As a graduation requirement, I had the privilege of designing a forty-hour experiential learning project. I decided the best setting for my growth as a future educator would be in the college's tutoring center. Below is a journal entry documenting what I learned from this valuable journey.
October 3, 2018
Today during my tutoring center shift I had the coolest experience! This kid named Mason who I had seen quite a few times in the Tutoring Center, put his name up on the board for help with Calc 1. I started helping him with the problem he was working on, which was just taking a derivative, but quickly realized that he had hardly any idea what was going on. I stopped and asked him if he understood the idea behind derivatives, and what a derivative actually was. He kinda laughed and said that no, he didn’t. So I proceeded to explain that derivatives are basically finding the formula for the instantaneous slope at any x value of the original function. I drew him some pictures, and tried to explain it several different ways. When he understood the basics, he kinda interrupted me and asked how this was applicable in real life. I gave him the example of a car, where the car’s position, speed, and acceleration (if they were represented as functions) were derivatives of each other. I felt like he was catching on, so I left him to work on the problems so that I could go help someone else.
A couple minutes later he called me over again to help with a really specific problem where you had to match the graph of a function with the graph of it’s derivative. I had him start with the first on and analyze just the slope of the function, and give himself a timeline where he would write a big or small plus sign or negative sign to indicate what kind of slope the original function had. We then took that and looked for a graph among the derivatives that had those slopes as actual output values. Around that point he started getting this goofy smile on his face. He was getting it! light bulbs going on all over the place! When we were packing up, he thanked me, and told me that the day before, he had been sitting in class and just struggling so much to understand what was going on. He said he prayed and asked Heavenly Father to send him someone — anyone — that could help him understand. He said that that night he had talked with the lady he lived with and she had told him that her son — also a math tutor — had recently had an experience of teaching someone and had realized that everyone can learn math, they just need to hear it explained a certain way. He said when he heard that he just flat out didn’t believe her. He was sure he wasn’t going to understand calculus. Then he said that that day, in the tutoring center with me, he finally was understanding, and that I had been the someone that had been able to help him do that. That was so wonderful to hear. I kept repeating to myself the rest of the night that THAT was why I wanted to teach! The light in someone’s eyes when they finally get it is intoxicating!
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