Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way

As I was reading "Algebra for All: Using Homemade Algebra Tiles to Develop Algebra and Prealgebra Concepts" by Annette Ricks Leitze and Nancy A. Kitt for my MTH 229 course at Grand Valley State University, the sentence, "Teaching is a challenge, and most teachers would agree that we would have it no other way," really resonated with me. Even though I am an undergraduate student, I have been given the opportunity to be placed in a quasi-instructor role at GVSU as a Structured Learning Assistance (SLA) Student Facilitator for MTH 097 Elementary Algebra (very similar to concepts taught in a high school Algebra I course) and MTH 110 Intermediate Algebra (very similar to concepts taught in a high school Algebra II course). Now one might ask what exactly is an SLA Student Facilitator. Well, it is my duty to attend all of the class lectures, create one hour course content support workshops twice a week, and meet with the professor to discuss how both the workshops are going and what we can do as a team to close the achievement gaps of each of the students. Until a few weeks ago, I also defined my role to be almost synonymous with a glorified tutor, per say. But when I had said that in passing to my partnering professor, she stopped me and said something like, "No, Nick, you are not just tutoring these students. You are teaching the students."

Mind = blown

Boom! I just had an epiphany about what it means to be a teacher. Since beginning to tutor my peers in mathematics in high school, I had thought that tutoring was simply helping my peers complete an understanding of the mathematical concepts they were learning. Also, I  did not consider myself to be teaching them because I thought to teach is to introduce the topics and initiate the learning process with the goal to also complete the learning process. In some regards, I could not be more wrong. According to the Google dictionary, to teach is to "show or explain to someone how to do something" and to be a tutor is to be "a private teacher."  So all of this time I really was teaching the SLA class since I was showing and explaining those in my SLA class how to do and understand the mathematical concepts of MTH 097 or MTH 110, even though it came in the middle of the learning process. 

You mean I was this guy all along? 

Now back to our regularly scheduled topic: teaching as a challenge. To say that being an SLA facilitator is easy would be an immense lie. For example, no matter how much planning goes into one of the workshops I plan, it rarely goes according to plan. Often times, I am either amazed (and excited!) at how what I have prepared goes really smoothly and nearly all the students finish the activity early or I discover that they are struggling immensely with the activity. When the latter occurs, I scramble to determine the root of the problem while fielding the seemingly endless questions the class has on the material. Most of the time, the students have some variation of the same question, and I then will explain to the class what they seem to be missing. But this is not always the case. Sometimes a student is really hung up on a given concept, to which I give my best go at explaining the concept in another way. Usually, my partnering professor has given one explanation, so that leaves the way I would explain the concept. However, this explanation sometimes fails to close the student's achievement gap. When this occurs, I am sometimes reeling for another way to explain the concept.

Nope, another explanation isn't coming to me.

Challenge accepted. Although on the outside I may look put together while thinking of another way to explain the concept to the student, inside I am a little more all over the place.

Just like these guys.

Despite all of this craziness going on mentally, I somehow find a way to alter what I have just said in an attempt to clear up the confusion. I wish I could say that I have a 100% success rate in adapting my explanation so that the concept now make sense, but I do not. This is where I have found teaching to be the most challenging thus far. Everyone is different. Although that comes with many benefits, it is a double-edged sword in the sense that it also means that everyone may require a unique explanation to understand the topic. As Oliver Wilde once said, “I may have said the same thing before…but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.” This quote embodies how I try to approach my explanations. Each time I discuss a certain topic, I will try to change at least one aspect of my explanation. That way, I hope that it will spark something in someone's mind that will allow them to understand, or at least better understand, the material. Speaking of the spark, that is precisely why I choose to accept the challenge that is teaching. There is nothing like seeing the "light bulb" go off in a student's head. 

Or the meter flipping too, I suppose.

To see this spark go off is such a gratifying experience, and it brings me joy to know that I can make this type of impact on a student and further their learning process. This is exactly why I accept the challenge and wouldn't have it any other way.