My Epiphany Experience

Everyone experiences that “ah-ha” moment, the epiphany, or realization, where he or she realizes something he did not know prior to that moment. Some epiphanies occur over academic achievements while others involve simple, everyday tasks such as opening a can. Whether someone finally grasps a math concept that he could not understand in class or realizes what the word “loquacious” means, people experience many epiphanies over the course of a day. My epiphany occurred while teaching, something that students do not generally get to partake in. While tutoring a few children, I learned life-long lessons that I would not have encountered in my life otherwise.

“You can go talk to Mrs. Reisig, she teaches fourth grade down in the lower school, because

she needs some tutors for her students.” Mrs. Bulfin said, and I told her that I would go down and talk to her after english, my last class of the day.

When I went to talk to Mrs. Reisig, she asked me tutor her student named Jane. We set it up to be two days a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When I first started working with Jane, I had a more difficult time actually helping her because I could not understand how she found the math difficult, as I had learned much more difficult topics in high school. She ended up helping me learn how to properly teach a subject through much trial and error on my part, and I had improved by December, when a family friend asked me to tutor her daughter, Mary, also in fourth grade. Mary and I had grown really close in the time we knew each other, so I found it more difficult to help her because correcting her felt like correcting a best friend. Having just met Jane recently, we had not grown close and I had an easier time correcting her, which

helped her a lot with knowing where she made mistakes. As time went on, I improved at helping Mary understand the topics and explained where she made mistakes easier. Around February, both Jane and Mary started improving, but they had a difficult time retaining what they learned. I started noticing that they worked better with games and activities rather than just practice, which made up the majority of our sessions. Small little rewards as simple as playing a game or stopping work early worked as great initiatives to make the math more fun and less of a chore. I did not realize that until the end of the year, and vowed to use that technique more the next year.
With the new school year came harder classes, the start of my dance season, and new responsibilities, such as co leading Impact club.

As a result, I could not tutor Jane. Only tutoring Mary gave me the opportunity to help her even more. Some nights, Mary’s mother would text me pictures of the answers Mary had gotten on her homework and I would send back how to explain the incorrect ones in order to help Mary reach her full potential. We continued to meet up once a week on Wednesdays and gradually improved her grades. However, her test taking skills had not improved due to the medical condition she has, which caused her grades to go down though she actually knew the material. This continued to occur, until the month of December when her mother talked to the principal and had separate setting put in place. After taking one test in separate setting and comparing it to those she had taken in the classroom, it became clear to me how much potential she had and that her condition was her main inhibitor. Around the same time, I quit dance and started tutoring Jane again. I continually made mistakes because I had not tutored that often in a while. On December 7th, 2015, I made the most mistakes while helping students that I had made for a while. I worked with students whom I had never worked with before, and continually told them that they had made mistakes when they had not. At one point I even had to run after a student and apologize for telling her that she was wrong when she was

right and almost died of shame.
After working with Mary and Jane and making a bunch of mistakes, I had an argument to counteract my friends always telling me I was super smart. I had learned a sense of humility. I had seen the pureness of a child trying her hardest to succeed. I had learned how hard a teacher actually works to have her students improve. I had learned how to admit my mistakes. I had learned how to teach myself math as well as other subjects which helps me to succeed in school currently. I can also now help my friends better when they do not understand something because of how Jane and Mary helped me.
Over the course of a year and a half, these so called children had taught me what life had failed to teach me in 15 years.