A Day in the Life of a Tutoring Center Teacher

Art: Shiying Xu

By SHIYING XU

For the past few summers, I volunteered at a tutoring center as a teacher’s assistant. As much as I can say, it was definitely quite the experience. I may or may not have ended up with a chronic fear of middle schoolers.

My career as a part time teacher began in the summer of 2021. A friend of mine found a tutoring center and managed to get spots there for their summer program. She called me up with an offer for volunteering. I replied to the offer and the both of us became teaching assistants. There was no training required; we showed up for an orientation and then we started working a week or so after. Unfortunately, the two of us didn’t get to work together – we were at different locations. My friend ended up dealing with kindergarteners while I ended up assisting ESL (English as a second language) kids of different grades. 

My shift was from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. I would stay in one classroom, doing what the teacher asked, like grading papers or helping students who called me over. That summer was very lackluster.

This last summer, on the other hand, things were more “fun.” From 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., my duties were essentially the same except I was in a Chinese class instead of an ESL class. After 2:30 p.m., I would move to a different classroom where I led a class of rising sixth graders for about a week or so until I got partners for the rest of my time there. In this classroom, I got to have a say on things and assign work to keep the kids occupied.

Even though teaching does at times get a bit boring, it’s never really that bad. Even when the kids get rowdy, they’re still quite entertaining. My favorite was the slightly older group. Most of the stories that I got out of teaching are from that sixth grade class. It’s those kids that opened my eyes to how big the generation gap is between them and I, even though I’m only six years older. One instance of this was when I randomly asked a kid if he knew what a landline [phone] was. The kid was completely lost. It made me feel old instantaneously. 

One time I started doing chemistry and random trivia on the chalkboard. The kids were getting too rowdy, as per usual, so they had more work from the other teacher that I was working with. As they were doing that, I started doodling on the chalkboard, and the first thing that came to my mind was chemical formulas. As a joke, I told the kids that “this information might end up as a pop quiz one day.” Of course, not even a potential pop quiz was enough to keep them quiet.

The kids that I worked with weren’t really challenging. They were loud and I had to constantly remind them to quiet down, and that’s that. That isn’t to say that there weren’t any nightmares. I haven’t experienced them firsthand, but I did watch another teacher go through it. She was the teacher for the SHSAT class which holds older kids – rising eighth graders. One of the kids in that class ended up making the teacher so upset that she just straight up stopped teaching the class altogether. In the end, she managed to get switched and was teaching a different class until the summer program stopped. 

Overall, I think that teaching has been a pretty fulfilling experience. I actually learned quite a lot myself. The biggest thing that I got out of it was what to expect when I’m out in society and have a job of my own. For anyone who is thinking about trying it, my only advice is to not be intimidated by the environment, your co-workers, and especially not your students. Even if teaching is nerve-wracking at first, know that you’ll get used to it in a couple of days.