We Never Outgrow our Need for Encouragement

When she signed up as a tutor at an elementary school, Lara Patangan faced her own fear of failure and learned the value of encouragement.

As a student, if I had a good report card my parents would let me order whatever I wanted at Dairy Queen instead of the standard five Dilly Bars for a dollar that my family always got. While it was kind of exciting to pick something from the big menu, I realized that as extravagant as banana splits sound, the bananas are a mushy nuisance that distract from the ice cream. I decided the smart kids could have them and I moved on with my mediocre grades and discounted Dilly Bar.  

The past few years, I’ve been a tutor at the Guardian Catholic School. While I had some experience as a substitute teacher, I was hesitant to take on this volunteer role because I didn’t want to be the reason a struggling student slipped farther behind. In short, I didn’t want to fail.  

Fear of failure

I knew failure as a student. In third grade, my struggle with math began and it peaked when I failed ninth-grade algebra. I remember the pleading eyes from teachers and tutors after they would explain a lesson. It seemed like they believed if they stared at me long and hard enough, I would understand how to reduce a fraction or cross-multiply or find the square root. Instead, I would just nod at them with a weak, embarrassed smile — too self-conscious from their intense gazing to think of math at all.  

Sister Susan Reineck, who runs the afterschool tutoring program at the Guardian School, is nothing like that. She’s soft-spoken and encouraging. I’ve watched her teach. She doesn’t rush students or shame them. She’s patient and calm and starts where the students are, not where they should be. I’ve benefited from her instruction on ways to approach teaching and am awed by how capable she is and how capable she makes others feel. I sometimes wonder if I would have struggled so much in math if I had someone as patient and resourceful as Sister Susan teaching me.  

Turning negative memories into teaching skills

When I tutor, I try to be mindful of my own negative experiences. I don’t correct every mispronounced word and I try to come up with fun and creative ways to explain to the student the different meanings of words and the emotion they connote. Almost always, I show her pictures of my pets or tell her a funny story about my life. We talk about her family, her best friend, places she’s been, and where she wants to go to high school.

We write summaries of the pages we read, and for weeks we practiced a speech she was assigned in one of her classes: writing it, rewriting it, and learning to project her soft voice to the back of the room where I sat cheering for her. Once, I read her a post I wrote that appeared in the newspaper and she seemed in awe of what I had written. I laughed at her sweet comments but secretly they made me feel proud — teaching me that encouragement is something we never outgrow.  

On occasion, we have to work on math. While it’s still a challenge, together, she and I solve the problems — learning in the best possible way — from each other (okay, occasionally I text my husband to confirm we are going in the right direction). Sometimes I still worry that I’m not good enough to teach her, that she could progress farther under someone else’s guidance.  But then I remember that life isn’t either pass or fail. It’s a bit of both. Besides, maybe we don’t need to be so afraid of failure.  

Mistakes are our best teachers

Mistakes, whether in math or in life, are always our best teachers. It’s not that failing algebra made me understand it better, only that it helped me learn something far more useful: the importance of being kind to yourself and others when working on difficult problems. I may not have always figured out the unknown I was solving for, but I did learn what it wasn’t.

I learned our worth isn’t defined by how well we navigate academia or our careers or the maze of measuring up. Our lives have a predetermined value set by God that no math in the world can reduce or even quantify. When we honor the infinite value of that in our neighbors, our capacity to understand one another grows exponentially. When compassion is part of the equation, the answers are no longer static. They carry on. 

Years from now, if all I’ve taught that young girl is the importance of having someone at your side as you work out solutions, plug in different variables, and ultimately find your own answer, then I will have done something far more important than hone her reading skills. But even if all she remembers is the lady with the silly stories and random pet pictures who showed up every week simply because she believed in her value, then I still taught her something worthwhile — and that’s got to earn me at least as much as a Dilly Bar.  

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Copyright 2024 Lara Patangan
Images: Canva