{ I really have no idea what the theme or purpose of this blog is. I mean, yes, I created it but even the design is pretty random...I don't live in a forest... and who even reads this? Oh well. I suppose, as always, we start with [word] vomit. }
Today I volunteered at the annual College Essay Boot Camp: a free writing workshop for high school students in Boston who want help with their personal essays. It's run entirely by volunteers, which is awesome but at the same time kind of scary because all I had to do to be a tutor was submit my email address...what if I was a crazy person??? Anywho, I got paired with a junior who wanted to get a head start on the college application process but had no ideas. I spent the first ten minutes trying to pull stories out of him, prompting him with all the brainstorming tools in our tutor cheat sheet packets to which he ultimately said "I'm just an average teenager." It was almost a mindless statement, but for some reason that hit me like a rock. As soon as he said that, I was determined to make him see otherwise. I dropped the tutor packets and started getting creative with my questions. That kind of worked, but eventually I told him to just list five things and three people. Random, right? Well, it worked! Within two hours, he went from having absolutely nothing interesting about himself, to a blob of an outline, to a fully written and typed personal essay.
It makes me sad when people, especially kids who really haven't even begun to figure out who they are yet, don't realize that they are special. I mean, yeah, we're all just dots in the universe and nobody's special but at the same time, everybody's special. If you think that doesn't make sense, it's like the classic glass half full or half empty question. People say there's no right answer but that's wrong-- it's both. For that first half hour when I was struggling to help him find his voice, I found myself thinking about my old teachers and re-appreciating how lucky I've been to have had so many great ones. Good teachers help their students learn their subjects, but great teachers give their students confidence. I've tutored at a number of places around the city in the past few years and I've discovered that most of the students believe that they are nothing special and that their creative ideas are wrong. They are taught to just follow the rules and "create" within rigid structures. I distinctly remember every single English teacher I've had from 7th grade and on telling me to forget about the silly five-paragraph-expository. I guess that doesn't happen everywhere.
I spent most of the tutoring session imparting wisdom that I learned from my old teachers to the kid I was working with. Even though my job was technically to help him write an essay, I decided that my goal was to build his confidence-- make him aware of the qualities that he possesses, and how to find those qualities in the things he does every day. Watching his smile grow as he realized that he did have things to write about was simply the greatest feeling in the world. I signed up to volunteer at the last minute, but I'm so glad that I did because with all that goes on in our busy college lives, I almost
forgot how great it feels to help people, and how much I love to
write.
This is probably as vomit-y as word vomit gets but I suppose if there was one point that I'm trying to make, it's this: Never underestimate the impact that teachers can have on our lives, and the people that we, in turn, can impact.
