What is your teaching philosophy?

My teaching philosophy is to create an environment where I encourage my students to seek answers, advance thought, learn the importance of organization and preparation, and develop a passion for their education. I believe that all students have the ability to excel, and it's my job to reinforce the material and present it in a way that maintains their interest and clarifies difficult concepts.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

Encouragement, positive feedback, reasonable expectations, and goal-oriented milestones are just some of the ways I keep my students motivated. When working with students who are challenged by a particular subject matter, it is important to reward academic achievements along the way. For example, I had a student who had difficulty reading, and we worked out a reward where if he read to his sister every night for 15 minutes for two months, he would get tickets to a local baseball game, provided by his parents. He set the goal for himself and took pride and joy in working towards that goal. His little sister was also happy for her night time reading. I also encourage parents to continue "quizzing" and asking questions during non-tutor hours to show their encouragement and investment towards their student's goal.

If a student has difficulty learning a skill or concept, what would you do?

I believe that students have the most difficulty learning a concept when it is just presented in one way. The way to tackle the problem of concept difficulty is to present it in different forms for the student to digest. Some of us are visual learners, while others need a more-hands on approach. Incorporating numerous approaches and techniques aids in my tutoring methods of difficult concepts.

What strategies have you found to be most successful when you start to work with a student?

I have found that first understanding how the student learns and what they feel is the difficulty is the best way to be successful with a student. I think it's important to have an understanding of the student so that I can approach the material in a way that they will be receptive to. I have found that students are much more successful with tutoring and school when they can voice their issues.

How would you help a student get excited/engaged with a subject that they are struggling in?

It is always difficult to love something that you can't understand. However, as a PhD. student in the medical sciences, it is something that I encounter all the time. The key to getting a student engaged and excited in difficult material is to one explain that we all have this issue, and there is always some topic that is difficult, even to a genius. It is important that a student not feel alienated for not understanding a certain topic. Second, I like to take a real-world approach to difficult concepts and show how these abstract ideas play out in real life. That could be a simple as pointing out shapes and angles in building architecture to a struggling geometry student, or having a student pay the cashier to work on math-related deficiencies.