TEACHING OR APPEALING? In Hong Kong, good-looking tutors are treated like celebrities (AP Photo)
Posted on 01/19/2007 5:31:16 AM PST by CarrotAndStick
HONG KONG: Angela Yiu and Stella Cheng spent weeks meeting with fashion stylists and photographers before deciding on the miniskirts and high heels to wear in their promotion campaign. They're not models peddling perfume or sports cars. They're English tutors who earn good money helping secondary school students pass Hong Kong's grueling exams to get into college.
“Their long legs are the most beautiful ones in the tutorial industry,” said Ken Ng, head of Modern Education, one of the city's biggest tutoring businesses. “This is our selling point.”
Sex appeal has become a hot selling point, just as important as teaching ability and knowledge, in Hong Kong's hypercompetitive world of “cram schools”.
Attractive teachers are marketed like movie stars. Their schools show them off on billboards, full-page newspaper ads and TV screens in railway stations and on buses.
Some tutors have their own teams of stylists, fashion designers and photographers, Ng said. They also have personal websites, where potential students can see their photos and read their online journals.
It's just the latest twist in the competition to grab the business of students caught up in Hong Kong's make-or-break exam culture. Youngsters take two college exams during their seven years in secondary school, and have to pass both to get into a university. So, hordes of students flock to after-school lectures at tutoring centres.
The Census and Statistics Department says a third of secondary school youngsters sought private tutoring in the 2004-05 school year, spending a total of $18.9 million a month --25 per cent more than five years earlier. Industry pioneers like Modern Education and King's Glory each have about 10 centres around the city, each offering about 200 lessons a week.
All the companies boast of their ability to give youngsters an edge by predicting what questions will be asked in exams, employing teams of full-time analysts who study patterns from previous exam papers. With competition growing fierce on that front, the tutorial centres in recent years have increasingly focused on promoting their teachers as trendy icons.
“When our rivals are equally good at predicting the exam questions, we need a new ground to outrun them,”' Ng said.
Indeed, tutoring is one of the most profitable jobs in Hong Kong. Top tutors who have more than 4,000 students can earn high salaries.
Percy Kwok, a former education researcher of the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studied the private tutoring phenomenon in 2003, said tutorial centres closely follow the consumption culture of youths to catch their attention. But he added that while tutorial centres have become highly commercial, they provide useful techniques in tackling exams, such as predicting question types. Daytime teachers don't have comparable resources or the time to do that, he said.
TEACHING OR APPEALING? In Hong Kong, good-looking tutors are treated like celebrities (AP Photo)
Uh, she's from Queens.
She's got HUGE tuts - errr... Tutors!
Funny, I've a customer who's girlfriend actually does this in China. (she's Chinese) From the way he talks about her, I'm assuming, she's hot.
Stella Cheng
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