There is a pervasive image in popular culture of Mathematics as a boring class where students sit and listen to a nerdy teacher drone on about rote memorization of concepts with no applicability to reality. While this image has been sadly true for many students, my own experience of learning math as I grew up was quite the opposite, and it is that opposite experience which inspired me to go into education.

In middle and high school, I was fortunate enough to have educators who taught math not as a regimen of drills and memorization, but as a process of thinking logically. They taught not exclusively through by-the-book lectures, but through anecdotes and idiosyncratic metaphors which may have amused my classmates and I, but also aided our memories and our reasoning skills.

Through high school and college, even while completing two unrelated Bachelor's degree programs, I began tutoring my own classmates, younger students, and even adult neighbors using a similar delivery style as my own teachers, albeit tailored to each student's individual struggles. My clients all showed a drastic improvement in their respective classroom performances. In graduate school, I had the opportunity to teach a semester of College Algebra, again peppering my lectures with idiosyncratic memory triggers. My students all left the class with well-earned grades showing their increased understanding of Mathematics.

After attaining my provisional certification in grades 9-12 Mathematics, I completed a teaching internship in a Missouri high school, teaching Algebra I and assisting with Geometry and Pre-Calculus classes. During that experience, not only did my instructional style reach my students, but their reactions also reached me, helping me learn how to better manage a classroom.

My teachers provided me with a memorable, reasonable and sometimes downright amusing Mathematics experience. Such is the experience which I have tried my best to provide to my own students so far, and such is the experience I will provide to my students with Varsity Tutors.