CALLING INDIA
The scene in the Broder family's Beverly Hills home is, in most respects, a classic glimpse into the life of your typical Southern California teenager. Noah, a high school sophomore wearing blue-and-orange tennis shoes, is working out a quadratic equation under the watchful eye of his math tutor, Shani, a petite young woman in brown leather sandals who has a copy of his textbook open in front of her.
"Exactly, Noah," Shani says, flashing a thumbs-up sign.
"Cool," Noah replies.
Across town in Inglewood, a sophomore named Mariana Ibrahin is going over a biology assignment with her tutor, Roshan. They both hear the occasional roar of a jet on final approach to LAX over Mariana's house, but neither is distracted from the work at hand. Their twice-a-week sessions have helped lift Mariana's grade to a solid B, and Roshan adores her student. In fact, Roshan says later, "I'd love to meet my Mariana one day."
Nothing is quite as it seems here in the global village, where Noah and Mariana get their after-school help in a virtual classroom, separated from their tutors by 12 1/2 time zones. Tutors Shani Jose and Roshan Salim work beneath humming ceiling fans in a muggy port city in India, where, fittingly, today is tomorrow. They are connected to their pupils by a voice-over-Internet phone and an interactive computer "whiteboard" where teacher and pupil write using a stylus and pad and on which, when appropriate, the tutors can add a universally understood electronic symbol for a job well done: Thumbs-up.
The spread of outsourcing, especially to India, has touched millions of Americans in ways both frustrating and satisfying. Customer service agents answer our complaints from Bangalore. Law firms get their legal transcripts typed in Mumbai. Blue chip companies farm out high-tech work to engineers in Hyderabad.
In the last few years, a small group of companies, most started by Indian entrepreneurs, has tried a new twist on the theme. They've tapped India's pool of highly educated and, by American standards, low-paid men and women to shore up the math, science and even English skills of a new generation of Americans, catering to parents desperate to get their children into the best possible colleges. In Los Angeles, this flip side of the outsourcing debate unfolds in microcosm each weekday afternoon, in quiet moments between pupils and tutors.
- 'Distance Learning' for Schoolkids Goes Global Jan 01, 2006
- $30 million is pledged for new USC campus center Oct 09, 2007
- Company to Tutor Employee Literacy Dec 01, 2000
