If you have read my other blogs, you may know that I do teach younger kids public speaking and STEM for a non-profit foundation I run. This year I wanted to expand this small bubble of people I used to teach. The plan was simple. Try to spend as much time as possible getting students to join the classes run by my foundation. I had used my school district’s email resources to try to reach out to as many elementary kids as possible. This plan could not have worked out more perfectly, because there was a huge influx of students from the day I sent the email. People were excited for this and I was pumped as well. Yet as far as my eyes could see, there was no way I would be able to teach all these kids by myself. So I decided to gather a few of my high school peers to help teach these classes. I needed to teach them first before they could be eligible to teach the students. As far as my experiences go, I only knew how to teach kids. So today I will be sharing my experiences teaching my own peers, otherwise known as project train the trainers.
First of all, I was truly shocked to find out that this was much easier than teaching kids because they had known most of the concepts. Many times I would catch myself repeating concepts over again because I would have to do that with younger kids, so they grasp the concepts. I would give tons of examples, when in reality they didn’t need any. I had structured it so the session would be split into 2 different sections, one at the beginning of the classes and one at the middle. Each set of two tutors would have their own session and they would practice together as well. We would always cover all the concepts briefly over the course of the session. In addition, a few of them were naturals at teaching so overall teaching them wasn’t hard at all. A problem I thought I would run into is that some tutors would not like it if I, their own grademate, had taught them concepts about science. As I had read in a couple of books and through sheer experience from previous encounters, students don’t like to be taught by people their age or below. This is because all humans maintain an ego. To my surprise, they had quickly grasped concepts without their ego affecting them. While teaching the concepts was a part of it, the tutors also had to practice teaching during the session as I had mentioned. Even though most of the session was teaching, we did have a lot of fun because at the end of the day, we would see each other as friends and not business partners. What the tutors learned is that teaching isn’t hard and is really fun, but what I learned is that teaching the teachers is even more enjoyable. Thank you for reading, I’ll catch you in the next post.