I accepted my first tutoring request out of procrastination.
The day is a November one, back in 2012, when, few months after securing a place at the undergrad English course of my hometown university in the summer, I was wondering if I’d known what I signed up for.
Let me describe the scene: hot coffee on the desk that faces a curtained window through which, on brighter days of the year, I can look at the swaying green sea of the oak trees on the other side of the road for hours. All I would see now, though, is a mess of branches and telephone lines tangled in the mad wind and driving rain, so it’s better to have the crimson curtains cover that tempest.
The soft yellow light (not ideal for studying but “you don’t want to feel like you’re in a hospital” so it has to do) falls on a bound volume of printed sheets, all in landscape format so whoever committed the act could squeeze two badly photocopied book pages on a single sheet. This monstrosity has about 150 such sheets, double-sided, each containing two pages of a book that was so thick that the photocopier couldn’t press it down into the glass enough, so the words curl and fade into a grey shade in the middle.
The challenge, thus, is as much academic as investigative.
The topic I’m trying to decipher from half-legible lines, understand with the help of an English dictionary, then desperately cram for the first semester exam in three days’ time is Phonetics and Phonology, or the Great Sieve, as our professors called it. Historical fail rate for the subject was around 70 plus percent, including resits. First attempt fail rate lurked around the 90 percent mark.
PhonPhon, as we derisively affectionately called it, ensured that only those who are really committed stay on the course. Commitment, in this case, meant pushing through the crippling self-doubt when presented with a badly photocopied volume as your only study resource.
My version of “pushing through” was staring at the page on that stormy late November evening, and wondering why I was doing this to myself. (Similar thoughts have always crept their way into my musings whenever I faced an academic challenge but since then I’ve learnt to take them for what they are: prompts from my brain to reaffirm my choice so it can move on to deal with the important stuff – like cramming PhonPhon)
You’ll understand now why a knock on my door was such a welcome distraction.
It was my mom, “disturbing” my “focused study” with hot dinner and a question. Would I be interested in tutoring her colleague’s daughter who wants to apply to an English-Hungarian bilingual course in grammar school; the very same course and school thanks to which I had landed the undergrad place in uni.
And suddenly the investigative and academic challenge of deciphering PhonPhon seemed less… frightening. What did feel like bumping into Vecna from Stranger Things in a narrow alleyway past midnight was guiding a fledgling who – like me, hunched over my book of phonetics, with no idea what she got herself into – depended on me.
Not that I knew what was expected of me as a tutor. I was fresh out of grammar school and the only thing I could safely say I was good at was English.
And procrastination.
So I said yes. Because the daunting prospect of helping another human being understand a language both of us were still learning was still more fun than PhonPhon.
Naturally, the photocopied nightmare was quickly replaced by my laptop and a few hours’ worth of diving down a rabbit hole that started with the Google search term “how to tutor”. Predictably, I failed my first PhonPhon exam.
I wish I could say that my first ever tutee was my first ever success story, but that would be the stuff of fairy tales. She did get accepted for the course, but how much of that can be attributed to me is questionable because we had a total of three sessions. Nevertheless, it was a transformative experience for me; I dipped my toes into tutoring and found it exhilarating.
I have had various jobs since then, from the obligatory bartending fresh out of uni to packaging tiny expiry day stickers, to consulting companies on their technology transformation strategies, but none has filled me with the profound satisfaction I experience when tutoring. Finding what clicks for a student, what makes them go “aaha!” in the classroom setting where a teacher’s attention is divided between 10-15 students is tough – I, on the other hand, have the time, opportunity, and space to achieve just that.
Maybe it’s because I generally love to watch things grow (my plants, book collection, niece) that I derive so much joy from connecting with my students and accompanying them for a few months (or years) on their learning journey. It’s hard to see how much hard work means when one is neck deep in studying – it can feel like shovelling water with a sieve from a tiny leaky boat in the middle of the ocean. But from where I’m standing, I can see the progress: how struggle slowly transforms into ease, self-doubt is replaced by confidence, and uncertainty becomes competence.
Before I could really get into tutoring, those three sessions were over and my focus turned back to mastering whatever the undergrad English course threw at me. It took five years for another tutoring opportunity to present itself, but there’s been no stopping since.
I haven been on numerous student journeys in the past seven years, but more on those later…
LITutors 