For Thai students, the summer holidays are approaching, but that doesn’t always mean a break from the education calendar. All over the country, but especially in Bangkok, students flock to tutoring centres in the break to brush up on subjects they haven’t excelled at in regular school.
And if you haven’t enrolled in Ajarn Ou’s chemistry course this coming March, you are already late to the game.
This chemistry teacher, whose real name is Uraiwan Sivakul, is better known around the neighbourhood than Walter White of Breaking Bad. She rocks a Liza Minnelli pixie cut, has a fan club of students waiting to speak to her after class, and has a poodle named Arthur with dyed orange ears and rainbow-coloured legs. Ajarn Ou has two biological children but all her students seem like her children.
“In another life, I’d still want to be a teacher, no matter how many times I’m reincarnated,” says Uraiwan of Pure Chem Center, now with over 40,000 students per semester and 27 locations around Thailand.Ajarn Ou has been teaching for more than 30 years, and opened Pure Chem Center over 20 years ago. “I find myself very lucky. It was all luck. When I was learning how to be a teacher and they taught me child psychology, how to sit, how to stand as a teacher. I thought, ‘This was right for me. This is it’. ”
From a modest beginning as a small cram school in Lat Phrao and later Siam Square, the nerve centre of tutoring schools, Ajarn Ou’s business kept growing along with the pressing need for Thai children to seek extra school courses. Five years ago, she stopped renting space in Siam Square and built her own centre near Phaya Thai BTS station — the 14-storey Wannasorn Building — where she has become a landlady renting out space to other cram schools. The expansion of a small chemistry tutoring school into a mini empire reflects the nature of the Thai education system where students see extra courses not as a supplement but a necessity. The teaching profession is considered as a lowly-paid one, but certainly that’s not always the case with famous tutors.
Ajarn Ou’s success has a lot to do with her personality, which corresponds perfectly to the teaching occupation. She has a sense of humour, she smiles, she teaches the arrangement of atoms like she’s narrating a story, she seems as if she doesn’t need sleep. She is restless when she’s not teaching or preparing for a class or compiling textbooks.
Uraiwan Sivakul, or Ajarn Ou, one of the best-known tutors.
“I had a short holiday and I rearranged all my books according to colour gradients, according to the thickness of the spines,” Ajarn Ou says. Her hyperactive character is well-suited to her work. In all her time teaching, she has never once stepped into a class without being prepared, even if she knows the subject like the back of her hand. She studies the questions the students have and incorporates them into the next session, transforming lessons to fit the students’ needs. She tells them there is no such thing as being the best — you can always do better, work harder.
Ajarn Ou once refused to use a set of textbooks she has published, all 25,000 of them, because the order of a few questions had been switched. “Ajarn Anusorn [her husband] asked me for a good reason, a better excuse to discard these books. I said, ‘As a teacher, I know there’s something better for the students and I won’t accept anything less. I won’t be happy teaching’, ” she says.
But she hasn’t always been a perfectionist or a hard worker. As a child, Ajarn Ou could always be found in a playground. “I probably had what people these days would call attention deficit disorder. I didn’t study hard. I had a short attention span. I didn’t even do housework. My mother used to say I wouldn’t have a future. She was always very worried. She kept telling me to study and I never listened to her.’’
The transformation came when her mother sent her to live with her older sister in the hope of correcting her behaviour. Ajarn Ou recalls an occasion when she was a child, sitting in her sister’s neighbour’s home with a couple of children around her own age. They were discussing the story of Ramakien (Ramayana) for a homework assignment. “They didn’t ask me about it. They knew I didn’t know anything. I listened and I understood it well. It’s not an official setting and that’s why I understood it. Then I did really well in a Thai exam and was encouraged. My mother was so proud she told everyone at the market.’’
Ajarn Ou tells her students this story to show that anything is possible if you only try. “I started doing well in school. I was so happy and I realised I could do all these things because I was paying attention,’’ she reminisces.
She also learns from her students and takes advice from them and their parents regarding the expansion of the school and uses of new technology. The growth of her tutoring centre from a small space in Saphan Kwai to an empire began with her taking suggestions from the students’ parents and the help of her husband who is proficient in the business and management side of things.
