What PupilPrep Means To Me
By Mehadi Chowdhury
Initially, when I joined PupilPrep I thought of it as just another extracurricular activity that would let me give back to the community. However, today, PupilPrep to me 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. Consequently, 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 fractions they were pretty confused as to why fractions with larger denominators meant that the fraction was smaller if the numerators were the same. Since my mentee likes cookies, I showed them a picture of a cookie and the same cookie broken up into pieces and asked them which one they would want, the whole cookie or just a piece of the cookie. They said the whole cookie, and then I explained how the smaller piece represents what happens when the denominator gets bigger. After explaining it with this cookie analogy they were able to understand how fractions work and why a larger denominator meant smaller pieces.
Besides learning while teaching my mentee, I’ve grown a lot from my responsibilities as a mentor coach. I’ve developed time management skills as I’ve 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 it’s better to do these activities less, 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.
As a mentor, I don’t have any specific 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. Recently, I’ve even started asking my mentee if they had any vocabulary questions at the beginning of the session, which has been a fun experience as I get to teach them new words and more about the world as I often explain these words in the context they're used in.
Overall, I would like to thank PupilPrep for allowing me to give back to the community and the ability to help the next generation with their learning. It’s been amazing being a part of this, and I hope I’ll be able to continue doing this next year as well.
