How Mentoring Contributed to My Growth
By Maks Coven
PupilPrep helped me grow as a person by making me realize how much dedication, organization, and knowledge teachers need to have in order to effectively teach their students. Nearly one year ago I was given my first two students, one in elementary school and one in middle school, through PupilPrep. Although I understood that I would have to create lesson plans and presentations, I was surprised by how difficult it was to make the presentations for each lesson both easy to understand and informational in the time allotted for mentoring. Making a lesson based on a topic I am familiar with is easy when presenting to people the same age or older than me, but I found creating presentations much more difficult when teaching a topic to a student who was many years younger than me who often never heard of the information I was presenting before. This experience made me more appreciative of the effort our teachers put into their lessons, as educators likely felt the same way I did when they create presentations and prepare lessons for us students. Another obstacle I encountered was trying to create a lesson plan that covers an adequate amount of material for the time allotted. I often found that including too much information in the presentation made the lesson hard to understand while putting too little made the mentoring session vague and overall less effective. Contrary to my prior thoughts about how lessons should be created, I found that including too little information can actually cause more confusion about a topic than a presentation with too much information. Consequently, I found out that shorter presentations failed to give my mentees a full picture of the information covered. As with easily presenting a topic, deciding what to include in a lesson made me realize that teachers constantly have to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of including certain information in their presentations.
PupilPrep helped me grow as a student by allowing me to learn about different learning styles and ways to absorb information from my mentees. Just as I help my mentees learn, my mentees in a way help me “learn how to learn” based on the way they respond to certain teaching styles. Through my experiences with my mentees, I found new, more effective ways to learn certain topics that I now use to learn new material in school. I often see parallels between why my mentee struggles and why I struggle on certain topics in school, which has offered me insight into how I can more efficiently learn topics. Through the periodic struggles of my mentees, I have also observed many different ways in which certain problems pertaining to learning new concepts are overcome. I will now share a personal anecdote to demonstrate what I mean. At one meeting I created a slideshow and lesson plan for dividing fractions and converting the solution into a mixed number. Even though my mentee worked very hard throughout the session to understand the material, at the end of the allotted time my mentee was shaky regarding how to divide fractions, and if the solution was an improper fraction, unable to convert into a mixed number. I told my mentee to continue attempting practice problems until the next session, but after the meeting ended I was disappointed that I could not adequately convey certain key concepts in my presentation, even though I thought that through my diagrams and visual representations I had made them clear. Thinking that I had not added enough examples and included practice problems of inappropriate difficulty, I altered my lesson and prepared for the next meet. At the start of the next meet, I gave a practice problem to gauge how much my mentee had retained from the prior lesson. To my surprise, my mentee solved the problem and converted the solution to a mixed number, something they were not close to being able to do a few days ago. I asked them how they were able to solve the problem so well, to which they replied that reading how to divide fractions in a textbook was much clearer for them than seeing diagrams and drawings. This change in my mentee’s ability to learn certain concepts made me realize that I should vary the ways I am studying for my subjects if I am struggling with certain topics. Even though this is not a new idea for me, I now understand the drastic change that can result from a different way of learning.
