We’ve been back in the neighborhood for four days and so far we’ve been avoiding the Avon Lady just fine, though with the instinct of the truly calculating she must have sussed something out because she is sending her son over for Russian lessons from someone in the household who is truly qualified and should be paid far more than the sum Avon Lady is willing to part with, but getting the most for the measly sums she’s willing to part with has been the Leitmotif of her life, and why change a good thing when it’s been working just fine.

To be clear, the Avon Lady isn’t corrupt or even a bad apple because she sells Avon. She is not good people because of the way she goes about it and about life in general. Case in point, her child is supposed to sit an exam online due to some legalities that shouldn’t be disclosed when it comes to minors and in this too she is extremely sporadic.

As someone who taught English and German all my life (or at least since I was 14) and has since pivoted into communication skills exclusively, I’ve never been a fan of just swotting up for the test or exam. In fact I make it very clear that my job is to help you feel confident in the language and in order to do that we are going to forget that there is an exam and focus on just having fun with the language. We speak, we create scenarios that can go from funny to tragic to the downright absurd and we do this with the understanding that it helps us develop a feel for the language and how it is used. It’s a method that takes away the horrors of learning vocabulary and allows people to make mistakes and understand how they were made. There is a lot of freedom, which in turn allows you to explore and obtain knowledge via trial and error. 

But when the focus is on the exam, it adds a sense of stress and focusing only on the bare minimum. The road might seem easier, but in the long run it is not sustainable, because we don’t retain half of what we learn, and while this method enables us to learn it all by heart, when we deviate from that script we are lost. We don’t understand the ways of bending the language because we never allowed ourselves the chance to experience that way of experimentation. I have worked with people with this mindset when I was younger and needed the money, and they rarely succeeded without cheating, or – on the rare occasions they did succeed – rarely retained much of anything beyond the exam. 

But Avon Lady either doesn’t realize this or she simply doesn’t care. The language exams will be necessary for her child’s education later on down the road when they want to graduate high school and pursue any career. And in order to ensure that they are obtained her method is simple and not something that I haven’t seen in Poland or Hungary. Because her child will not be taking the exam. Oh, to be sure they will be logging in and replying but the same tutor who will be “preparing” them for the exam will be right there, making sure they fill in the correct answers, essentially writing the exam for them.

Considering that Mrs. 52 Hours of Freedom paid someone the equivalent of 150e to write her MBA thesis for her, I should not be all that surprised. But it still irks me, more so when I saw someone close to her suffer mentally while writing their own MSc thesis because they wanted to do a good job and be honest. I’m not exactly a paragon of virtue myself in that I’ve pulled some pranks that were legendary in college and school (but only in response to having been treated unfairly), but theses and diplomas as well as important exams is where I draw the line.