Adapting to Zoom

Over the summer, I wanted to volunteer and decided to go down a different route from past summers. Instead of going into classrooms and teaching face to face as usual, I tutored students—at all academic levels—through Zoom. At first, tutoring online felt disconnected and frustrating—I couldn’t read my students’ faces or sense their energy. I felt a little lost and that maybe online tutoring wasn't for me. After all, when I taught in person I found it more fun and interesting than tutoring online, which felt . But as I explored what philosophers were occupied with ideas of education and the purpose of learning. I came across John Dewey, who wrote, “The essential aim of reflection is to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, or disturbance of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, and harmonious.”(How we think 1910, Dewey) Every challenge in education is an opportunity for growth. Through reflection and trial and error, I learned that teaching isn’t about the setting—it’s about guiding students to think for themselves, even through a screen. Even though I was teaching, I was also a student, learning how to teach differently. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this and changed my whole teaching style from something that was more fitting for a classroom to something that could make one-on-one tutoring sessions more interesting and immersive for both parties. Instead of just watching over their work and sharing my screen to offer explanations, I would use little games via Zoom’s Miro app, where we could both interact on the same whiteboard as if we were in a classroom. I noticed that little changes like this not only made the students I taught more interested, but it added real life interaction and connection into my meetings. By the end of the summer, I realized that what once felt like a limitation had actually become a lesson in adaptability. Dewey’s ideas helped me see that education isn’t defined by where it happens, but by the experiences it creates. Tutoring online taught me patience, creativity, and how to bring energy into virtual spaces that don’t exist physically. What started as uncertainty turned into confidence—not because I mastered online teaching, but because I learned to grow through the challenge. In that sense, my students weren’t the only ones learning something new each day—I was too.