What Are My Strengths And Weaknesses Essay

A less comfortable path to explore is my weaknesses, yet I will press on. As silly as it may seem to an external eye, one of my major weaknesses in the first few weeks was that I doubted myself, the extent of my knowledge, and my ability to help my students. I felt somewhat out of place in my tutoring sessions considering the proximity in age and my lack of experience in tutoring reading comprehension and literacy skills. Within a few weeks, I realized that I had an academic knowledge base, coupled with a few years of college experience, that I could employ to communicate to my students the importance and reality of the work we do for their EN 103 class. I was able to use my experience as a student, previous and current, to understand how they felt and thought and then to validate their feelings through sharing my similar struggles in the relatable perspective of another student (MacDonald, 2000, p.12). Nevertheless, I still do worry about, and struggle with, the idea that I do not have enough content awareness to be a knowledgeable, effective educator. Another weakness or struggle I faced, at least with most of my students, was time management. I felt like I was letting my students down when we did not complete all of the tasks in our lesson plan for that day. Even when I tried to budget our time, use a stopwatch to keep track of the amount of time left, and refrain from adding extra detail to try to save time, there just never seemed to be enough time left. As the semester went on, I got better at utilizing our time effectively while maintaining the important information and discussions, but I still have a lot of room to improve. Discussing my strengths, believe it or not, is an equally difficult personal topic to discuss. Having students from two very different classes made me realize how flexible I can be for my students needs and the needs of other teachers. While one of the teachers I tutor for has a lesson plan for each day, the other teacher gave no specific lessons or topics for me to discuss. Therefore, for most of my students, I implemented another teacher’s plans and for the rest of my students, I created lessons to …show more content…
More than anything else, my experiences working with this group of amazing individuals will stay with me for the rest of my life. Years down my road, I will not remember which texts we read or how well my students explored and discussed their themes, but I will remember the day that I bonded with my student over our love for our nieces. I will remember the hilarious quotes and phrases my student brought to our meetings and how he liked to playfully complain when I assigned the remainder of the day’s task for homework. I will remember laughing with my student over the absurdity of American phrases that I had never given much thought before working with her, an English Language Learner. I will remember the excitement over a quiz review game and the knowledge that on that day I did make a difference in helping them learn. I will remember that glimpse of a smile on the face of my student who could barely meet my eyes during our sessions. I will remember the light in my student’s eyes when she finally understood the author’s meaning. I will also remember those who departed too soon, the emptiness of a journey