Tutoring Center - Reflection

· While tutoring the kids, I felt very good. I always enjoy helping others and knowing that I can do something to assist someone else. I felt accomplished whenever a kid or a parent would thank me for my help. I also felt a bit smart when helping the children. Elementary school homework seems so easy now that it did back then that I can be confident when teaching the children how to complete their homework. However, sometimes I would feel frustrated with the children because they wouldn’t pay attention. You could play games on the computers in the tutoring center and very often, the children would ask to be able to play the games before finishing their homework. It was a very frustrating task to convince them to first complete their work. Also, patience was an extreme virtue in this task. Sometimes things that seem easy to me could be very difficult for the child to understand. It was important to keep your patience while having the explain the same concept multiple times and in different ways.

· I perceived the tutoring activity as a way to help the community and spend my time usefully. I completed this activity during spring break. It gave me something to do and kept my mind active. It was a way to learn how to correctly interact with a kid. Even though I have worked with other people in a group on projects and school work, the habits and needs of an elementary school child are a little bit different. I slowly learned how to handle the children and get them to pay attention to their homework.

· The value of this activity is that it helped me understand whether or not I was good at teaching and how to get along with younger children. It also allowed me to compare my education in elementary school with the education of today. It seems that they are becoming more competitive at a younger age and are receiving more work to encourage higher learning. Seems like we’re trying to catch up on the education level side of the world.

· I believe that the lessons of patience and teaching can be used in multiple situations. Often times one is required to explain a concept to someone. If that person doesn’t understand what they are saying, you should have patience and calmly continue to explain everything. In the future and not only in academic areas, I might have to teach an idea or concept. I think it was good that I practiced on children who are sometimes the hardest age group to teach. I learned different teaching methods that involved more than just paper and pencil.