A parent suggested recording the lectures and showing them as videos as the number of students were increasing rapidly. She took on that advice and with that, Pure Chem centres could be opened anywhere, and made more accessible to the students. “The tape is filmed in a real class with no edits. I would compare it to listening to Sorayut [Suthasanajinda] read the news. In the newsroom he’s live, but on screen it’s not like you get any less content or less understanding.’’
The results the students achieve in entrance exams prove that the videos work. On why students seek extra lessons outside of the regular classroom Ajarn Ou explains: “In schools, teachers don’t have enough time. There are so many subjects. The students are like ducks. They can fly but they aren’t as good as birds. They can swim but they are not like fish. They can walk, but only ungracefully, like chickens. There are five school days in a week and there are so many subjects. There isn’t enough time.’’
The time spent on chemistry at the tutoring centre is more than that spent in school. In addition, Ajarn Ou is able to spend more time on a more difficult subject.
She reviews the exams regularly and has noticed that they are becoming increasingly difficult.
“It was much easier when I started teaching. The syllabus, the tests were easy. It only took a few classes to cover everything. The kids did very well. Now it has become very difficult. It’s even too difficult. That’s why students flock to tutor centres. I think it’s because students began going to extra classes. They become more capable and do better in exams so the schools have to adjust the standards and make the syllabus harder,’’ she observes.
Ajarn Ou continues to revamp her teaching methods and now she uses an iPad during lectures, as suggested by a student.
The students continue to be inspired. The most important thing for her, since she first started studying to be a teacher in Mathayom, is to be happy with what you do. And she is, tremendously. Her eyes sparkle when she talks about being a teacher.
“Last week, a student wrote me a note thanking me for inspiring her to become studious. I have boxes full of these — I collect them all. I plan to go through them all again when I’ve retired. It makes me very happy. Teaching makes me very happy. I feel like I’m teaching my own children.”
LEARNING, CELEB STYLE
Uraiwan Sivakul, or Ajarn Ou, is one among the many celebrities of tutoring centres in Bangkok and across Thailand. The fact that tutors have established celebrity status for themselves is a marvel in itself. But here, if you are a student trying to get into college, there are tutors renowned for every subject, whose names people can recite off the top of the heads — Kru Lilly for Thai language, Dr Pom for physics, Ajarn Jia for maths, Kru Somsri and Ajarn Sanguan for English, and so on. These were household names a decade ago and they remain on top today.
As demonstrated by the case of Ajarn Ou, it is not just their knowledge of the subjects but also their charm and personalities that earn them tutor stardom.
Take the flamboyant Kru Lilly, or Kijimanoch Rojanasupya, who has long commanded a presence in the media. Besides taking charge of the classroom, she has appeared on countless talk shows and recently made headlines when she took to the stage at Democracy Monument last November, taking a political stand against the amnesty bill. She said she was thinking of starting a Pheu Toey Party (“toey” short for “katoey”), The Queer Party, drawing laughter and cheers from the crowd.
While other famous tutors might not be as vocal, or appear as regularly on TV, their names are a legacy, a brand, a guarantee. Their tutoring centres are multi-million baht businesses, sometimes bigger and more influential than regular schools.
It is hard to imagine teenagers willing to spend hours on weekends or summer days watching video screens at tutor centres in a cramped room, or competing to register for a specific course which fills up as soon as it opens. But somehow these teachers have done it. Ajarn Ou pointed out that many students attend tutoring lessons because they were afraid of losing out to their peers who were attending.
“Thai students follow trends,” says Kompit Panasupon, who runs Mac Education, and has almost 40 years in the business. Before the era of Ajarn Ou et al, tutor centres provided courses with the effectiveness of the content as the main selling point.
“With the rise of celebrity teachers like Ajarn Ou and Ajarn Ping, Mac was affected,” Kompit says. “There was now a celebrity teacher for each specific subject. An appealing instructor is something Thai students go for.”
The fame of these teachers travels by word of mouth. Their profiles boast extensive lists of personal achievements, but also the wonderful achievements of their top students.
“Ultimately, the most important thing is to find a balance between business and education,” says Kompit. “Education should always come first.”
Thai students see cram schools not as a supplement but a necessity.
