Teaching Kids How to Use Their Entire Toolbox by Elina

Teaching Kids How to Use Their Entire Toolbox by Elina - November 2019 Scholarship Essay

“I’ll be handing back last week’s tests.” The class groans; some of frayed nerves and some from disappointment. Your test score isn’t so great; you chalk it up to not being a genius and move on.

One of the things I hear about in my classes and read about on Reddit is how school is how school doesn’t teach students how to study. My classmates groan over their lousy grades, and when pressed by the teacher, they admit that they only briefly skimmed the study guide, or they spent hours on end staring at it, only to not retain any of the information. Today’s students don’t know how to study; while they know what the benefits of it are, they don’t know how to get there. Today’s students see good grades and their first thought isn’t, ‘Wow, they worked hard for those grades’, it’s, ‘Wow, they’re really smart for getting those grades.’ Intellect is something that isn’t gained through hard work, it’s something to be born with, like attached earlobes and blue eyes, which is ironic, considering we’re the land of opportunity, of social mobility through hard work.

I was one of the lucky ones (and I’m not afraid to admit that I was lucky in this regard). In elementary and middle school, I was able to coast through school with ease. It wasn’t until 9th grade that I started to flounder academically. I didn’t know how long I was supposed to study, if I was supposed to use flash cards, if I was supposed to rewrite notes and play Kahoot games until it was midnight- I didn’t know anything about studying. Luckily, I was digging through some of my old school notebooks and stumbled across my 7th grade science notebook, one of the middle school classes I had especially excelled in. I took the techniques that teacher often recommended for us, and by mimicking that, I was able to slowly learn how to study.

Ever since that miraculous autumn, I’ve been pondering over how to show others this valuable lesson that I learned. However, as far as I knew, there was no way for me to feasibly accomplish this goal of mine: I didn’t have the equipment or skills needed to make videos or create a website on the topic, my personality was incompatible with traditional tutoring, and the vast majority of people scoffed at me when I taught them my ways. Some didn’t even believe that I studied, and assumed that I was lying when I told them so.

Then, I was introduced to the Warhawk Workshop.

Run by my English teacher, it’s a school organization that helps students work on their schoolwork, college applications, and scholarship essays. It’s not tutoring; as my teacher repeatedly says, tutoring implies a power imbalance between the two people involved, a relationship of teacher and student. Instead, we are merely collaborators: the only thing separating me and the person I’m helping is the badge that I wear with my name on it.

As collaborators, we help people learn how to study more effectively; we guide them to correct literary conclusions, better essays, and correct math answers through carefully curated questions. While most tutors and teachers end up merely telling students the correct answer, we make students reach that destination through their own means. We are helping our fellow students understand the material better, and we are setting them up for future success. With each session, with each student I help, I am imparting onto them the wisdom I learned in that first semester of 9th grade, and helping the student body learn that genius isn’t something born, it’s something created.

“I’ll be handing back last week’s tests.” The class groans; some of frayed nerves and some from disappointment. Your test score is almost perfect, just missed one problem on the back; you think of all of the hard work you put in, and strive to continue onwards.