What is your teaching philosophy?

My teaching style is encouraging, clear, fun, and flexible. I love figuring out how to customize a lesson in order to best cater to an individual student's needs. I can work with classroom teachers to come up with a plan to help you or your child through the semester. I also love helping students to build confidence that extends far beyond one subject or one test. As a teacher, it is important to me that students make fundamental and lasting progress as a result of our time together. One of my favorite things to do as a teacher is to convert students who are shy about math into math heroes.

What might you do in a typical first session with a student?

In many cases, the first session will be focused on diagnostics--identifying which concepts or types of problems are the most troublesome. Then we will walk through some problems together so I can understand how the student is thinking about the material, and I will suggest a few strategies to help with that, or those, problem types. The rest of the session will be devoted to reinforcing the new strategies through practice problems, in which I give successively less help. If a student starts to get fatigued on one topic, we will move to another topic to refresh our brains and continue to get the most out of the session.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

A good tutor is a good listener, and I only do about 15% of the talking in any given lesson. I give help when it is needed, but otherwise challenge students to think through problems on their own with successively less guidance from me.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

I have a very encouraging style and use humor whenever possible.

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

If a student is having an especially hard time with a concept, I will start by modeling the skill from start to finish. As we continue to practice, the student will start the problem on his or her own, with my suggestions when needed. We will try several different ways to see what makes the most sense for that learner. Finally, the student will practice with as little input from me as possible until we get to skill mastery.