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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday December 22 2016, @01:24PM
There's something wrong with your reasoning...
You agree, on the one hand, that "teacher require special certifications". I.e., one cannot be a teacher, unless one has certification X. Then you respond to criticism of these required certifications by saying "I deal with the results of untrained teachers on a more or less daily basis". If the certifications are required to be a teacher, then what exactly is an "untrained" teacher?
I went to a lot of different schools in the US, because my parents moved a lot, basically a different school every year until high school. There were public schools, private schools, and at least one odd hybrid somewhere in between. The public schools, with their certified teachers, were by far the worst. Teachers who openly "didn't like boys". Teachers who couldn't stand kids who were smarter than they were. Teachers who didn't understand the material they were teaching. I'm sure they all had the right certifications, but too many of them were useless.
In the non-public schools, the teachers generally did *not* have teaching certifications. Instead, they had subject matter qualifications. The teachers liked what they taught, and they taught because they liked kids and enjoyed teaching. These schools were - without exception - better than the public schools with their "certified" teachers.
For very young kids - pre-school, kindergarten, maybe first and second grade - knowledge of child development and child psychology probably is more important than anything else. However, by the time 3rd or 4th grade comes, teachers need to have a deep knowledge and love of their subject. It should not be possible for a 10 year old kid to stump his math teacher. Geography teachers must know which continents countries are on. History teachers need to love history, so that they can convey its importance. Language teachers ought to be fluent in the language they are teaching. These things are *not* secondary to courses in pedagogy; the reverse is true. Pedagogy is something you teach on the side, to enable subject experts how to teach kids.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:50PM
If the certifications are required to be a teacher, then what exactly is an "untrained" teacher?
I just wanted to note that the whole "certification" thing is a lot more complicated for public schools, particularly in "shortage" areas (which are typically math and science teachers in a lot of states). When I taught high school, I started off as uncertified -- in fact, the whole reason I even got into teaching was that I heard a news report about how many classrooms would be starting the school year with a substitute on the first day of school due to teacher shortages, so I started looking around for positions to do a bit of "public service" at that point in my life.
Anyhow, it varied from state to state, but I was hired under what was called an "emergency permit" which generally granted teachers 3 years to become certified, thought there were some sort of exemptions that I think could allow that to even be extended another year or two under special circumstances. Things changed a bit with "No Child Left Behind" which was initially sold as something to stop this practice of uncertified teachers -- but most states basically just renamed things and ultimately ended up with a similar system.
There's a LOT of this going on in most states. And once you factor in the "burn-out" factor among teachers, where the MAJORITY of new teachers leave the profession within ~5 years, you realize that a lot of these new folks either never finish their certification or quite soon after, meaning there's a LOT of uncertified teachers continuously required to staff public schools. Again, this is highest in areas like math or science, since people with those degrees are more likely to be able to find jobs with better salaries elsewhere.
But the net effect of this whole certification shuffle at many public schools is that the worst public schools are often stuck with substitute teachers or people who are hired with no real hope of ever becoming certified in this area. The first school I taught math in, I was hired along with a woman who had a psychology degree. She was also assigned to teach general math, though as far I as can tell whenever I entered her classroom, the students did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. She seemed like a reasonable person, but I'm guessing she was just using this "emergency permit" thing to get a year or two hanging out with high school kids until she could actually find a job she'd prefer more.
Not an argument for or against certification in general -- just noting that the system is NOT just as it is claimed to be where all public school teachers are certified. And certification requirements vary VASTLY from state to state, and expectations in individual universities for education degrees or teacher prep programs also vary significantly in rigor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:20PM
In the first grade here, the problem "X - 9 = 9" was given, but with a blank instead of an X because variables are algebra.
The teacher would accept 9 and 0 as possible answers. When asked by a volunteering parent why 18 was not acceptable, the teacher said it was incorrect because 2-digit numbers hadn't been covered.
The kids will be confused forever because this causes inconsistency and because unlearning is hard.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:48PM
That's a problem I often encounter where there's multiple solutions, or usually methods, but only one of them has been covered.
And yes, that solution would be wrong if they haven't gotten to the point where they've covered that. However, neither 9 nor 0 are correct answers to the problem as using a 9 would give you an inequality with 0 = 9 and 0 would also give an inequality as -9 is not 9.
That kind of incompetent curriculum causes a lot of the students I get to still need help with remedial math. And not even math, a lot of them struggle just with arithmetic. They haven't even gotten to the point where they're doing anything other than strict calculation that you could just type into a calculator to do for you either.
One of the hard truths is that the place where the best teachers need to be is teaching those beginning students as your first experience with new content is where you develop a sense of whether it's even possible to succeed.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:43PM
That's because at the college level there's no requirement that you have ever had a teaching degree. It's a straight up masters in the content area and often times a PhD because clearly that qualifies them to teach. All too many colleges will focus more on the faculty's published work over their classroom abilities.
The college I work at is pretty good over all, but there's little ability to really pick good part time faculty to fill out the mix. Many of them are only around for a few quarters anyways as it's not a viable living without working in multiple districts or having a second job.