A Reflection on Tutoring: Josephine's Story

This is a shared story from Josephine, a summer 2020 Intern who worked with our BRIDGES online program.

I stare at the elegant tangle of Burmese words that cascade down my screen, courtesy of Google Translate. To me, the graceful loops, spirals, and whorls are both beautiful and frustratingly incomprehensible. But that is just one of the many barriers I faced this summer in my work at the Refugee Education Center. There was the barrier of language, yes, but also the barrier of distance.

Tutoring is hard enough in person, but when everything happens through a screen, interaction, motivation, and attention seem to slip away all too quickly. And then there was the barrier of culture. Over Zoom, my attempts to gauge whether I had said something culturally insensitive were futile. Furthermore, because of cultural differences in communication, I knew that I could never expect either Kaung or Thura to break in with a question if something had confused them, no matter how many times I encouraged them to do so.

As a result, I often found myself trundling blindly through a lesson, stopping abruptly every once in a while to ask explicitly: “Have you learned this word before?” or “Does that make sense to you?” Perhaps most insurmountable was the wall of differing experiences that seemed to divide us almost as effectively as the screen.

I soon became all too aware of how much teaching depends on shared experiences and the ability to relate to one another. I became painfully cognizant of how the pictures of happy children that were pervasive in the stories we read did not look at all like Kaung or Thura. As I waded through swamps of online teaching material, every potential lesson or story I found seemed to be intended for kids who were worlds away from the community the Refugee Education Center serves.

Once, I foolishly chose a story about building snowmen and consequently spent the first half of the lesson explaining to Thura what a snowman was. At least I knew better than to pick the story about an Italian restaurant.

But as time passed, these barriers, while still a significant presence, began to dwindle. Every morning before we started off our lesson, I would ask Kaung and Thura how they were doing or what they had been up to since I had last seen them. At first, such questions were mostly just met with hasty mumbles and averted eyes, or perhaps the all-time favorite answer of “nothing much.”

But as the summer progressed, Thura started to tell me about his favorite video games, and Kaung expressed his excitement and apprehension about his family’s impending move into a new apartment. There were other moments too, when the numerous barriers and difficulties we faced seemed to melt away. Like the time when Thura instantly grasped the concept of division (despite my garbled explanation and only a few hasty examples) and spent the rest of the lesson dominating our games of Quizlet Gravity. Then there were all the times Kaung surprised me with his level of focus and engagement as we read increasingly long stories or with his ability to perfectly recall every new word we had learned in the previous lesson.

Besides my regular tutoring, I was also assigned various tasks, such as distributing Chromebooks to families who wouldn’t otherwise have access to technology or dropping off cards and gifts to Refugee Education Center volunteers. One such task was compiling a map of all the families the center serves. Each pin on the map was to be color-coded based on what language the family spoke. Seeing the map of Grand Rapids overflowing with a myriad of vibrant colors was beautiful. It was a stark reminder that God’s kingdom is not a place where our differences divide us or where differences are stripped away, but rather a place where differences are accepted and cherished by all.