english tuition
I had a trial lesson at a local tuition centre today (～￣▽￣)～
It was a group tuition session, and multiple students were sitting at a long, light-brown, birch table. They were all female, and the teacher was a male. Since it was my first time actually experiencing a real tuition session -- academic, institutionalised and expensive -- I was extremely nervous. This was glaringly obvious in the fact that I arrived at the centre 30 minutes early, waited outside the glass doors for 2 minutes after the session had already started, and stood nervously at the edge of the room, staring apprehensively at the figures seated by the table.
The tuition teacher tilted his head up and greeted me with a dismissive smile. He beckoned me to take a seat beside him, and I uncomfortably navigated into the proffered seat, wary of the half-lidded eyes around me. Oddly, the students remained entirely silent and barely looked up at the newcomer. Their eyes, half concealed by beige-coloured eyelids, were trained on the smooth display panels of their phones. Well, what did I expect? To be honest, they all looked like they were forced by their parents to be there. Literally no enthusiasm whatsoever.
Undaunted by my passionless peers, I eagerly accepted the worksheet the teacher listlessly handed to me. The sound of my bag being unzipped cut through the deathly silent room as I moved to retrieve my pencil case. I did it as much out of purpose as out of habit. To me, a pencil case signified that you were ready to write, measure lengths and calculate things; basically, you were about business and prepared to tackle anything thrown your way. This is why I pack everything I need academically into my pencil case: highlighter, pen, pencil, eraser, curved ruler, straight ruler, calculator and stapler. Trust me, I've tried to jam a hole puncher into it, but the poor contraption simply couldn't fit.
Over the course of the session, I would jot down notes and tidbits of understanding in the margins or on blank pages in the worksheet. Interestingly, I was the only one doing so. All the other students were simply underlining what the teacher underlined, following his every move rather lazily. I liked the feel of writing, as the action itself could not only concretise what the teacher was saying but also stimulate my own lines of thought, connecting the idea to my own stores of knowledge. I wasn't just copying whatever the teacher uttered, I was processing what he said and turning it around, churning it through a machine, breaking it down into its constituent components, making it mine. Writing notes was an active process, and one I was always happy to indulge in.
A few minutes into the session, the teacher admitted that he was not the actual English tuition teacher, but instead a substitute. This was because the English teacher was not here today, and the reason for this was not given. None of the students pushed it, and me, being a newcomer, felt uneasy trying to access this crucial information. After all, this was just a trial session, so why should I care? Unfortunately, this train of thought proved very wrong when I recounted the entire tuition experience to my mother afterwards. Enraged by their unprofessional conduct, my mother spewed, "How dare they change the teacher without first informing us? How are we supposed to know if the tuition is good if they don't even give us the right teacher? I'm going to write..."
Not only that, the substitute teacher even used ChatGPT to generate 2 sample essays for us to learn from. He didn't directly say this, instead telling us that he had written it, but the formatting and writing style were very obviously not human. This lack of effort on the teacher's part irked my mother even more, but I personally wasn't really affected by the teacher's actions. After all, my English teacher at school also frequently used AI to teach essay writing. It seemed like a pretty common, if not normal, thing to do. The AI-generated essays also served to help me develop a structure for hybrid essays involving describing incidents, so the truth is that effort does not always equal reward. Seemingly thoughtless and poorly-done work can stimulate critical thinking and help us see patterns in a genre. The essays may not be winning any Pulitzer prizes, but they helped me to grasp the concept of hybrid essays, and in doing so made a whole new category of writing accessible and inviting to me.
The worksheet provided in the tuition session included a practice prompt and space to jot down ideas for our essay. Here's what I wrote.
Write about an incident that changed your life and explain how it has impacted you.
Incident:
- my brother fell off his bicycle
- because I insisted on cycling in wet weather (cool breeze, overcast sky, misty spray of rain)
- he scraped his knee and knocked out his tooth
- the incident allowed me to understand when to give up
- freed up a lot of time for me as I quit doing things that weren't meant for me
- more opportunities to discover new interests
As I pored over these notes with my mother after the session, she gave her perspective on the event. I listened attentively and jotted down notes under the ones I had already written.
