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Abstract

hour long lecture is a question mark on your student’s face. At the beginning of my journey, such incidents used to get on my nerves; not to mention how they left me completely baffled. Sometimes the same 3-hour timeframe changed to a month’s timeframe. Imagine your student coming and telling you at the fag end of a month, that he didn’t really understand what you had taught him 3 weeks ago. It is indeed frustrating and agonizing but still, I used to go back and teach the same concept over and over again. And one fine day, the results did show. But with time, I learned that the final exams are not always the end goal. Some students take time longer than what an academic calendar gives them and patience is all that it requires.<h1 id="65b5">3. Commitment</h1>I used to travel 2 hours to and fro on a non-traffic day to go and teach my first student for a mere 3 hours. The math didn’t add up well for me in my mind and by the end of Summers, I was just tired of traveling those distances. As my Sophomore year approached, I was glad that my part-time teaching job was coming to an end. (If you know Mumbai traffic, you would surely resonate with me) Just when I thought my timetable would be getting lighter, the kid’s father requested me to continue for another year till he gets done with his final exams. I was quite apprehensive at first, with the enormous college semester lying in front of my eyes, but a sense of commitment kicked in me. My student had built a comfort zone around my teaching and leaving him hanging in what we call the most important year of our student life, didn’t look like a good option for my conscience. And so I took up the offer, and looking back I feel if that hadn’t happened, my teaching career would have most definitely ended as a small stint in the summers.<blockquote id="cbfd">Commitment is like sleep. You’re hesitant at first, but then once you get in the process, getting out of it is difficult.</blockquote><h1 id="0928">4. Gratitude > everything</h1>After almost a year of effort, my first student got admitted to Purdue University to pursue his undergrad studies in engineering. That day, THAT feeling surpassed all. Satisfaction and gratitude were sufficient enough to push me to continue teaching. Very rece

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ntly, he hit me up on my messenger and told me,“I am sure you must have thought of how dumb I was, back when you were teaching me and I think I was. I didn’t take studies seriously back then and I wanted to prove myself a point in college. You won’t believe me, but my Score is 3.6/4 at the end of the first year.”The feeling of being able to make a change in someone else’s life is beyond description. The gratitude you receive at the end of it is incomparable. This got me to a lot of thinking about my goals in life and there was a distinct transition in my thoughts. (I hope to write about this someday too)<h1 id="cd7d">5. Humility</h1>The last thing I want to talk about is Humility. After having dealt with several students and parents, I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten a great education and from the right people in my life. I also feel blessed to have got an unbiased and open chance to pursue whatever I have wanted to. There are so many students who are reeling under the pressure of their parents or peers and are being forced to study something they don’t really understand. They are made to believe that they were meant to do it and just need to put a little bit more to get there. I pity them, as most of their time goes in adding incremental value to something they weren’t meant to do as supposed to multiplying and leveraging on what they are good at. All of it just makes my achievements feel small and insignificant in the broader perspective.However, this journey has been special to me and I hope to keep sharing and giving back to society to my best capacity. At the same time, I urge you all, ‘If you think you know something, try teaching it.’I would like to take this opportunity to thank my high school Physics teacher(Suman Saurabh Sir). He has helped me profusely even through college and has been a catalyst in most of the decisions I have taken. If it were not for him, I would have never gathered the confidence to go and teach right itself in my first year. I also want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the teachers who have taught me right from kindergarten to now. I wouldn’t be the person I am without the great education that I have received.~Adit D</article></body>

5 Things That Teaching Taught Me

If you think you know something, try teaching it!

It was in my first year when I saw an advertisement saying, “Tutor required” on one of my Facebook College Groups. Being a freshman, you have got ample time on your hand to explore different hobbies in life and so I did. My first student was an 11th Grade kid preparing for his SATs. I had taken up the task of helping him just as a stint for my freshman summers and little did I know, that I had embarked upon a journey that I hope to continue throughout my life.

