Anything but Failure

Writing an essay about a successful teaching experience is not easy. First off, I have to think of that certain successful teaching experience. How can I justify a particular teaching experience? Do I value quantity over quality or the other way around? Do I rely on the positive feedbacks, or on how I felt about myself during those teaching occasions? Worse part is that I have to answer these questions myself.
I thought about the times I taught people and went through them one by one. I tried to think of the best one that would suit the queries needed to be answered in this essay. I finally ended up with my tutorial sessions with three classmates from my fourth year high school. We usually studied Mathematics in the school library together. Everyday our teacher would give us an assignment and we, as students, had to wrestle with numbers and all sorts of figures.
The four of us—among the majority of students—usually do our homework in school. During lunch break, we would go up to the library and do our Mathematics homework there. I usually explain to them the lesson before we ink on our assignment papers. When everyone has a better understanding of the lecture, we answer the assignment individually.
You see, I’m not really into cheating. That’s probably why I prefer to teach them the lesson and then let them on their own. I count copying of homework as cheating. We do compare our answers but I don’t take it as copying. After all, what’s the point of teaching someone when one allows mistakes to go abandoned? Whenever we do not get the same results, we discuss our answers to check. This way, all of us get to exercise our brains and better understand the lesson.
Aside from Mathematics, we also study other subjects especially during exams. Two or three times, we meet at my classmate’s house to review. The most effective thing probably was that I was a bit strict when it comes to teaching. I give them lots of exercises to practice on and sometimes even give them assignments myself! I don’t really check if they do it though, I leave them that freedom to do it only if they want to. When it comes to Math, with all the formulas students need to strike down their throats, I make sure all the four of us memorize what is required. A learning technique that they learned to adopt is making a handy list. I usually write all the formulas in a piece of paper and try to memorize. A better way of memorizing, a practice my classmates started to do, is writing down a copy of the review list without looking on the original paper. Writing the formulas down again and again gets them stuck on all of our heads. That is why when it comes to exams, the four of us are all equipped for battle. During preparation, one can imagine the four of us whispering terms, holding a piece of paper.
I am quite convinced that I’d be able to make use of the procedures I used among my classmates on a classroom. As of now, I am also convinced that students will learn healthily. After all, my classmates did become skilled.