FEATURED TUTOR: MANON

We sat down with Manon, one of our awesome math tutors, to talk about their time working at LTLS, what lead them to education, and their tutoring philosophy. 

How did you get into teaching/tutoring?

For me it was a natural progression stemming from being very academically involved and enjoying doing well in school. I started tutoring peers in high school, then after high school I began working at an after school learning center. I was basically teaching a class of more than ten English students. I don‘t entirely know why they decided to give a seventeen-year-old the responsibility of making and implementing their own curriculum, but I enjoyed it! That experience was what helped me learn that I really liked working with kids and education.

What’s a favorite story you have from working at LTLS?

I feel like most of my experiences with my students are fun and funny. I spent almost an entire session about a week ago with a student trying to proofread their Excel spreadsheet and working together with them to figure out why their graph wasn’t a straight line. It was a really collaborative experience, and that’s what I enjoy. Initially neither of us really knew what was causing the issue, but we were working together to figure it out. I think stuff like that is really fun. I’ve also gotten to meet a few students’ pets, which is awesome. 

What have you learned through your work in education that you feel is most important to share?

A lot of people approach teaching as if they are a full person helping other people to become full people, but really, it's more of an information exchange. As tutors, we are already dealing with full people. It’s important to have the mindset that students already have plenty of knowledge; they just need someone to help them with the process of figuring things out and building more of a foundation. As people we are always learning new things and gaining new knowledge, and a tutoring relationship, like any relationship, requires give and take; it’s not one sided. I can learn a lot from my students just like they can learn a lot from me. 

What’s something we don’t know about you?

I wrote my first book when I was fourteen. It was about 250 pages long and was Attack on Titan fanfiction.