Perfect Score
Below the heading “Boston Educational Institute” on that company’s webpage are several blocks of Korean script. The whole would be utterly incomprehensible to me but for the words “IVY league,” “AP,” “Plan,” and “Alumni Interview,” which appear in English. These gave me an idea of the company’s marketing, and together with the Korean, of their market.
My bike chain snapped on my way to the interview. I boarded a bus briefly, was rejected for having inexact change, and got dropped off at the corner of Beverly and Western. My walk took me past the mansions of Hancock park, with lawns tended by other people and dainty little signs threatening “armed response,” which means, I think, that trespassers will be shot.
I arrived a half-hour late, my back soaked through with sweat, in a spacious and non-descript office suite next door to the home of the South Korean consul for Los Angeles. The woman who was to interview me was on the phone (speaking Korean), so I sat down with a copy of Private Eye from 2006, a periodical with bylines from students at Harvard Westlake and Marlborough. I skimmed over editorials about the semi-formal and the SATs , then read an article about choosing a video-game console entitled “The Most Important Choice in a Gamer’s Life,” evidently a more difficult choice than I’d thought.
Across the waiting room, I could see an English class under way through a window in the inner-wall. Two twelve-year-olds sat attentively below admissions brochures from Harvard and Yale taped to the glass.
Ms. Sue was warmly business-like, and excused me for my tardiness while half-standing to shake my hand. ”You are Andrew?”
“Rowan.”
“Rowan?” She reshuffled some papers and seemed reassured. ”Yes, Rowan.”
Ms. Sue’s office was full of books on getting into college. Right off the bat, she told me I did not have enough experience to teach one of their SAT classes: “These students are applying to top private colleges. We don’t use any of the books you can get at Barnes and Noble—these students, they have already been through 5 or 6 practice books. All they do is study all the time. We need people with experience using college-board materials.”
Would I be interested, she wanted to know, in tutoring first, second, and third graders, for lower pay? I was confused: “What exactly do the first graders come here for?”
“Most of them are studying very hard to skip a whole grade. They are usually a year or two ahead in math, at least, but we being Asians, we speak Korean at home. They are still good students, but their English is behind.”
I was interested. Ms. Sue drew me into a maze of questions I’d hoped that she would answer for me—“Would this be your summer job? Are you looking for full or part time? How much would you charge for private tutoring for little kids?”
This is a common and infuriating tactic among employers, who withhold information to find out how little you’ll work for on the off chance that it will be less than they’re willing to pay. I was able to dodge it with a blitz of dependent clauses and non-commital adverbs.
We moved on to other subjects. ”Do you do SAT 2 classes, I asked, “in French?.”
“French? There aren’t enough materials out there for a class: there are only two books. We have one student, but I tell her, there are only five or six practice tests. What would you use?”
Those practice tests, and the student’s textbook, I thought. Ms. Sue was circumspect: the student in question, as it turned out, was her daughter, who would like to take the test in October
“Ohh! That’s plenty of time,” I said, sincerely.
“My daughter—she finished AP Spanish in tenth grade and did a lot of review, but she only got a 720.”
“Hey, 720’s not bad.”
“Noooo, no.” Ms. Sue shook her head with gentle condescension. ”On all the other tests she got 800s…What did you get on the French SAT 2?”
“I got an 800, but I went to high school in France.”
“Oh.” Ms. Sue pondered our exchange for a moment. ”And how much would you charge for private French tutoring?
