Reasons Why I Can't be a Teacher

Hello!

So as you might know from my last post, I am currently tutoring a rising 9th grader in English this summer. Now just to give you a little background on the boy before I delve into my thoughts; he has had a good education in the past and he is a jock. So of course my life becomes a stereotypical nerd helps the jock situation especially since I'm Asian. Now I have no problems tutoring him; in fact he's a really smart kid. He has a great memory and is good at picking up on what I'm trying to get across to him. What I think his major problem is, is he is embarrassed about these tutoring sessions, feels he doesn't need them to some extent, and just wants to forget about school and enjoy his summer soccer season. And I can totally relate because I felt very similarly when I was just a little rising freshman in high school seeing my mom come home with very large and what seemed scary books about the SAT. Now while these problems can be very easily overcome, I just don't think he has the motivation to really work hard. Anyways, school wise he is okay at reading comprehension depending on how hard the semantics are and if he is interested in the story and his writing kinda sucks.

Anyways, his mom asked me to pick a book and read it with him so naturally as the good Nerdfighter that I am, I picked The Great Gatsby. I had remembered the book as being a pretty easy read and interesting once you get passed all the character introduction and truly get into the plot of the story. Plus the book has some relatively obvious themes about social classes and love. Finally, I thought Gatsby would be good because it's a short book and if we read about two chapters a week we would be able to finish it before the summer is over. To my surprise (and fear) reading it over again, the sentences were a little more drawn out and contained larger words than I had remembered from when I was a freshman in high school. But he had already purchased the book and I assigned him the first two chapters. Since the start of reading this book we have gone through three chapters because he didn't have time (or forgot) to read the book while he was on a trip to California even though he had about a three hour flight one way. On top of the fact that we are behind what I realize now is a lofty reading schedule, I don't think he is reading the book to comprehend. I don't know about you guys, but sometimes when I'm reading a boring textbook or article, I find myself just moving my eyes across the words without really taking into account what those words put together in sentences actually mean. The reason I believe he's not really reading is because he can't answer my simplest questions about characters even after I point out where in the book the answer is. I mean honestly, if the book explicitly says a character is harsh and mean and disliked then obviously you shouldn't say that character is nice and well-loved. To try and rectify this problem, my mom suggested I write out questions for him to answer about the chapters he's reading so that he knows what to pay attention to. I believe that this is a great idea for him especially because he will probably end up doing something similar while in school.

I realize that this post reads as me complaining about my tutoring troubles, but this experience has made me realize that I was correct all along in not wanting to be a teacher. I'm the kind of person who likes to see results from my actions. I don't have a lot of faith in my abilities to just assume that what I'm doing is actually having an effect when I can't see that they're having an effect. With this boy, I don't really know if I'm helping him improve his reading comprehension and writing skills. He doesn't really seem to understand the book any more from one week to the next and his writing is still kinda bad. On the plus side I finally got him to understand that he needs to read over his essays and actually separate what he's writing into paragraphs. His biggest writing problem from the beginning was run-ons and the number of run-ons in his latest essay dramatically decreased. So he can actually write to some extent; he's just too lazy to take the time and read over what he wrote. I don't want to be harsh and I probably won't say this to his face, but he's not a good enough reader to write the essay and have it be good with minimal grammar issues right off the bat.

If things improve or other extraordinary events happen I'll update in another post.

Bye!

Seattle and Vancouver

Hey!

You would think that I would have more time to blog during the summer, and yet I still have so much to catch you guys up on. Just as a brief summary I would describe my summer so far as relaxing. When my summer first started I was simply spending time with my friends and doing a little studying for the MCAT. My time became slightly less free as I now have a job tutoring! The tutoring gig actually started about the end of June and has been pretty successful so far...I hope. I might go into more detail in a later post, but basically I am tutoring a rising high school freshman boy in English. Then with the start of July, I have started volunteering at a local hospital. Depending on my experiences at the hospital, I might recap my volunteering later as well, but I love the feeling of helping other people feel better. I know that I'm not actually curing any ailment that these patients have and in no way do I expect to, but seeing these patients and the hope they have really encourages me about my career choice.

Now onto the reason for this post. Recently my family and I went on vacation to Seattle and Vancouver. Now you might be wondering why we would go there for vacation during the summer as that's the reaction I received from a lot of my friends, but I'm really glad we went. We started our trip in Vancouver, and boy was I in for a surprise. One of my close friends is Canadian and my group of friends and I love to make fun of her about how Canada doesn't exist. We actually refer to Canada as Canadialand because it's fictional! When I got to Canada I was so ready to have my jokes proven wrong. And to my surprise those jokes actually seemed correct. Canada appeared to be no different than any other part of the US. I mean sure there were Canadian flags everywhere and they call the bathroom the washroom, but really the stores, cars, and customs were the same. What was even more surprising was that Canada appeared to be a mix of Hong Kong and the US. Our hotel was just outside of the city of Vancouver, and yet it was like we were in the middle of China. Of course we might have just been in the Chinatown of that city, but even in downtown Vancouver there were a lot of Asians. Now I've been to China before and I can handle the Chinese atmosphere, but it was still a shock. I have nothing against Canadians and they have a lot of great things going for them, especially their Canadian pride, but Vancouver just wasn't really for me.

Seattle on the other hand...now that's an amazing city. Ever since college, I've truly realized how much of a suburban person I am. But Seattle made me reconsider my thoughts about not wanting to live in a big city. Seattle was the first city I've been in that was really clean and had any type of landscape that you could ever want. Seattle is a port city and so there's the ocean on one side with beaches, snow-topped mountains only two hours away, open farmland, and a lake. Seattle gets a lot of tourism business and I believe that tourists supply a large part of the revenue that helps Seattle businesses run, but that doesn't seem to hurt the city in any way. A lot of my friends couldn't understand why I love Seattle so much mainly because they believe the city to be covered in rain for a large part of the year. And I don't doubt that, because our first day in Seattle it was raining on and off all day. But even with the constant rain, the city never felt humid, which is one of the worst things about living in the south. Sure the city may not be filled with as much sunshine as I would like, but I will trade the better part of a sun filled summer here in the south for 80 degree highs instead of the 105 degree weathers we've been having lately. In fact, the biggest shocker for me from the whole trip was the fact that in Mount Rainier I was in shorts and a t-shirt with a light jacket and standing on a mountain side covered with snow. I loved Seattle so much, that I am seriously considering University of Washington Medical School as my medical school of choice.

I hope to be writing to you guys soon about the other parts of my life here during the summer, but if I don't, and that's a big possibility given my track record, know that I'll be back soon!