Incident:
- my brother fell off his bicycle
- he scraped his knee and knocked out his tooth
- it was a public holiday, so most clinics were closed
- my mom hired a taxi to whisk us to a 24-hour clinic
- I focused on handling his bicycle, securing the broken machine to the pole of a streetlamp
- instead of pressuring my mom into acting quicker, I resolved a separate but equally pressing issue
- this allowed her to focus on my brother's injuries
- everyone has a different part to play in an emergency
- don't flock to deal with an issue that somebody else is already tackling. that only causes stress to that person and leaves other potential problems unresolved
- instead, look for other ways to help, like I did
During the tuition session, the teacher had mentioned 2 main ways to describe an accident: with the main character as an aggravator or a healer. An aggravator is a person who partially caused the incident to happen, while a healer is someone who partially helped to rectify the incident. Neatly said, one is a villain and the other is a hero. My original story was a villain type while my mother's was a hero type. This was quite fitting, because my mother always tended to see the good in me, while I -- like most other people -- tended to only see fault and blame. This is called the negativity bias.
The phenomenon whereby people think negatively about themselves but see others in a positive light is closely related to cognitive biases and self-image dynamics. One relevant concept is the "negativity bias," which is the tendency for individuals to focus more on negative stimuli or aspects of themselves, leading to a more negative self-view. Meanwhile, they may apply a "halo effect" when viewing others, which is a cognitive bias where people tend to see others' traits more positively based on good impressions or specific positive attributes.
Now, onto my actual hybrid essay! The tuition teacher did not give us time in class to write it out, neither did he assign it as homework, but as a personal challenge I am going to try writing one villain type and one hero type hybrid essay based on the notes I had penned down during the session.
Villain
It's hard to imagine how my stubbornness could injure my brother so horribly. This gory incident taught me how to let some things go, because I simply wasn't meant to have them.
Overcast skies and a misty spray of rain greeted my bubbly, overexcited eyes. It was a public holiday, which meant no school and freed up precious time for a cycling trip. As I hurriedly urged my mother and brother to rise from their comfortable slumbers, I pictured myself in the park, my legs pumping to pedal my gorgeous bicycle and propel it forward, the cool breeze rustling my hair. I just had to cycle!
After setting off for the park in our little triangular formation, the skies promptly darkened, the heavy clouds blocking out the sun and casting the road ahead in ominous shadows. Undaunted, I pushed on and continued cycling to the park, but my brother made a strangled sound in his throat. Hearing his animalistic utterance, I slowed down to hear him tell Mother, "I don't want to cycle anymore." His voice was small and wavering, stripped of its usual arrogance.
"But I want to cycle," I groaned to Mother, staring at her concerned form with pleading eyes. I was always more like my father, more of an adventurer, maybe even a daredevil. I always wanted to push boundaries, but was this one worth pushing?
Me being the persuasive debater that I was, I easily convinced Mother to press on despite my brother's protests. As a half-hearted apology, I agreed to race my brother and let him win. As he flew past me, I caught sight of his gleeful smile, that rush of confidence, and I grinned back, even though he had already passed me by.
The wind picked up and was coming at us hard now, billowing our shirts and tossing my hair. My brother's hat was picked up by a stray gust and landed unimpressively on the tarmac behind him. I yelled out "Hat!" and slammed on my brakes, intending to go get it for him. Unfortunately, he had the same idea and whipped his head around, eyes on his misplaced hat. Then he crashed.
My brother went flying through the air before landing and skidding on the rough, black road. He sat there in stunned silence as I rushed over to his bicycle. It was upside down, and upon closer inspection apparently had a broken gear. My mother was cleaning up my brother's bleeding knee as I jostled the bicycle and parked it to the side. Tentatively, I stepped towards my family.
"I told you I didn't want to go," my brother pouted, putting all the blame on me. He wasn't wrong, though. As he was ranting and raving, a white object droped out of his mouth and onto the gray floor. Curiosity morphed into horror as my brother realised what it was. "My tooth!" He screamed.
In the end, we made it to the hospital, where the doctors secured his tooth back in place and told us to wait for it to reattach. The whole experience made me feel terribly guilty and regretful of my insistence. My mind was filled with one singular thought: what if we hadn't gone cycling? Then my brother wouldn't have to sit through a painful root canal surgery, nor would he be forced to live off liquid food for a month. Why was he the one suffering for my mistake? What sense did that make?
