self-doubt

I lost a student this week. This happens every once in a while. Sometimes parents decide they'd prefer someone to work with their students on the weekends (which I don't do), sometimes a student's situation changes, and sometimes I simply finish helping a student with whatever he or she needed. It happens. This time was different. I had planned on having this student for another year, but this week, I was informed that my sessions with him had come to an end. Long story short, I had been helping him for a year with his English class, helping him understand the novels he was reading and helping him with his essay writing. Over the summer, I was asked to help him with his college essay. His parents were not satisfied with the final product, hence the end of my lessons with him.

To be fair, part of this was my fault. I didn't explain at the beginning of the summer that I don't have a lot of experience helping students with their college essays (which, if you recall back to your high school days, follow a very different structure from regular essays). I also didn't explain that in my high school, my English teacher helped us with ours, so while I wrote mine on my own, he checked it and made suggestions where it could be improved. I assumed this would be the same case for my student, so even if I helped him as best as I could, his teacher would be the one to point out any areas of improvement that I had missed as the one with more experience. If I could go back in time, I would have outlined these points more clearly at the beginning. Unfortunately, I had to resort to explaining these things to the parents after the fact.

Why am I sharing this story with you? Well, because I don't lose students often and because I've never lost a student because the parents thought I was performing poorly, this stung a lot. I know I'm not supposed to have favorites, but this student was my favorite to work with. I had also gotten to know his family pretty well. It hurt knowing that they believed I had failed them, especially when I was shown some of what their proofreader friend (who WORKS in college admissions!) had to say about me. It also hurt knowing I had helped him improve his average in English and improve his SAT Reading and Writing scores, but this incident overshadowed the good that I had done. Being the person that I am, I took it all to heart and started questioning myself. Was I good enough? Did I truly have what it takes to help students in English, or was I in over my head? Should I avoid helping students with their college essays in the future? What if another incident like this happens? Would they talk badly about me to his next tutor? I felt pretty awful for a few days.

I officially lost the student on Monday. By Wednesday, I had completely forgotten about it. Isn't it amazing what a little bit of time can do? I'd also like to suggest that it's a testament to the amount of growth I've experienced. I've always been sensitive, but after college, I started to develop a thicker skin, out of necessity. You can't really show your sensitivity when you're teaching. There are certain times that call for it, but in most situations, I would have been eaten alive, by students and parents alike. There were times in the classroom when I know for SURE the old me would've broken down and started crying. I can say with pride that I've only cried at the front of the classroom twice (the first time was because I was really sick but felt I should still show up at school when I really shouldn't have, and the second time was because my eighth graders had started crying on the last day of school and I couldn't help but join them). That thicker skin I've grown has helped me on many occasions, including this one. I lost a student. So what? I also gained five new students last month alone.

Negative comments and situations don't have to define who I am. If I went off of negative feedback alone, I would've quit tutoring a while ago. That's not me though. Yes, negative feedback hurts, but as the great Joanne Kaminski (an online tutoring coach and the head of the largest group of online tutors on Facebook) has reminded me, I'm given MUCH more positive feedback than negative feedback in a given week (I'm actually going to start keeping track of them in a notebook to serve as a visual reminder of the validity of that fact).

So now what? I'm simply going to keep doing what I'm doing and know that despite how it all ended, I DID help that one student in multiple ways, and I DO help my current students on a regular basis. I love what I do, and I'm going to keep it that way. =]