BYU tutoring: one of the scariest experiences of my entire life.

About halfway through the semester, I decided to do something that terrified me: I decided to sign up to be a tutor through Yserve for classes that I had taken the AP equivalent of. I wanted to do some sort of service, but at the same time don't have a lot of extra time, so I figured that a couple of hours a week would be doable. I signed up to tutor chemistry, but secretly hoped that no-one would ever sign up for a tutoring session so I could say "At least I tried" and never have to put any effort in. To my dismay, people did want chemistry tutors.

When the first person signed up for a tutoring session, I was terrified. What if I have no clue how to help? What if I tell her the wrong thing? What if I'm intimidated and can't think straight? What if this person is like 6 years older than me and doesn't want to listen to a freshman 17 year-old? I compiled a pretty extensive list of everything that could go wrong. But when we met up, I discovered something: I'm pretty good at tutoring chemistry.

I'm pretty good at not just giving a tutee the answer, but instead giving them clues about how to find it or how to think about the question in a different way. I'm pretty good at explaining important concepts in a way that's easy to understand and using analogies. And strangely enough, something that helps me be a good tutor is the fact that I'm not very good at chemistry! When I learned all the things that I'm now helping other people learn, I had a really hard time understanding the concepts. Now I understand them fine, but I remember exactly why I found them difficult and what eventually helped me grasp them. I think that makes me a better tutor than someone who found a topic so easy that they don't get what's so hard about it.

So anyway, I love tutoring chem now. I've taught three different people (four, as of tomorrow) and received really good feedback from them. Helping someone understand something they didn't before is extremely rewarding, I've found, and a good tutoring session makes my whole day.