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Fitzgerald · Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 224

This is nothing specific to Mexico, it would be true at an upper class school in any country, but I can't help thinking about it every time I walk through the parking areas on my campus: 85% of the students here, high school and college, drive gleaming brand-new cars and SUVs of top quality makes, vehicles better than anything I have ever owned or will ever own. The other 15% of students don't have their driver's licenses yet. I estimate that between cars, clothing, clubbing, vacations, expensive hobbies (such as flying and horseback riding), the very high tuition at this place, etc., the average student here costs about four times as much to maintain for a year as I do. They don't just HAVE luxury items, they ARE luxury items. Working here sometimes feels like living inside an episode of My Super Sweet Sixteen.

One begins to understand what the French Revolutionaries were on about.

BadBeagleBad · Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 5:12 pm Post subject:

Yeah, it is depressing. I worked at a school like that, and interviewed at another. I remember one of the students lamenting that his father was getting rid of his chauffeur and he was going to have to share a chauffeur with his brother as if it were the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

Fitzgerald · Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 224

notamiss · Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 7:23 pm Post subject:

Fitzgerald · Joined: 10 Aug 2010 Posts: 224

BadBeagleBad · Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 9:28 pm Post subject:

[quote="Fitzgerald"
There must be the occasional wealthy parents who do what they can to make sure that their kids understand what "real life" is like. Yet I think they are surprisingly few. There are more, unfortunately, who employ their children as proxies for ostentatious display of the worst kind.[/quote]

I think it depends on HOW they became wealthy and if they always were. I had a student at one time who was very well off, but had not grown up wealthy, but had gottent to where he was with a combination of hard work, and luck (he bought some land at a very low price that he was later able to sell for a $$$$ profit). I met his wife and one of his daughters and they were as normal as you and I (if we are, in fact, normal, but for the sake of this post let's assume we are).

But I also had a student whose father wanted him to have private classes with me at his home. Since it was far away from where I lived and difficult to get to, I declined. He offered to send a driver for me, and return me home, which seemed like a perfectly normal solution to both father and son. The son attended a frou frou school where everyone had to learn not one, but TWO languages, and living abroad was not the least bit unusual. He had not had the chance to do that, so thought having private classes would give him a leg up. He also had a French tutor come to his house (not with a driver, though, haha).

Phil_K · Joined: 25 Jan 2007 Posts: 2041 Location: A World of my Own

I wouldn't say it's depressing, Fitzgerald -as long as people are happy with their superficial lifestyle, those of us less "fortunate" can be happy that we are acheiving what we are acheiving through our own hard graft. On the plus side, it's means there are fewer people likely to scratch my car or grafitti my street! Wink

MotherF · Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 10:34 pm Post subject:

There are other employment options...

Once many years ago I was trying to figure out what everything in my bank statement meant when a student can to my office. I asked him a few questions about some of the vocabulary on the statement, and he said I spent more in a month than he did all year.