Uh, ok.
My son’s cram school (small, private, rural Japan) runs like this. For about $200 a month he gets three two-hour classes a week. But he can (and does) go in almost every day to study. The guy has two rooms and whoever isn’t in an actual class goes in the office room to do their homework or whatever. My son likes it as he feels unable to work at home but can buckle down there. I like it because he’s doing at least something (though I suspect there’s a lot of chat goes on too!).
My husband works away most of the time, I work till 7 or 8 most nights. It suits our lifestyle well. And yes, me nagging him to study gets exactly nowhere.
That’s been my (non Pit-able) reaction to all of code_grey’s responses to people in this thread.
To the OP: Nobody wants to speak to an asshole. Don’t think you have to go to “cram school” to figure that one out, either.
Hokkaido Brit, thanks for your 2 cents. Incidentally, is the $33 per hour of class price you quote surprisingly high, especially given that this is a rural area of Hokkaido, of all places? Is this a big group class, small group class or a one-on-one class? Could you pay less or get more hours by switching to a larger group?
Your comment makes me wonder about two things:
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perhaps children of English speaking expats in Japan who speak decent English themselves may constitute a market niche for lower cost remote academic tutoring in worldwide-equivalent subjects like math, physics, programming etc. E.g. if I were to get a part time job doing this for math (using the remote tutoring using handwriting technology I have built but still got nowhere in terms of marketing) presumably the student could just translate the Japanese problem instructions into English for me. Naturally the quality of teaching may be lower due to lack of great familiarity with the local curriculum, but then lower price per hour can translate into more hours taught, and like they say quantity has a quality of its own.
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I wonder if there are big differences in cost and/or quality of teaching/tutoring between different places in Japan. If so, perhaps it may make sense for the “superior” (cheaper, or more expensive and higher quality, or maybe superior in some other way) tutoring providers in place A to seek to sell their services to some place B using online tools. Which of course would again tie into my above-mentioned research in the field of remote teaching for certain subjects.
Note, incidentally, that such remote tutoring could provided even in people’s homes, despite the issue of discipline control, because IMHO people are much better at keeping appointments than at doing their own work. It’s one thing to tell the kid “do the homework before 5pm” and quite another to tell him “at 3pm you should be logged into your 2-hour class”
Of course, this also would constitute direct competition with the existing local cram school industry, which means that the remote providers would need to prove themselves somehow “superior”, as I noted above. Or else, they should sell their services “in addition to” rather than “replacing” the local cram school.
This whole thread is incredibly bizarre.
Remote tutoring exists, and is mostly used for language tutoring via Skype (and some test-prep tutoring, which is mostly focused on online quizzes and tests rather than personal instruction). For obvious reasons this works best when people from rich countries pay people in poor countries for tutoring- nobody is going to pay an American to teach them math when they can pay an Indian of Filipino to do the same thing. It is true that American expats will seek out international schools, but a lot of that is fore the social aspect.
Nobody is going to pay you to tutor them in a subject if you don’t speak their language, unless you are teaching them English.
You are not going to think of a cram-school market niche as long as you insist that you don’t need to know anything about the subject.
even_sven, could you please do me a favor? Just stop posting in this bizarre thread. You have already taken up way too much thread space without saying anything constructive or relevant to the topic - quite uncharacteristic of you, I might say, given your usual practice of saying interesting things on issues you are familiar with.
The same applies, preemptively, to other people who find my approach to exploring this issue sufficiently abhorrent. Such people should head straight to the pit.
It’s just that this happens in many of your threads. You seem to be looking for specific answers to validate some of your assumptions, and when challenged you get quite defensive.
But hey, more power to you if you can get people to answer you.
He gets 24 hours a month (usually a lot more) of anything from one to one to a group of maybe six students, depending on what time he goes. That works out to $8.30 an hour…
I think there are a number of problems with your tutoring idea, not the least of which was referred to by Hazelnut Coffee - he goes to that cram school because the tutor has a wide knowledge of the exam system and can predict trends with the upcoming entrance exam questions. He also can teach the kids tips and tricks for the exams and interviews themselves. Also there is no way the average kid could translate anything into English for you from Japanese. My own kid, despite being fully bilingual, only gets about 70% on the English tests for example (there’s a lot of Japanese involved and lots of grammar that must be explained in the correct terms in Japanese on the test and this is where he falls down) and there is no way he could translate a maths question for me - he simply does not have the vocab. I can’t imagine a fully Japanese kid even knowing enough English to even start.
