Al: Essex County tutor

Certified Tutor

In addition to a year of experience as a Calculus I course assistant (college), three months of experience as an organic chemistry teaching assistant (college), and two months of experience as an organic chemistry lab aide (college), I recently spent four months as a maternity leave interim chemistry teacher (high school). I've also spent approximately three years informally assisting college students in various mathematics courses, from statistics and precalculus to higher-order algebra and analysis. While developing my own study skills, I've taken the time to research study strategies, work with others to learn material and adapt to different learning styles, and edit and review English and liberal arts assignments.

Generally speaking, these jobs and experiences have taught me to approach every student as an individual, working with their strengths, interests, and unique approaches to problem-solving to better improve their comprehension of a subject. For instance, while I was substituting at the Loomis Chaffee School, I made it a policy to find at least three different ways of explaining a new concept to my classes, and I kept long office hours and provided my email in order to enable my students to approach me with questions whenever they had time. I often met with students one-on-one, and I brought textbooks from my home and researched online resources so that they could supplement my teaching with other materials.

While working as a dorm parent and as a chemistry TA, I also assisted students in studying for a variety of subjects, even those that I didn't nominally teach, such as history, French, English, and Algebra II. In this capacity, I worked with approximately twenty students outside of my official classes. This taught me to get to know kids' learning styles and difficulties quickly.

In my work as a chemistry teacher, chemistry TA, and math CA, I was required to both run study sessions and grade. This taught me to use assignments to assess students' progress as frequently as possible, note general issues and probable flawed methodolgies responsible for mistakes, and tailor my teaching to focus on areas of difficulty as they appeared.

My skills, experiences, and belief that every student should be approached as an intelligent individual with their own motivation, entry point into a subject, and areas of strength and weakness inform my teaching style. I believe strongly in approaching students based on how they will best learn, whether that means finding a new way to explain, better examples or applications of information, or a wider array of useful resources.