From No English to a Raw 50: My Story

This is my story.

I feel like I’ve been tutoring a lot of you for a while now, and I’ve known many of you for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever really shared how I got here. So here it is.

Arriving with nothing

We came to Australia when I was about eight years old, with no English whatsoever. And as Australia does with new arrivals, you can’t just walk into a primary school; first you have to complete what’s called a language school. For me that was in Carnegie: a small place where they gather all the migrant kids, every one of us from a different background, none of us sharing a common language.

I still remember the terrifying Russian babushka who taught us English. We were all scared of her and at the same time completely unable to talk to each other, because one kid was speaking Chinese, another Hebrew, another Italian. The only thing that bonded us was whatever was in our lunchboxes at lunchtime.

Having just arrived from the other side of the world, the last thing I wanted was to feel isolated. But I got lucky — English just made sense to me from day one, and I finished language school in six months, half the usual time. From there I skipped prep and went straight into Year 1.

The kid in the principal’s office

My primary school years were, to put it kindly, menacing. I was not an easy kid. I couldn’t stay focused, I couldn’t sit and study, and I pulled enough silly pranks that my parents seemed to be in the principal’s office almost every week, explaining why we were there in the first place.

It was around Year 6 heading into Year 7 that I started to actually care about my results. And I tried — Year 6, 7, 8, 9, I gave it everything. I dedicated myself to studying. But I couldn’t get above 70% in a single subject. English included! At one point I even had an additional teaching aid doing extra classes with me just to make sure I wasn’t failing. I’ll never forget my tears falling on the fractions worksheet as I sat in with the aid after school 😂

I was unmotivated. I felt like a failure. And I genuinely thought that was the end the story.

A point to prove

But I hadn’t given up. I realised that if I wanted to succeed, I needed an environment that would let me, which is why I moved to Bialik, a very academic private school. God bless my parents. I’ll never be able to thank them enough for the effort they went through to put me there.

Now I had something to prove. And as I walked into Year 10 in a fiercely competitive school, I realised the truth: I didn’t need to study harder, I needed to study smarter.

So instead of studying my subjects, I spent my time learning how to study, which is basically what we do at Tutors Melbourne today (I’ll touch more on this shortly). I was often behind on the actual content, but I had an edge nobody else had: I knew how to learn. I experimented, trial and error, testing which methods actually produced results and let me spend less time studying. Eventually I built my own system.

That system carried me into Year 11 and Year 12. My results started climbing. Suddenly a good ATAR felt possible. Suddenly all the effort felt worth it.

When English finally clicked

Even then, English wasn’t easy for me. I poured countless hours into it in Year 12 and could still barely break the 80s.

Then, around the end of first semester, right about where all my students are now, something clicked. Full credit to my Year 12 teacher, an absolutely phenomenal and genuinely life-changing teacher who inspired me by the way! She told me that English, VCE English included, is so much more than writing an essay. It’s about understanding the world around you. It’s about understanding the authors who wrote these books. The ones we call classics for a reason.

The moment I started treating English as a chance to show that I understood what the author wanted me to understand, and that I could apply those lessons to the world around me, my essays transformed. All of a sudden, English wasn’t so bad.

Now I had the perfect storm: a system of revision, and a real understanding of what makes a student good at English. Put those two together, and things changed.

The lesson that felt like cheating

I also gained a bit of a funny reputation. I’d go out, have fun, do my hobbies — I wasn’t glued to my desk. Everyone says study hard, and yes, I poured hundreds of hours into my subjects. But if I had the chance to go out, I’d take it.

And it taught me something I’ve now seen in myself, in my peers, and in the countless students I’ve taught: the students who succeed most in VCE are the ones who let their brain rest. They let it passively absorb the knowledge, and they keep balance in everything else. It almost feels like cheating, but it worked a charm!

So I walked into that exam calm and confident. And there it was: a RAW 50.

All the work, all the stress, all the self-doubt — from arriving in a new country knowing no one and not a single word of English, to a raw 50 in English.

Why I do this

The beautiful thing is that now I get to pass all of it on. Every lesson, every hardship — I get to hand it to your kids so they can enjoy Year 12 more than I did, and skip the mistakes I made along the way. That is the privilege of being a tutor and a mentor. That’s what Tutors Melbourne is about.

My goal is to teach your kids how to study, how to look at their subjects, and how to make the most of these final months before their exams. Because it’s never about being the hardest worker, and it’s never about being the smartest. It’s about the person with the right attitude, and every hour I spend with your kids, I try to pass that attitude on to them. Having worked with them for months now, the growth I’ve seen has been substantial, and it makes me incredibly proud.

So that’s my story. Please feel free to share it with other parents.

As we move into Term 4, I’m looking to take on the next generation of students. If you — or anyone you know — is interested, please spread the word.

With much love, as always. I’ll see you very soon.

Yahav