I actually started this back in 2023 and never got back to it since I had no ending point. Now I do.
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Earlier this week I had the chance to tutor a student I hadn't seen for a number of years. I became his de facto tutor because he was enrolled in an Chinese enrichment program (he's Caucasian) and was trying to learn Chinese and I was the only tutor even remotely qualified to help him with his homework (which I actually couldn't do, but I devised some strategies to help him learn how to identify characters, etc.).
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he's now about a foot taller than the last time I tutored him. Then history repeated itself as it turned out that he needed tutoring in a pre-calculus class and was working on doing conversions of angle measurements using degrees, arcs & radians, something I was ill-equipped to deal with as I haven't studied since trigonometry class in high school & I had to do a little internet review on the fly while my student was working on his homework to get caught up. My high school course material used some different terminology so I had to figure out the terminology being used by his textbook. Fortunately, before the session was over not only was I able to help him but I came up with a formula that allowed him to do conversions by creating equal ratios:
Radians/ 2 Pi = Degrees/360 = Arc / 2 Pi R (circumference)
which allowed him to cross multiply and derive the missing variable in the equation.
What's memorable about this is that after the session I felt an emotion that was unusual for me; I actually felt good about being smart. I'm sure I need to clarify this.
When prompted, I describe myself as painfully intelligent and it reflects how I feel about my intelligence most of the time, as it's contributed a lot to the sense of loneliness that I've experienced most of my life. Intelligence as defined by the makers of certain tests as being innate reasoning ability. And I also seem to be able to discern relationships between facts which allow me to identify causalities and draw conclusions that are eventually confirmed to be accurate, but I can't seem to explain how I got there to others. After a while I learned to stop verbalizing my observations as the typical responses were usually some combination of disbelief and laughter prompted by what I learned to understand was insecurity.
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segue to 2025:
I dawdle on youtube much more than I probably should, though to be fair I seem to spend a fair amount of time identifying channels which I find completely uninteresting. Today a UCLA site had a video on volleyball GOAT Karch Kiraly (the international volleyball association named him the best volleyball player ever in the last 100 years). He left competitive volleyball playing at the age of 46 (!) and went into coaching and now coaches the (US) women's Olympic team. Despite all of his success, the last sequence of the video has Karch talking about the importance of living a happy life and he cites the influence of Dennis Prager's Happiness Is a Serious Problem on the importance of gratitude:
"If you're not grateful, you can not lead a reasonably happy life. So I'm incredibly grateful for the chance to coach this team. run this program, to work with lots of quality people and we're working on ways to bring out the best in every single person in this program."
And I am grateful that I can do the same tutoring whether it's coursework or ISEE/HSPT/SAT/ACT test prep. I do consider the irony that I have this opportunity only because I'm mentally agile - but it's equally poignant that the most I have to contribute has little to do with me as much as it is recognizing what causes anxiety in my students, dealing with it while we discover what the best version of who they are really is - which is not to be a mirror image in how my mind works.
