walk up to my desk and whisper in my ear the rescheduled timing after school. My cute bench partner always asking me ceaselessly what secret I was keeping. This teacher was a busy bee too, her kids also students in the nearby classroom. Upper management knew about their staff taking classes at their homes, but made nothing of it. Some student’s parents held tuitions at home. In one case, a girl, my classmate, whose mom was discovered to be a tuition teacher, was said the following by our class teacher in front of the entire class, “Jennifer stand up, I have warned your mother already during the parent’s meet. She can’t take tuitions. What is she doing still taking tuitions? Go tell her I said so”. And of course, kids would be punished or dragged over to the principal’s office in tears. Parents would be forced to leave their jobs, offices in the morning to come to talk about their son or daughter. Quite chillingly, our principal was absolute over the phone. “Yeah Shivam, I see you did not do your work. Come now…puts down the receiver”. I recollect stories from buddies whose parents were given the ultimatum to show up or find another school.
Later in life, I learned through one retiring teacher that the administration would frequently not pay salaries to the teachers on time, sometimes an entire quarter late! This school has an Olympic swimming pool, one of the only two special football grounds in the country, other academic institutions in other states, hosted national and international trips annually and forcefully extracted donations from parents to build a lot of the infrastructure, and they were not honoring the very women who help build their reputation.
Featured image source: theweek.in