As a first year university student who only completed their HSC last year, I have come to realise that tutoring other people has become not just a teaching experience, but also a personal opportunity to learn. By employing this new mindset, I have noted that these sessions inadvertently push me to develop my own critical thinking and problem solving skills, while constantly challenging me to communicate my ideas to different audiences.
One way in which I like to push myself to grow and make the most of these sessions is allowing and encouraging my students, especially the older ones, to take the helm. They have the responsibility to select and bring relevant material from their courses, and are encouraged to evaluate their own progress by identifying their own strengths and weaknesses, which determine the main focus of each session. Most of my decision-making while preparing for and conducting these sessions is led by what help I think I would have liked to have received when I was in their shoes. The memories of those relentless avalanches of impending deadlines, the feeling of the panic setting in at the crack of dawn on the day of an exam, and the absolute chokehold that the reveal of a rank or mark had on me, are not just fresh, but also still in the making. I am painfully familiar with the highly physically and emotionally demanding nature of the academic world, so the last thing I want to achieve with these sessions is to bombard these students with another mountain of mindless work. This is an underlying principle behind how I ensure that the sessions and the homework focus on boosting the students’ confidence , getting things done, and equipping them with the appropriate tools so that I can rest assured that they can independently meet their learning goals by themselves.
I am endlessly grateful for this opportunity to assist other young people in their academic journeys, while introspecting and examining how I can use these practises of sympathy, communication and adaptiveness across different contexts in my own life.
Nisan Erdonmez