There is a huge variation in the quality of cram schools, of course. People choose different ones depending on their needs. My son’s best friend goes to a science based chain for one on one tutoring based solely on getting him into a good technical university, and he pays the same $200 a month for 1.5 hours a week of tuition and a mound of homework. Our guy is a one-man band who specialises in kids who have no confidence and think they are rubbish, and he spends a LOT of time building the kids’ esteem and working through their weakest points with them. Sometimes I am not so sure about the quality of his exam research but then my son loves him and has gotten so much from the tutor/student relationship that I just let that slide. My son is not academic anyway and we are just trying to get him into a reasonable high school, not a high-flying one.
with all due respect, Telemark, what you are saying is just a surface reading of the matter. I am not looking for claims that validate my assumptions. I am looking for claims that are relevant to my assumptions, thoughts, topics etc.
If you examine my interaction with even_sven in this thread, you will quickly see that even_sven did not come here to actually say something substantive about cram schools or tutoring or any other issue I am trying to discuss here. Instead she started out with claims about the root causes of internet adddiction and then subsequently proceeded to berate me for not reading “Make a mil yen” type of memoirs (not that there is anything wrong with these wonderful books, mind you) and for daring to share my thoughts out loud. She even managed to infer from my comments about remote tutoring that I was planning to do this myself, even though even most basic reading comprehension of my post would have suggested that I am primarily interested in marketing a technology for this sort of tutoring, regardless of whether the tutors will end up being Japanese, Filipino or Elbonian.
If even_sven wishes to say something specific and substantive about the workings of cram schools then let her do so. But there is no need to demonstrate minimal reading comprehension skills and attack me under the slogan “you don’t know how things work, so shut up”. If she or anybody else wants to fight my ignorance, e.g. as HazelNutCoffee and Hokkaido Brit have done very well, then that’s precisely what I am here for.
Also, by way of philosophical observation, notice that things that do not yet exist are of necessity kind of hazy. Operations plans usually don’t fall down from heaven in completed form. So naturally, a discussion of a possible innovation is likely going to sound kind of dumb because of a 100 different problems. Maybe each and every of these problems would eventually get ironed out and fixed (if an intelligent effort is made to achieve that) but until that happens the overall idea will sound quite non-functional. And that’s ok, as long as we keep out people who like to clutter up threads with non constructive pitting.
Gosh, I wonder why she’d do a thing like that. :rolleyes:
From the OP:
Lamia, good point, I think the word “continuation” is an inaccurate one. It would have been better termed as “inspired by”. Or “referencing”. Notice that in my OP I explicitly cited a number of facts established in that previous thread so it is certainly the case that the other thread is somewhat relevant. In any event, I also explicitly invited discussion of cram schools and not of internet addiction, root causes or anything of that nature. Further, I reaffirmed this topic choice again and again, asking even_sven and some other offenders to lay off the OT talk.
Quote from end OP:
“…So from the standpoint of the parents while not a glamorous “respectable” school, it still would work as an institution that at least temporarily combats internet addiction…”
This is your pattern:
make an assumption
state some stuff
forget some of the stuff you stated
others bring up valid points that challenge your assumptions
you respond angrily either because it challenges one of your assumptions or because you forgot what you typed and you think it’s not relevant
The same thing has happened in each of your threads that I’ve read. At some point, is it possible that your assumptions may need to be adjusted?
RaftPeople, off to the pit with nitpicking and the nitpickers. I say many things in my threads. The focus of the thread can shift - in this case it clearly shifted away from internet addiction. So stop beating the dead horse and go away, given that you clearly have nothing to contribute WRT Asian cram schools. Go to the pit and discuss some international studies of problem solving amongst the yadda-yadda.
If anything, I would have expected even_sven to contribute interesting stuff since she seems connected to the milieu. You, right now, are contributing a major waste of thread space.
Incidentally, cram schools existed long before internet, addiction and any of that BS. While I may have been wrong suggesting that they be used in some way for people who play too much Starcraft, it’s still an interesting topic and worthy of discussion. So go away and let the discussion proceed 
I went to cram school, but in my day we just called it “college” or “university”.