At some point in our learning experience, we feel motivated to pass on our hard-earned knowledge to those just starting out. And then it happens…
Bang! We feel like we’re impostors. We’re doing something fraudulent. We’re trying to be something we’re not—an expert, someone with years and years of experience.
In reality, we’re afraid of the backlash of failure and being exposed to what we feel we are—someone who is still learning.
But are we really impostors? Remember:
Could it be that we are instead beginners?
Freelance teachers who used to work in public schools may have proposed to a parent their child needs homework help. Perhaps, they then suggested an older child give the much-needed support. But why would a teacher recommend that an older schoolchild provide a younger schoolchild with homework help? Surely, the older child is not experienced enough to offer tuition?
The answer is that an older child may not have years of experience in teaching but will have the knowledge to pass on to a lower-grade schoolchild who’s struggling. The parents are happy to give pocket money to the older child, and the teacher no longer has a child struggling with lessons.
What does homework help have to do with freelance teaching? You may ask. Quite a lot, actually, although it may not be quite as straightforward as you may think.
Many freelance teachers struggle because they cannot believe their teaching skills have value to society. It’s a common phenomenon with highly skilled people. They develop tunnel vision and see only their flaws and imperfections.
This is a disastrous recipe for any teaching business.
The more expertise and years of experience you gain, the more you’re at risk of thinking this way. The greater your knowledge, the more you recognise what you don’t know. You become acutely aware of what you have done wrong in class, of what you left out, or didn’t have enough time to go through with your students. You develop a guilty conscience because you now focus on the flaws in your work. As a result, you wonder why anybody would pay for your courses because you wouldn’t spend that amount of money on such inferior work.
The crux of the problem is when your self-confidence resists charging a fair price because you know you’re not perfect or don’t feel ready.
But think about it—you have skills, and it doesn’t matter what level of expertise they are in your own eyes because your students appreciate them. Remember also, that in some Asian cultures, there is no such thing as ‘perfect.’
That you may not know everything has become clear to you after your learning process. It comes with knowledge. The more you learn, the more you realise there is so much more to learn.
For example:
When your students need the knowledge you already possess, they want you with the knowledge you can offer because it’s more than they know. They won’t match you against Leonardo da Vinci’ or the Bill Gates of this world.
You possess the knowledge the students want to learn.
The older schoolchild wasn’t perfect either. However, the older child had at least one year’s more knowledge than the struggling schoolchild, which sufficed in this instance. But would you call it fraudulent because the older schoolchild wasn’t a trained teacher?
There is no reason to believe you are ‘false’ either. Whether or not you feel like an expert, your potential students know you have more experience than they do. They want your expertise and knowledge and appreciate having found someone who can instruct them. Also, many teachers don’t realise that a student with less subject knowledge than you cannot differentiate between your capabilities and those of another teacher. And that person is someone you consider an expert.
Freelance teachers must consciously shift the inward stare for perfection outwards. Running a teaching service means focusing on your students’ needs and finding a way to satisfy their requirements. Make all your years of training, qualifications, knowledge and experience available. Students won’t recognise how little or how big your knowledge gap is compared to the ‘experts.’ What they will know is whether you can teach what they need. You have the knowledge and teaching ability they want, so don’t let intimidation or the quest for perfection stop you because you don’t feel ready—yet.
Do you think the older schoolchild would feel unprepared for peer-to-peer teaching?
No, I don’t believe so because they accept the job as a job to be done without thinking about qualifications or the missing years of training and experience adults (teachers) have gone through. The older child is also not worried about making a living. They are helping another child as well as assisting a teacher. That is enough for the child. On the other hand, teachers know that actual teaching is the best way to gain experience and knowledge, rather than reading books or learning by rote. The old military expression ‘No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy’ reflects this philosophy in a broad way.
Contact teaching is the only way to gain important skills regarding what you do and how to do it. Mistakes are integral to learning as long as you learn from them rather than giving in to fear and dismay. Your students may praise you for doing a great job teaching, but as a teacher, you’ll always realise you’re still learning and making mistakes.
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
This is a paraphrase of an idea that John Dewey, an American Philosopher, expressed using other words in My Pedagogic Creed (1897) and Democracy and Education (1916); it is widely misattributed to Dewey as a quotation.