Tutoring

Generally speaking, white people and brown people see tutoring very differently. 

White people see tutoring like they see the physio. It’s a service you see when you’re falling behind. It helps you get from below average to average - a helping hand. 

Brown people see tutoring the same way an athlete sees the gym or training. This is the place for you to get stronger than your competition. This is where you go from average to the top of your class, crushing the skulls of your peers as you make your way to ATAR glory.

Both groups hide the fact that their kids go to tutoring, but for different reasons. 

White parents are ashamed they have such a dumb kid, you can see it when they’d pick their kids up from tutoring. It’s always like, how’s he doing? Is he okay?

Brown parents know they have dumb kids, they’re just trying to hide the competitive advantage they are giving their kids. 

They want it to seem like their kids were just born smart from the start, like when you watch really good stand-up for the first time and it feels like the performer is just making this up as he goes along. 

The allure of genius is effortlessness. 

Having said all that, tutoring was a big part of my life growing up. I feel like I was naturally pretty average in school, but it was getting to that next level that I really struggled with. 

My intelligence felt inconsistent. Sometimes I’d come home with great marks, other times I’d come home with terrible marks. 

As a result I spent a lot of holidays and after school in tutoring programs in both Sydney and Newcastle. If you ask my parents though, definitely not as much time as my cousins did. 

They had it much worse living in Sydney, the competition is so fierce in some of the selective schools it borders on insane. 

I’d get a glimpse of it when I went to this tutoring college in Homebush during the school holidays every now and then.

We’d stay with my grandparents in Marayong and catch the train to the college - 9am to 3pm, Monday to Friday. 

There were hundreds of kids that would go to these schools, mostly Asian kids with parents like mine. Everyone was there not because they were behind but because they wanted to be ahead. 

In year 8 I remember taking a year 8 maths class, and the work was so advanced I wouldn’t see some of the problems until I hit year 11 extension maths. 

It’s easy to picture these kids as some group of wunderkinds, but really they were just regular kids who were both brilliant and used to spending their holidays getting smarter. 

Like some of those kids had been going to tutoring their whole life, they’d been ahead since they were born. So for me, who hopped in occasionally it was always such a steep learning curve. 

On top of trying to keep up with each lesson, you had the whole added element of trying to make friends. That was almost even harder. 

Not only was I academically behind everyone else, because I wasn’t in the Sydney selective high school bubble, I was behind socially as well. 

I remember in that same year 8 maths class I ended up sitting next to this Filipino guy who went to Sydney Boys High. In front of us were a couple of Chinese girls who went to Sydney Girls High. They all kind of knew each other or at least had mutual friends. 

I was sitting closest to the wall, so I was smack bang in the middle of their entire conversations one day. 

One time we’re sitting quietly doing some exercises out of nowhere I heard one of the girls (let’s call her girl 1) asked the other girl if she’d ever seen cum before. The other girl (girl 2) said she had gotten close once, but that she’d never actually seen it before. 

That’s when girl 1 turned around and looked at the guy sitting next to me. 

Girl 1: “Hey man, can I ask you a favour?”

Looking up from his textbook

Guy: “Yeah what’s up?”

Girl 1: Can you cum?

Guy: What?

Girl 1: Well we’ve never seen cum before, can you like to go to the bathroom and like get a bit of cum for us?

Guy: What? Why? 

Girl 1: Well we want to see what it looks like. 

Guy: I’m not doing that. 

Girl 1: Why not? 

Guy: The toilets here are gross and what I’m supposed to do is just hold it in my hand?

Girl 1: Please please please! We just want to see what it looks like! 

Girl 2: Yeah please! We just want to see it. 

The Guy starts laughing

Guy: Are you gonna help me? 

The girls laugh and are a little grossed out at the same time. That’s when Girl 1 see’s I’m listening to the conversation. 

Girl 1: How about you? Will you show us your cum. 

I’m dumbfounded. I have no idea what to say. I’m desperate to make friends, but not that desperate. Maybe I could go to a pharmacy and buy a bottle of shampoo and pass that off as cum? 

Rowan: I...umm...you don’t...umm… 

As I’m deliberating in my head what to do, the tutor slams a textbook down on the table. 

The girls turn around quickly and the guy and I both put our heads down. 

Teacher: Is there something I can help you with?

We laugh. 

Tutoring’s great, but I guess it can’t teach you everything.