Besides guiding students to write research proposals for applying to PhD programs, I’ve also started tutoring English, this time a girl in her last year of senior high.

I didn’t really look for students who were in need of English tutors, and I didn’t advertise myself so, either. It was a total happenstance: when one of my relatives heard that I was teaching students, she asked me if I could also teach English to high-schoolers. Specifically, she said, was I able to and open to tutoring a student who was preparing for college entrance exam.

I said yes, admittedly without much thinking. I said, I’m happy to help and I believe I can definitely help, but you and the kid and her parents all need to know that I’m by no means a professional Chinese high-school English teacher. I’m just a Chinese who has loved to read and write since a very young age and the language I use for these purposes happens to be English.

The team I work with for supporting college and master students to apply for PhDs had written me an “ad” when I joined them. My relative asked me if I had resume or any doc for self-introduction that she could pass along to the girl’s parents, so I shared this “ad” of mine with my relative. I didn’t think the kid’s parents would get serious, but it turned out they did. They were super interested in me teaching their girl’s English. They even asked, “is it possible to get her English score to above 130?” (The total test score is 150; the girl consistently tested around 80s.)

Promising a target score is not something a sensible teacher will do, let alone me, someone who isn’t a real English teacher. I told the parents that I can’t promise anything about her score, but I sure can teach her the right way to learn English.

Looking back, I now realize that was also something quite ambitious to claim, lol.

Fast forward: I have been teaching her for a month by now. Every Saturday night (which is her Sunday morning since we are not in the same country), I dutifully sit in front of my computer, initiate a call through a video-conferencing tool, and start teaching her English. I’ve assigned her the Harry Potter series for her to familiarize herself with fictional text. For non-fiction, I seek for appropriate news articles published by well-known American media. I teach her to forget about rote memorizing words; instead, I guide her to guess the meaning of words, and if an unknown word shows up too many times in a passage that hinders her understanding, she should look it up in the dictionary, which is (I suppose) the right way to build up one’s vocabulary. We talk about the readings in class, and I go through the edits and corrections I made for her reading summaries. Sometimes I also answer her questions about her exams, per her request.

I wonder what she thinks of these classes and my teaching. She is perfectly aware that I’m no professional but she still wants me to teach her. My relative told me she seemed to like me after my initial chat with her, stressing that she liked very few teachers. For me, I’ve been enjoying these one-on-one tutoring sessions, but I hope she can give me more feedback. When the student becomes silent, I readily panic. For now, she at least has been good at answering my questions. Maybe I should thank her for enduring my first-time tutoring.