I’ve done quite a bit of tutoring over the years: I tutored a neighbor in elementary math in middle school, then a struggling classmate in basic essay writing in high school. I taught English on and off throughout the rest of my high school years. Not too long ago, I started tutoring underprivileged and low-income students around the world for the SAT and SAT Subject Tests.
Perhaps it sounds cliché, but the last one was the most eye-opening of them all.
The actual recruiting process into becoming a tutor was nothing special: while preparing for my own SAT Subject Tests, I solved math and physics problems on a WhatsApp group chat rather frequently to get as much practice as I could. A recruiter from this tutoring organization reached out to me, and a short application process later, I found myself routinely launching Zoom for a few scheduled hours of tutoring.
I spent the first two weeks after accepting this role trying to unlearn everything I thought I knew about tutoring others. My past experiences had all been with kids from affluent neighborhoods; if not affluent, then at least rather well-off. I’d gotten used to my students having any and every resource I could think of, and furthermore, I could confidently draw on the curriculum I knew was taught at their school in order to drive a certain point home. I could expect them to know precisely what I was talking about as soon as I brought up the title of a chapter from some fancy, gloss-covered textbook.
All of these assumptions and luxuries I’d taken for granted went out the window when I was presented with my new charges. I didn’t know their progress, nor the courses they took. Then there was the language barrier to overcome: being a non-native English speaker myself, we’d occasionally have trouble understanding one another, and a spotty internet connection attempting to support our video calls didn’t help matters. And textbooks? There was no chance of them simply running out and buying a random thick, dusty tome just for one lesson.
Yet despite all of these obstacles, we somehow made our lessons work, and that was in no small part due to their grit and perseverance. Never did they miss an assignment. Never did they voluntarily miss a session. I thought myself to have prepared rather rigorously already way back when, but their dedication was on a whole other level. They were willing to give their all to get a shot at a better college education, and therefore a better life.
My Musings
I though about this quite a lot between lessons: for underprivileged students, the pursuit of a better future was a vicious cycle. Without adequate resources, one would inevitably underperform on critical standardized exams. Underperforming on such exams meant an unsatisfactory outlook was bound to follow. And the result of such “unsatisfactory outlooks” was finding oneself stuck even deeper within the circumstances that landed them in that disadvantage in the first place, namely, poverty and an ever-growing lack of resources.
But the key here is that more often than not, their lack of resources is also the sole obstacle. These students aren’t lazy or foolish; no, they’re far from it. Perhaps it’s the realization of their dire situations that pressure them to excel, or perhaps their education system is simply doing something particularly right, but one way or another, they were highly motivated, fast learners.
Typically, in my first session with a student, I’ll have them do a practice test to benchmark their abilities. It’s common for them to do rather poorly, but it doesn’t matter. The goal isn’t to instantly turn them into geniuses, after all; it’s so that after reviewing the questions together, I can get a better grasp on their strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the session, I’d give them a quick rundown of my analysis and some tips they could use to rectify those issues.
One of my students made me feel like I could have saved both of us some time and skipped that benchmark altogether. After deducing that his biggest flaw was a tendency to read between the lines too much—and as a result, jump to false conclusions—I gave him some general pointers on where and how to extract just the right amount of information from a passage. I then delivered a generic spiel about identifying a passage as a subjective, explanatory piece, or an objective writing of fiction and/or passion, then sent him on his way.
In our next session, he blew me away with his improvement. Over the course of a week, he seemed to have picked up the art of analyzing implications with magical accuracy. All along, he’d had it in him to accomplish this; there simply wasn’t anyone to foster those abilities. Now that I’d pointed it out, he could develop them to their full extent. And that’s what he did.
That was just one example out of many, but the bottom line was, these students, despite their difficulties, were outstanding.
The (Lack of) Privilege
One more thing these students did: they sought our help, they helped themselves, and at the same time they were willing to help others.
Case in point: one of the students I’d taught—outside of the organization, but a student nonetheless—was heavily disadvantaged in the Math II Subject Test. He didn’t even have a graphing calculator to use for problems on advanced trigonometry and polynomials. Yet this didn’t deter him: on his own, he analyzed the questions he’d seen and conjured some methods to implement in the questions. Using these methods, he was able to sketch out a rough graph—or at least a portion of a rough graph—of most questions very quickly. Using the obtained results, he’d find an approximation of the answer. The outcome was a surprisingly accurate half-guess.
He could have kept these hard-earned tactics to himself and eliminated some competition. But instead, he went on to share the methods with others who were in the same predicament. He also happened to be proficient in physics. Despite the pressure he was under preparing for his own upcoming exams, he still found time to actively solve physics problems in SAT Physics preparation group chats. I was more comfortable with Newtonian mechanics and waves, while electromagnetics was his forte; together we cracked problems online, and throughout our cooperation, I couldn’t help but feel immense respect towards him.
My observations and encounters with these students revealed a common theme among them which, interestingly, I found to often be lacking among us higher-achieving students. Despite our relatively privileged life, or perhaps because of it, we often didn’t have as much compassion or patience for struggling peers. Competition among us could only be described as toxic, and in some cases I’d even bore witness to intentional sabotage. Yet among these students, they knew how it felt to struggle under hardships, and actively extended help wherever they could.
I was glad to see this kind of growth bloom throughout. But on the flip side, it was quite upsetting to see this contrast. One can only hope that one day, peer competition attitudes could change for the better.
Their Teachings
I’ve taught peers and juniors on and off for most of my education. Yet none changed me quite like these kids from all around the world whose faces I didn’t even know and garbled voices came only through computer speakers.
There was a lot one could learn from them. Tutoring them was less of a job than a skill swap: for the measly price of telling them how to open a textbook the right way, they’d open our eyes to an overlooked corner of society. One overshadowed by a lack of opportunities, but thrived whenever there was a little shred of light.
On a personal level, it was a jarring wake-up call. I often ranted about our education system, but while my experience with these students didn’t change the fact that I still felt much could be changed, it did make me grateful. And it also made me realize that education, a right I’d so often viewed as a burden, was something that a lot of people had to fight for. It felt real: up until now, I’d only heard of these struggles through a television screen and internet news reports, but for the first time in my life, I found myself face to face with fighters for whom these hardships were just a fact of life. Their persistence and endurance in pursuing this fight only made that realization hit even harder: who were we to nitpick at the opportunities presented to us, when these kids had only one shot at a better life and still they took it in stride?
I suppose this awakening is what brought our organization together.
We are all high-achieving students with a common goal: to give back to the society that had fed us, but in ways that it never could. This was done in hopes that we could make a difference, and I suppose we did. We’re far from the stage where we could shift the tide on our own, but for now, we’ll give these kids more chances.
And we’ll continue the push, one tutor, one student, one lesson at a time.