Teaching & Learning & Discovering New Personal Growth

Written By: Kween

I am 37 years old…so the furthest thing from my mind…is high school Earth Science. YET…there I was Wednesday going over it with a friend’s daughter.

Faatima is the daughter of my co-worker, Annette. Annette and I hit it off immediately…but, not just because we’re cool folks. When I first started working at the social services office here in Peekskill back in January, Annette and I gave each other the “crooked eye”. Not the eye of “ew”, but the eye of “hmm…I’ve seen you before”. Before long, we’d figured out that she remembered me from a job I used to have at a daycare center in my hometown of Mt. Vernon, NY, where I worked at the age of 14 as a teacher’s assistant through the Youth Employment Program. She drove the bus for the center, aptly named “Toddler’s Park” and remembered my face right off.

We’ve been very cool ever since. She’s prayed with and for me through some rough situations…including and especially the death of my beautiful grandmother in March. We’ve held each other’s confidence within the office walls where…there actually AREN’T any walls. The sound travels around this tunnel of office cubicles where laughs, drama, work frustrations and copiers can be heard over short dividers. We’ve become fast learners of lip synching and hand movements, and have enjoyed a few lunches together…fast friends.

SO…when she asked me to help her daughter with some complicated lessons…I couldn’t refuse her. I did indeed have to stave her off a week or more due to being overwhelmed on the emotional front…but, the other day I sucked it up and said…”let’s do it!”. Her daughter showed up Wednesday, not really there for our lesson, but we met and she and I started in on what was hardest for her. Faatima said, “I just need it to be simplified!”. That was a beautiful thing to hear, because I’m the “kween” of simplification. As wordy as I can be, I can cut an explanation short with one swift, painless blow. I broke down to her the theory of the Heliocentric universe (the sun being the center). I also showed her how to skip the minutiae of diagrams, descriptions and trick questions…to trust what she knows. I explained why the stars aka planets aren’t fixed and how they move about. She was in awe of how simple it ACTUALLY was. I even helped her with some writing tips for a couple of essays.

What I found to be the best part of the meeting with Faatima…was how good it felt to impart some passion for knowledge to a young woman of 18. How, this little meeting…in spite of my hesitance to help her…was rewarding for all of the moments I read her face and saw, “Oooh, I got it!”. She was so worried about failing the upcoming test on the Astronomy part that she was nervously unlearning her lessons. Unconsciously, she was allowing fear of failure to consume her and cause her brain to drain of all she’d retained. Being smart and versed well in her OWN fave subject of biology…she probably thought she’d sail through. She had an epiphany, that it was SHE who was making the subject hard. Once she accomplished that…she began to absorb more. She also knows…that she could pass with a meager 55, but she doesn’t want to settle for that. My “student” has a desire to excel!! I love it.

If I do decide to help her regularly, this could be a great way of being an influence on someone in the younger generation. Helping to “simplify” education, helping to build confidence with what they learn and know, and being a part of that “village”. Encouraging her along her path is a no-brainer, though…there are so many young people easily deterred by the pull of the world. When one says, “I want to make a difference in the world” it should be nothing to help them hack away the brush of life to get them there. I also learned, that I’d be teaching and learning at the same time. RE-learning love of knowledge and coming a bit closer to God’s purpose for me…and THAT is priceless.