New Lenses
By Mehadi Chowdhury
For me, PupilPrep has become much more than just an extracurricular activity; it has become something I’m passionate about as teaching my mentee and watching them grow brings me joy. Though mentoring isn’t easy at all and requires a lot of energy and prep work, being able to help my mentee learn something new keeps me going through all the days where I felt too tired to mentor as it reminds me of how important this is and the impact it has. Besides, it’s not only my mentee that’s learning. I grow a lot, as well, while teaching my mentee new concepts. I’ve learned to prepare alternative ways to teach a single topic as not everyone understands or learns the same way. As a result, I’ve become more flexible with my explanations and analogies to best suit my mentee’s interests and have become better at noticing when they are confused about something. For example, when I was teaching my mentee the difference between area and perimeter they were pretty confused as to what exactly the difference was. Since my mentee seemed to learn best through examples, I asked them to trace their finger around their hand, explaining that that was what perimeter represented. Then I asked them to trace their finger over the area of their palm, explaining that the space they just traced would be the area.
In my time at PupilPrep, I have improved myself as I juggled my work here with my other responsibilities. I developed my time management skills as I had to balance my tutoring and coaching responsibilities with other extracurriculars and school work. Subsequently, I learned self-care skills and to prevent burnout from all the work and stress from these activities by balancing how much time I invest in each activity. I have realized that in order to work more efficiently, I had to reevaluate the time i spent on each responsibility, as this results in more work being done overall instead of being tired every day juggling all these activities. I have also learned how to effectively reply to and schedule emails, and make a contact list for group emails due to my responsibilities as a coach- all of which are great skills to have in the future for work.
As a mentor, I don’t have any jaw-dropping, TEDTalk type stories to talk about. But, when it comes to mentoring, one of my favorite things to do is to let my mentee ask me any questions they have at the end of the session. It’s interesting to see the types of questions my mentee comes up with, and it’s cool to be able to satisfy their curiosity. One of my favorite questions that my mentee has asked is if I can do the same math we do in class, but quicker because it lets me show off the results of practicing. Plus, it always leaves my mentee awestruck and eager to improve, which is great because it keeps them motivated to pay attention and care about what they are learning. Additionally, sometimes my mentee even surprises me by requesting the next lesson to cover something that’s a bit ahead of what they’re currently learning. I’m always happy to fulfill this request of theirs and it’s amazing to see them develop a love for learning.
