Tutoring Bamboo Forest

To be honest, I am tired of dealing with students who think they are one-in-a-million geniuses—which, at this point, is almost all of the entire few hundreds I’ve taught in my entire career (except a few that I can count on one hand).

These students believe themselves to be geniuses simply because they were always told so by their own parents. They feel vindicated when they can perform some rudimentary mental gymnastics better than their peers. Those ones are also never grateful when they get any constructive feedback, since their whole world was built upon the axiom that they are infallible. (That is why, on the other hand, I often go the distance to help with whatever I can do for any student who is sincerely grateful.)

Even at my level of 3 SD-above average, teenage life was not about being able to do some things better than my peers. It was about wondering why people utterly fail to do all the things that seemed extremely elementary; it was about my sense of inadequacy and inability gnawing at my self-worth every day.