Charles -
I wanted to thank you personally for putting yourself through so much to help others, both the members of GMAT Club who watched your lessons with great interest and the unseen beneficiaries of the larger donation drive. I will confess that this was my first time watching any of your content. I simply prefer to read instructions or teachings, to be able to skip around according to my own understanding of the content. But from the moment you started the marathon, I was engaged. (I was watching while running, sort of participating in a challenge of my own creation: run without soled shoes for 20K, all while breathing through my nostrils only. My efforts were buoyed by your own, and I made it.) I watched hour after hour, in disbelief that another hour had passed in the middle of every hour on the clock. I even participated in the chat from time to time, as you noted yourself at some point when Ian Stewart and I had an exchange.
From the perspective of a tutor, I can say that I felt validated in many of my own pedagogical techniques when I saw you offering similar advice: I use "housekeeping" for "hygiene," for instance, but the idea is the same, and I also eschew mechanical thinking (although sometimes to a fault in Quant). I got up before 4.00 the next morning because I knew you would still be going, and I stayed with you until I had mere minutes before my first meeting of the day with a client. But that last hour was a treat. No, I do not enjoy watching others suffer, but you seemed to be having so much fun, working through those difficult Quant questions. I think I recognized every one, and I missed the same inequality question some time back for the same reason—I made an assumption. At least you had a legitimate excuse.
I left that marathon lesson feeling inspired, wanting to improve certain aspects of my tutoring, getting back to basics in my practice sets of questions. To be honest, I was in a lull with Quant after hitting a high in December. (I even wrote
a post about that triumphant moment when everything had seemed to make sense.) But seeing that you were employing sound logic to work through those difficult questions, even at the end of your tour of duty, I decided to go back to those same GMAT Club Quant questions, new ones, with a different mindset. I stopped thinking about outcomes and just worked from the ground up. So far, I have not missed a single question, even one of those 95-percent-difficulty questions in a set from earlier today. Sometimes I like to say that when I teach, it is as though I have waved a magic wand, and my student is enchanted with pixie dust for a while, feeling as though nothing on the test was insurmountable. I have seen such a marked change in my students before, as I am sure you have in yours. It was a rare opportunity to be on the receiving end, but all I had to do was watch and listen. You are a professional and an expert among peers.
Thank you for being so generous.
- Andrew