Are you always your best?
I believe it’s important to bring my whole self to everything that I do, whether that be as a software engineer or as the owner of TriTutoring. It’s also important to bring one’s best self. How can one balance this? That was not a rhetorical question... I would love to know! Why do I ask? I ask because, hopefully, you see this dichotomy. Your whole self isn’t always your best self, and that is the same for our students. Students have bad days, sad days, frustrated days, and tired days. How do we encourage them to balance bringing their whole selves and their best selves to the classroom or the Zoom session? I don’t have an answer to this one. Still, with teaching comes the prerequisite of empathy. Helping our students to become their best selves sometimes means dealing with their whole selves when, well, they aren’t at their best.
At TriTutoring, we work with and have worked with a wide range of students. Some students love to learn; we have students who ask their parents to continue sessions over the summer to expand their skills and make the start of the school year easy peasy. We have students who are less excited to be there; it’s not that they hate learning, but they may not be engaged in the subject, may feel too busy for the extra session, or may be frustrated with the difficulty of their work. We have students everywhere in between.
A student must feel safe bringing their whole self to a session, while still being encouraged and empowered to bring their best self to their learning. Again, I don’t have an answer for this tension between “whole” and “best”. I do know students need our support in order to learn. Students need encouragement and confidence in order to grow.
This is less of a blog post and more of a reminder: we all experience this gap between being true to who we are and what we are feeling and being the best version of who we are. As you go about your day, trying to be your best self, it might help to remember that the person who sent the annoying reply-all email to the entire company, the person who didn’t notice the light turn green, the person who left you on hold… they are also trying to fill that gap. Is it always true? Is every person truly working tirelessly to be their best self? Absolutely not, but does it hurt to give them the benefit of the doubt?