Here’s yet another story, this time in the NYT, about Malayalees tutoring American juvenile delinquents using porncams instant messaging and headphones. 
Where’s the fire button in this game? It ain’t real until desi teachers can simulate stabbing you in the head with a pencil. It’s not the Montessori method, it’s the belan method:
Greeshma Salin swiveled her chair to face the computer, slipped on her headset and said in faintly accented English, “Hello, Daniela.” Seconds later she heard the response, “Hello, Greeshma.” … Ms. Salin, 22, was in Cochin, a city in coastal southern India, and her student, Daniela Marinaro, 13, was at her home in Malibu, Calif…They must go through two weeks of technical, accent and cultural training that includes familiarization with the differences between British English, widely used in India, and American English… “They learn to use ‘eraser’ instead of its Indian equivalent, ‘rubber,’ and understand that ‘I need a pit stop’ could mean ‘I need to go to the loo…’ ”
… she was “floored at first when 10-year old American students addressed me as Leela. All my teaching life in India, my students addressed me as Ma’am,” she said.
Fussy Americans, we shall school your haraam zaday spawn in ye olde English:
Dr. Marinaro said that he had misgivings when he first considered enrolling his daughters for English tutoring. “I thought, how could somebody from India teach them English?”
There’s something very reverse colonialist about this. Now instead of wealthy families importing teachers to provide a proper English education, we have… wealthy families importing teachers to provide a proper education in English. I can just hear the anti-Macaulay bruting about over Skype: ‘Your native culture is worthless! Jonathan Safran Foer, I spit on him! You sawdust-for-brains natives— read Rushdie, Roy, Khushwant Singh if you want to be proper Indian gentlemen.’ 
This part is actually true — we probably get more 1st gen - 2nd gen interaction on this blog than face-to-face, because it’s in text and only the essence remains:
Eliminating factors such as skin color, appearance, gender and accent made the Internet “more egalitarian than most classrooms,” he said.
Previous post here.