From that day onwards, I always check the weather forecast before planning to cycle and never race with my brother again. I have learned when to stop insisting that we cycle and instead think of other fun activities to do when the weather is particularly stormy. As a result, I have developed interests in reading and writing. This incident changed how I looked at the world -- it was no longer a binary dimension with only two possible choices. No, there were thousands of options laid out before me. I just had to look.
Hero
When disaster strikes, everyone has their own part to play. I learnt this prudent philosophy when I was out cycling with my family.
The sky was overcast and pregnant with heavy clouds. Powerful, savage winds tugged at our bikes and bodies as we pushed against them, struggling like fish against the current. My thighs were burning with the strain of pedalling against such a force of nature, but I wasn't going to start complaining.
Just then, an errant gust of wind snatched my brother's hat from his head, like an eagle plucking a thrashing fish from the sea. It tumbled in the chaotic breeze before eventually reaching the ground, another proud soldier lost to the wind. I slammed on my brakes and went to retrieve the little blue hat, but my brother had the same idea. He just executed it poorly.
His eyes were on the hat behind him, not the road before him, and so a pebble, or a discarded water bottle, on the road tipped him backwards and off he was, tumbling through air, just like his hat had been mere seconds ago. He landed hard, sharp bone meeting jagged concrete, and scraped his knee on the rough surface. Blood spilled out of the laceration, pooling onto the floor that was his undoing.
Watching my mother rush over to my brother's side, I decided to turn my attention to another problem: the bicycle. It was upside down, wheels still turning eerily. I hoisted it over and tested the brakes and wheels. Unfortunately, the gear seemed to be broken, and I wondered to myself whether that caused the accident.
As I pushed the broken contraption to the side, my mother called an ambulance for my brother. Trodding to her side, she asked me about the bicycle, worry strewn all over her face. When she heard that it was taken care of, she sighed in relief, tightly-knitted eyebrows finally relaxing. She gripped my hand tightly as the 911 operator arranged for an ambulance, her eyes boring into mine, the gesture one of pure gratitude and appreciation.
I learnt that quick-thinking only helps when you do it right. Instead of pressuring my mom, I resolved a separate but equally pressing issue. This allowed her to focus on my brother's injuries. In emergencies, don't flock to deal with an issue that somebody else is already tackling. That only gives them stress and leaves other potential problems unaddressed. Instead, look for other ways to help, like I did, because that can be the difference between an accident and a disaster.
The next time a crisis occurs, I will be sure to assign specific roles to everyone involved. Not only can this speed up the clean-up process, but it can also prevent freeloaders from nagging and stressing the people who are actually helping.
Now, I'm going to look at an AI-generated example essay to see how to improve.
Neutral
The incident that changed my life happened in January 2021, when I was involved in a minor car accident on my way to work. While physically, I only sustained minor injuries, the event proved to be an emotional turning point. The moment my car collided with another vehicle, I felt a surge of fear and helplessness that I had never experienced before.
In the weeks following the accident, I found myself constantly replaying the scene in my mind. I struggled with anxiety each time I got behind the wheel, and even lost sleep worrying about what might have happened if things had turned out worse. This forced me to confront my own vulnerability and rethink how I approached daily routines.
The experience taught me several important lessons. First, I realized how valuable life and health are, and how quickly things can change unexpectedly. This insight encouraged me to become more cautious and present, both on the road and in other aspects of life. I started practicing mindfulness to manage my anxiety, which gradually helped me regain confidence while driving.
Additionally, I became more empathetic toward others who struggle with anxiety or have faced traumatic events. I began volunteering with a local support group for accident survivors, helping them share their stories and overcome fears. The sense of community and purpose I found there became an important part of my recovery.
Ultimately, that accident pushed me to make positive changes: I now cherish the small things, manage stress better, and take nothing for granted. It was an event that reminded me how one moment can reshape your outlook and priorities forever.
The most obvious points of difference between my essays and the AI-generated essay is the length of the descriptive section. Being a storyteller, I find it hard to keep stories short and irritatingly vague. The urge to fully develop a story, no matter the context, proves severely unhelpful, especially in exam settings that usually skim past the descriptive aspect in favour of the reflective segment. It seems like Perplexity AI knew this and played it to its advantage, simply briefing us on the car crash and focusing more on its impact on the writer. Which is, well, the main point of the essay.
Well done, AI, you nailed it (*^▽^*)
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