So, after 4 students and more than 250 hours of teaching, I do believe teaching is underrated. Teaching is more about iterations. You try teaching using one method and if it doesn’t work, you rattle your mind and try coming up with another, and it goes on and on till you seem to get a green signal from your student. It’s been a humbling experience of 2 years and as stupid as this analogy sounds, it is true:-

Teaching is like wine. It just gets better with time.

While teaching has certainly helped me understand my own concepts in a better fashion, there are several other non-academic aspects that teaching has imbibed in me.

1. Perspective

Our constant pursuit as a teacher is to know what goes on in the student’s head. Every time I teach a new concept, I wait and try to think from the student’s perspective, from a mind that has zero clues about the topic. What might seem like the silliest of things, might just as well be a pyramid of doubts for them. More often than not, even in life, we assume things for the opposite person and take them for granted. Looking at situations from other people’s perspectives has hugely helped me in empathizing with other people.

2. Patience

There have been just so many instances, where all you get at the end of a 3-hour long lecture is a question mark on your student’s face. At the beginning of my journey, such incidents used to get on my nerves; not to mention how they left me completely baffled. Sometimes the same 3-hour timeframe changed to a month’s timeframe. Imagine your student coming and telling you at the fag end of a month, that he didn’t really understand what you had taught him 3 weeks ago. It is indeed frustrating and agonizing but still, I used to go back and teach the same concept over and over again. And one fine day, the results did show. But with time, I learned that the final exams are not always the end goal. Some students take time longer than what an academic calendar gives them and patience is all that it requires.

3. Commitment

I used to travel 2 hours to and fro on a non-traffic day to go and teach my first student for a mere 3 hours. The math didn’t add up well for me in my mind and by the end of Summers, I was just tired of traveling those distances. As my Sophomore year approached, I was glad that my part-time teaching job was coming to an end. (If you know Mumbai traffic, you would surely resonate with me) Just when I thought my timetable would be getting lighter, the kid’s father requested me to continue for another year till he gets done with his final exams. I was quite apprehensive at first, with the enormous college semester lying in front of my eyes, but a sense of commitment kicked in me. My student had built a comfort zone around my teaching and leaving him hanging in what we call the most important year of our student life, didn’t look like a good option for my conscience. And so I took up the offer, and looking back I feel if that hadn’t happened, my teaching career would have most definitely ended as a small stint in the summers.

Commitment is like sleep. You’re hesitant at first, but then once you get in the process, getting out of it is difficult.

4. Gratitude > everything

After almost a year of effort, my first student got admitted to Purdue University to pursue his undergrad studies in engineering. That day, THAT feeling surpassed all. Satisfaction and gratitude were sufficient enough to push me to continue teaching. Very recently, he hit me up on my messenger and told me,

“I am sure you must have thought of how dumb I was, back when you were teaching me and I think I was. I didn’t take studies seriously back then and I wanted to prove myself a point in college. You won’t believe me, but my Score is 3.6/4 at the end of the first year.”

The feeling of being able to make a change in someone else’s life is beyond description. The gratitude you receive at the end of it is incomparable. This got me to a lot of thinking about my goals in life and there was a distinct transition in my thoughts. (I hope to write about this someday too)

5. Humility

The last thing I want to talk about is Humility. After having dealt with several students and parents, I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten a great education and from the right people in my life. I also feel blessed to have got an unbiased and open chance to pursue whatever I have wanted to. There are so many students who are reeling under the pressure of their parents or peers and are being forced to study something they don’t really understand. They are made to believe that they were meant to do it and just need to put a little bit more to get there. I pity them, as most of their time goes in adding incremental value to something they weren’t meant to do as supposed to multiplying and leveraging on what they are good at. All of it just makes my achievements feel small and insignificant in the broader perspective.

However, this journey has been special to me and I hope to keep sharing and giving back to society to my best capacity. At the same time, I urge you all, ‘If you think you know something, try teaching it.’

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my high school Physics teacher(Suman Saurabh Sir). He has helped me profusely even through college and has been a catalyst in most of the decisions I have taken. If it were not for him, I would have never gathered the confidence to go and teach right itself in my first year. I also want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the teachers who have taught me right from kindergarten to now. I wouldn’t be the person I am without the great education that I have received.

~Adit D