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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) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:20PM (#444770)

    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

    by Francis (5544) on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:48PM (#444777)

    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.