The Need to Re-examine Long-Running Activities

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. While I subscribe to the said adage, my presumption here is that one has gone over the thing and has seen it to be still working well. The presumption shouldn't be that since something has been long running, it should go on forever without the benefit of being checked upon, once in a while.

I don't propose to say I know the answer to the following dilemma but I think it is a dilemma worth considering.

A school, a prestigious school, has this program where Seniors in high school go to the different public schools nearby to teach Grade Six students Math and English. How noble, I thought, considering that to ensure that the students from the exclusive school do not take matters for granted, they are graded on the lesson plans they prepare. They even get plus points come the choosing of Valedictorian time for proposing and preparing a textbook for Math -- an apparent means to an end: the pot of gold. Never mind if in preparing that textbook, they plagiarize. but that's another story. Anyway...

The reason why the program worries me is that I now tutor a boy who tutors these public school students. And heavens, this tutee of mine cannot even distinguish a noun from a verb from a preposition to a conjunction. Possibly, his students know more and he thinks so too. Once, he told me, their lesson was on "how to make verbs nouns". Of course that means having verbs take on the form of gerunds or infinitives. Do you think my tutee knows that? He who decides on whether a sentence is correctly constructed or not from the sound of it? Anyway, I asked, so how did you teach it? He said he asked them how to do it. I don't know if by now his students have come to the conclusion that they know more than he does. I think that that won't be as bad as his teaching them wrong stuff. I constantly tease him, "pity your students". He smiles because what can he do? He is expected to teach them English... And he has no choice but to do so lest he flunk his fourth year in high school.