I wasn't used to listening. In high school, my flair for the dramatic led me to the stage: I was comfortable there in front of audiences, filling auditoriums with my voice. And so, when I arrived at Brown University, I thought teaching would be a natural extension of my inner (and, to the occasional dismay of friends, outer) thespian. When I stood in front of my first classroom, teaching English during a sweltering Providence summer to ten eight year-olds, I realized that not even my loudest volume could bring order. And so, I began to learn what my teachers throughout schooling had implicitly taught me: listening to and building relationships with students is perhaps the most essential tool in a teacher's arsenal.

Throughout my time at Brown, I lent my ear to various different teaching opportunities, learning to know when to lead, and when to step back and be led. As a tutor with Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment, I met with Yonas, a fourteen year-old from Guinea, to help him with scholarship applications. He was confounded by the prompt: "describe yourself." Together, we worked to clarify what that meant to craft a narrative that would help him succeed. He got that scholarship, and the essay he wrote, though informed by conversations with me, was all his: it was his story, his words, and his voice. Later, I taught German to sleepy undergrads. In the classroom with twelve students, I balanced teaching a lesson at the front of the classroom with walking through the desks, observing, questioning, and facilitating conversation. In my weekly office hours, I sat one-on-one with students, encouraging them to come with questions or just a thirst for conversation: in the lobby of the school library (my "office"), I sat for hours with my students, discussing everything from the subjunctive to our favorite kinds of wurst.

My approach to tutoring is much the same: my sessions are personally tailored to each individual tutee's needs and interests. I am a firm believer that learning is not static it must be informed by a mutual exchange between tutor and tutee: learning not just the "why" of a question, but also the "how."