Those Who Can't 20100718

Those who can, do; Those who can't, teach


While having 100 square meters apartment, people entrust the future of their children to fresh out of college kids, human worker ants who share living places with some others.

Parents are not necessarily crazy to do this. It is a seemingly never fading fad of English, namely oral English, that puts a drain on nearly every parent’s cash flow, reason and sense.

On the contrary, as ones gifted by this information asymmetry, no matter how much a bilingual babysitter you feel you are, you will be treated as a master of education and language, even of life, as long as you portray one picturing yourself as one.

Unfortunately, I’m not one of the one. Fortunately, I’m one of the ones.

Ironically, with nothing worthy of boasting under my belt two years after college, now I’m usually addressed with the term Nin (the Chinese version of Sir, sometimes Your Honor) by people 15 to 20 years my senior, and at least one brand new Audi A8 my richer (although it depends on the house market), only because I’m their children’s English teacher.

Just for the record, born into a family converged by four grandparents all from different parts of China, learning accents is simply my thing, a blessing from birth, which has afforded my current teaching position. Of course, thank God for the confounding of human languages.

The reason lion share of kids' developing minds end up in green-hands of people like me, is not that we are painstaking hard workers as their parents (for god sake, how many of us used to be teachers’ pain in the ass when we were students), but there are employers who are arrogant and smart enough to be able to cash in on the English craze across the board.