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[prof]

Sexy Tutors: Sex Appeal Sells in Hong Kong's Competitive Tutoring Business

Sunday, January 21, 2007
Associated Press

HONG KONG � Angela Yiu and Stella Cheng spent weeks meeting with fashion stylists and photographers before deciding on the mini skirts 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 � or "bou zap se" in the local Cantonese dialect.

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 Web sites, where potential students can see their photos, read their online journals and download video clips of "gag moments" in class.

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 they have to pass both to get into a university.

So hoards of students trek to after-school lectures at tutoring centers.

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 percent more than five years earlier.

Industry pioneers like Modern Education and King's Glory each have about 10 centers around the city, each offering around 200 lessons a week.

All the companies boast of their ability to give youngsters an edge by predicting what questions will be asked in the exams, employing teams of full-time analysts who study patterns from previous exam papers.

With competition growing fierce on that front, the tutorial centers in recent years have increasingly focused on promoting their teachers as trendy icons consumable by students.

"When our rivals are equally good at predicting the exam questions, we need a new ground to outrun them," Ng said. "And that is the tutor's appearance."

Last summer, Ng hired Yiu, who once won a modeling contest, to teach English along with Cheng, described by Ng as "a gorgeous former lawyer."

Yiu, who has a business degree, said: "Being a model is not a long-term career. I should plan for the future. I know my good appearance has a market."

Indeed, tutoring is one of the most profitable jobs in this Asian city. Top tutors who have more than 4,000 students can earn high salaries.

Elaine Chow, an advertising executive, said tutoring businesses are applying a "star-making" promotion technique in which tutors dress fashionably and are given nicknames like "the Godfather of Science," "Brand-A tutor" or the "Queen of English."

"In the advertisements, going to tutorial centers is portrayed as a trendy after-school activity more than a chance to acquire knowledge," she said. "This is a twisted tutoring market."

Percy Kwok, a former education researcher of the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studied the private tutoring phenomenon in 2003, said tutorial centers closely follow the consumption culture of youths to catch their attention.

"They may even expose tutors' private life if necessary," he said.

But he added that while tutorial centers 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.

Tutorial centers will continue, he said, "As long as university certificates and exam results are the best evidence to prove one's competence and guarantee a stable income."

[saint57]

I remember when I first went to Korea, my co-worker said her mother was affraid she was being recruited for sex work.

[Stephen Jones]

It's quite clear me and scot47 don't have much of a future in Hong Kong.

[Jetgirly]

I was "pimped out" by my old school in Italy. Half the staff were grumpy middle-aged women who'd got knocked up when they were on their Erasmus year, and the other half were young single females (presumably with the potential to be knocked up by one of the students... if that student did all his homework). I definitely don't think this very surprising or even a problem.

[Serious_Fun]

[11:59]

It's not just the hack tutors here in HK (whose images are often blazoned across the side of buses) who have taken this route, teachers at Ying Wa primary school now have promotional 'image shot' posters on the school walls.

But then that's simply HK: all form and no substance.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

It's not just Hong Kong. It's Japan and (from what I've heard and seen) the rest of Asia too. It IS a problem and it is one that effects hiring decisions up to universities in North America because they need to attract students and students often report that they would much rather have a blond hair blue eye woman with a mini skirt and a 100hour certificate teaching them than a PhD professor in Applied Linguistics (TEFL/Language Acquisition) teaching them. So universities (and of course private language schools) in North America go out of their way to try to hire people who look close to the what the students want, but who are actually qualified and so if you don't look that way, you don't get a job. Then, even in university classrooms in North America occasionally students will spend their time trying to show off to their friends in class about how they would do the teacher, and they don't bother to pay attention to what they are supposed to be learning because it is ingrained in them that English teachers exist only for their pleasure and because university in many of their countries is the easiest level of education (it's hard to get in, but once you're in it's hard to not graduate) they simply don't pay attention and assume that they will get passed through simply because their parents are spending over $30,000 in tuition alone a year to send their kid to university as a foreign student. So in order to actually get their undergraduate degree, some of these kids are spending over eight years (and virtually bankrupting their parents) because they aren't working anywhere near hard enough at learning the English they need to know in order to get into their degree content courses.

It's all due to advertising and marketing and it's a big chunk of the reason why teaching English has a sort of 'something to do until you find out what you really want to do (because it's better than being an'entertainer', and more fun than working at Starbucks)' image.

[FuzzX]

What a great idea!!!

I have a good one too... I just need some business partners. Ok so what we do is go and find a bunch of porn stars, strippers and white trash and get them a certificate of some sort.... hmmm.. we could call it.... TEFL..
Hmm I guess someone has already done that idea. Nevermind.

Ok Ok I have a better idea. lets get a bunch of unemployed social misfits, geeks and obese spinsters together and give them a certificate of some sort.... uh... how about we call it CELTA....

aww crud I just searched on the net, someone already did that one too...

[wildnfree]

Interesting, cause there alot of aesthetically challenged teachers lurking in the bland beige halls at many a school in HK.

My friend, who is teacher in HK, said he is regularly asked by students in his secondary school to show them his chest hair (?) and regularly dote on him for being what they consider "extremely attractive".

[mondrian]

Teaching in the schools (particularly the Middle schools) of Asia in the summer: often have I wandered up and down the aisles while making some point or other to my "attentive" students. My concentration is distracted by a soft feathery touch on my arm as some smiling student gently caresses it's hair.
I have never ventured to expose my chest except at one sports meeting when I jerked off my sweatshirt with T-shirt accidentally following. For the following week it was the boy students who wanted a repeat performance!