Tutoring
Being young, hardworking and exploitable, I spent six months as the Upper East Side’s version of an Asian sweatshop worker. I wasn’t folding other people’s laundry, selling batteries on the subway, or pushing light-colored babies in strollers. I was an SAT math tutor for progeny of the city’s upper crust.
***
“Did you hear about Emily’s scores on the PSAT?” Emily’s father announced as he entered the study, where Emily and I were reviewing trigonometry theorems.
“Yes,” I said. “She did well for her first shot.”
“Well, there’s always room for improvement,” he said. He leaned against the leather couch and directed his eyes toward me. “Rachel, I’ve got a proposition for you: the tutor who raises Emily’s scores the most—you with math or Andrea with verbal—gets a free trip to the Caribbean!”
Although I’m not certain I could accurately identify the Caribbean on a world map and just misspelled it as I typed it here now, I do know that the man was totally serious. I locked my jaw to prevent it from dropping, then shrugged and grinned with what I hoped was the socially appropriate combination of enthusiasm and nonchalance.
“Sounds good to me,” I said. I looked at Emily. She glanced up from her textbook and flipped her ponytail to the side.
“Dad,” she sighed, “I’ve got to study.”
Growing up in Edina, Minnesota I’d always considered myself a member of the privileged class. Upper-middle class for sure. I got new jeans for the first day of school, my dad drove an Audi, and a few of my friends had lakeside cabins. People from Edina had the reputation of being rich, privileged snobs. We were “cake eaters,” our sports rivals heckled, as our hockey and tennis teams took one state championship after another. Edina moms shopped a lot, went to the tanning booth, and bore highly demanding children. EDINA, it was said, was an acronym: Every Day I Need Attention.
But after attending college in Silicon Valley and working in New York, I realized that upper-middle class for Minneapolis wasn’t upper-middle class for the rest of the country. Here I encountered PWM: People With Money. Real money. Old money. Lotsa money. And I don’t mean daddy-bought-me-a-Jeep-Wrangler-for-my-16th-birthday. That’s Edina money. I mean daddy-bought-my-tutor-a-trip-to-the-Caribbean. I mean my mom’s maiden name is Gamble, as in Procter &. I mean dad got me a position as Dick Cheney’s aide. I mean my house on the Upper East Side is a house. Not an apartment. The guy who answered the door isn’t a member of my family. That kind of looks like a Picasso on the wall, well, because that is a Picasso on the wall.
Even as an upper-yuppie-up-and-coming college grad off to an ambitious design career, I became the underclass for this upper class caste. I found myself in closer parallel to a factory laborer except that I wasn’t churning out t-shirts; I was churning out statistically reliable test takers.
It wasn’t the fact that I made $25 an hour while my employer charged $180 that made me want to quit. (Well, yeah, that was part of it.) But the real problem was that I had students who had ordered 30 hours—$5,400 worth of tutoring—and I just felt like I was ripping people off.
As college admissions become increasingly selective, parents feel pressured to shell out thousands to guarantee their children a spot in one of the country’s most prestigious schools. I don’t know why. After they graduate, they’ll just join the rest of us SAT tutors.
