Brian: Durham tutor

Certified Tutor

I founded and for over five years led an education start-up that devised, produced, and presented a range of live, in-person instructional programming for middle and high school students designed to develop and reinforce the creative thinking, teamwork, and organizational skills that find broad application across the full ambit of educational and professional endeavors. We designed and taught, for example, an eight-week playwriting course where 1012 students use our guided classroom discussions of the evolution of narrative structure and character in English-language drama to inform their writing as they all complete their own one-act plays over the course of the eight weeks. During the final class meeting, we bring in actors and other theater professionals to select one of the student plays for a staged reading, which they perform for all the students and their families. In contrast, our larger programs tended to include as many as 250 students participating in a single day-long event. In one instance, we partnered with a major northern New Jersey car deanship group on an entrepreneuship competition where teams of students devised a marketing strategy for an assigned car brand, which they presented to the dealership group's executives who selected four winning campaigns to actually implement in their dealerships for a limited time that summer.

While it may not be a background in formal classroom teaching, I have broad and deep experience working with students and designing and presenting engaging instructional content that doesn't talk down to students. Meeting students where they are is the only way to help them get reach their learning goals. Accordingly, I work directly with students and parents to put together a plan that speaks precisely to their individual tutoring objectives, and includes criteria for evaluating our ongoing success in achieving those objectives.