Stanford-Tutoring the Tudors-Intellectual Vitality
Hello forum members:
"Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality. Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging."
When the phrase "intellectually engaging" enters my brain, my mind doesn't jump towards a challenging calculus test, my favorite book, or Wikipedia.com. Instead, it looks at tutoring. Tutoring means much more to me than giving up three hours out of my week and making a nice forty dollars. It offers an experience and skill few high school students have: the ability to teach others.
I was nervous when I received my first tutoring gig as a junior for pre-calculus. Granted, I was talented at math, but had virtually no knowledge pertaining to vectors, matrices, and the dreadful polar coordinates. As my pupil and I sat down, he stated he needed help understanding Descartes' Law of Signs, a rule I had never heard of before. Wanting to appear as professional as possible, I rapidly flipped the pages of his textbook and swiftly analyzed and absorbed this mystic Descartes' Law of Signs.
This in and of itself was an intellectual feat: learning an entirely new concept under the pressure of a client looking over my shoulder and expecting help. But this was the easy part. The real challenge was then synthesizing the information in such a way that my pupil would understand and fully grasp the concept. Doing so was not only dependent on my clarity, creativeness, and ability in explaining things, but also on my student's attentiveness and willingness to understand the ideas. I ended up being successful in helping my student understand Descartes' Law, and he later improved his grade to an "A" in pre-calculus.
While my experience in tutoring has bred skills like thinking on my toes and creativeness in communicating and explaining ideas, I do not feel that those qualities are the most important products. Rather, tutoring helped me learn patience. I can control how I process and learn information or how I describe a theorem to my student. However, I was never able to affect my student's attitude, or desire to learn. This is what taught me patience, that, no matter how frustrated or disinterested my student became in learning something new, I would remain calm and steadfast in my efforts.
Hello forum members:
"Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality. Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging."
When the phrase "intellectually engaging" enters my brain, my mind doesn't jump towards a challenging calculus test, my favorite book, or Wikipedia.com. Instead, it looks at tutoring. Tutoring means much more to me than giving up three hours out of my week and making a nice forty dollars. It offers an experience and skill few high school students have: the ability to teach others.
I was nervous when I received my first tutoring gig as a junior for pre-calculus. Granted, I was talented at math, but had virtually no knowledge pertaining to vectors, matrices, and the dreadful polar coordinates. As my pupil and I sat down, he stated he needed help understanding Descartes' Law of Signs, a rule I had never heard of before. Wanting to appear as professional as possible, I rapidly flipped the pages of his textbook and swiftly analyzed and absorbed this mystic Descartes' Law of Signs.
This in and of itself was an intellectual feat: learning an entirely new concept under the pressure of a client looking over my shoulder and expecting help. But this was the easy part. The real challenge was then synthesizing the information in such a way that my pupil would understand and fully grasp the concept. Doing so was not only dependent on my clarity, creativeness, and ability in explaining things, but also on my student's attentiveness and willingness to understand the ideas. I ended up being successful in helping my student understand Descartes' Law, and he later improved his grade to an "A" in pre-calculus.
While my experience in tutoring has bred skills like thinking on my toes and creativeness in communicating and explaining ideas, I do not feel that those qualities are the most important products. Rather, tutoring helped me learn patience. I can control how I process and learn information or how I describe a theorem to my student. However, I was never able to affect my student's attitude, or desire to learn. This is what taught me patience, that, no matter how frustrated or disinterested my student became in learning something new, I would remain calm and steadfast in my efforts.
