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posted by mrpg on Thursday December 22 2016, @07:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the ni-hao-ma dept.

Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.

Mi is capitalizing on an alluring arbitrage opportunity. In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living. Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she'll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.


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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2016, @11:53AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 22 2016, @11:53AM (#444687) Journal

    What do other people with similar amounts of education get paid in Canada. Also, are they required to fund their own continuing education to maintain their credentials and how much work are they expected to do?

    Sounds like we have a case of too much credentials contrary to your assertion in your other post [soylentnews.org].

    Teachers require special certifications because teaching requires a lot more work than just mastery of the content area.

    I'll note here that I don't respect the certifications and credentials that are currently enforced or issued for teachers because I think it's a deliberate intent to restrict the supply of teachers by those teacher unions.

    I mean seriously, I deal with the results of untrained teachers on a more or less daily basis. Just because you know how to solve a math problem, does not qualify you to teach somebody else to do it. Most days I wind up cleaning up after a teacher that doesn't understand how to teach and I've made quite a bit of money over the years from that.

    There are ways to train teachers that don't require pointless certifications and credentials that don't reflect actual ability of the teacher. Ultimately, the goal here is hiring and keeping good teachers. Credentials are evidently getting in the way of that according your above post.

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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:28PM

    by Francis (5544) on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:28PM (#444791)

    The certifications aren't pointless, one way or another you need a way of telling who has and who hasn't had at least some exposure to the methods used in the trade. We can quibble all day about which standards make sense and which ones don't as well as how to fix it, but at the end of the day, it's not realistic to have teachers teaching long enough to know if they're any good. It's just too costly and time consuming.

    As far as my previous comment goes, there's basically no requirement if you're teaching at a college, those requirements I referenced are for the K-12 public schools. Private schools and colleges don't necessarily require that the teacher be qualified to teach. But, the whole idea of going back and taking classes regularly is that it helps the instructor keep current as well as remind them what it's like to teach. The last thing you want is to have a teacher who hasn't taken any classes in decades and can't even remember what it takes to pass a test teaching the class.

    As for credentials getting in the way, no they don't. What gets in the way is a lack of proper pay, lack of proper working conditions and having the teachers be responsible for paying their college and credential fees while still expecting them to make poverty wages and put up with the long hours.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2016, @12:32AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 23 2016, @12:32AM (#444880) Journal

      one way or another you need a way of telling who has and who hasn't had at least some exposure to the methods used in the trade.

      But of course. You can evaluate them in the classroom. You can speak to their references. That's better than credentials.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Friday December 23 2016, @04:43AM

        by Francis (5544) on Friday December 23 2016, @04:43AM (#444927)

        No, just no.

        So, you're suggesting that every time a school needs to hire a new teacher, that they waste class time for a dozen or more students for each applicant rather than just accept the practicum done once by an accredited trainer? How is that better than the current set up where the prospective teachers get feedback and experience in an environment set up to handle it?

        Also, references are something that you get in addition to the credentials typically anyways. They're not a replacement for a properly monitored practicum in any reasonable way. Whenever you've got somebody watching the classroom the students behave differently even if the teacher doesn't. I remember being unintentionally screwed over by students on multiple occasions because they were trying to make me look good, but them looking like good Chinese language students wasn't what I was being evaluated on. I was being evaluated in part on the energy in the room which was mysteriously absent whenever the head teacher was evaluating me.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2016, @05:04AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 23 2016, @05:04AM (#444935) Journal

          So, you're suggesting that every time a school needs to hire a new teacher, that they waste class time for a dozen or more students for each applicant rather than just accept the practicum done once by an accredited trainer?

          That would be better, particularly since they're going to waste the time of the students on an unknown anyway. Might as well be one that you've actually seen at work.

          I remember being unintentionally screwed over by students on multiple occasions because they were trying to make me look good, but them looking like good Chinese language students wasn't what I was being evaluated on.

          Which would be no different a problem if you were credentialed or not.

          • (Score: 1) by Francis on Friday December 23 2016, @05:23AM

            by Francis (5544) on Friday December 23 2016, @05:23AM (#444942)

            First off, where do you get students to sit through those lessons from? Students are students, they're supposed to be studying. If you're interviewing for a job at a college, you might get away with having them give a lecture, but for the K-12 system there's just no time to do that. Students arrive at a set time and leave at a set time, when are you going to have the teachers doing their lessons? Students have enough to do with their own studies without having to sit through lessons that aren't related to their material and they aren't being graded on.

            As for the second point, coming in with a credential means that you've proven a base level of competency. There's a lot less pressure involved and generally schools don't have your entire career at that school resting on the result of a single class session with students you don't know.

            The current system is only broken in so far as the teachers are being poorly compensated, presented with unreasonable conditions and a more or less complete lack of support. How are you going to figure out if a teacher can handle that with just a test lesson? At least with credentials, the teacher has a set of tools available for addressing things like that.

            Removing the regulations isn't going to help. If you want to avoid the regulation, just take a look at private schools. Some of them are great and cost a huge amount of money to attend and others are significantly worse than public schools because they're not bound by the same regulations about hiring trained teachers.

            The whole idea that this is somehow a substitute is at best half-baked.

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2016, @05:54AM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 23 2016, @05:54AM (#444953) Journal

              If you're interviewing for a job at a college, you might get away with having them give a lecture, but for the K-12 system there's just no time to do that.

              You do realize that there's more time for that in the K-12 system than in college - for all parties concerned, don't you? Teachers work less hours and students are going no more than half the speed of a college environment. What's different is that college professors tend to take hiring very seriously because having a good, compatible colleague can boost their own career, even if only indirectly via boosting the reputation of the department.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:46PM (#444797)

    I'll note here that I don't respect the certifications and credentials that are currently enforced or issued for teachers because I think it's a deliberate intent to restrict the supply of teachers by those teacher unions.

    I feel the same way about MCSEs, and CPAs, and MRAs and MREs! All of them are, as George Bernard Shaw put it, "conspiracies against the laity"!!! And I also do not respect any credentials to be a Soylentil, or a khallow, because the intent is just to mindless catapult the propaganda.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2016, @12:35AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 23 2016, @12:35AM (#444882) Journal

      And I also do not respect any credentials to be a Soylentil, or a khallow, because the intent is just to mindless catapult the propaganda.

      How did you even find this site without the proper credentials!? The butler was most emphatically told not to let these people in!