What is your teaching philosophy?

Learning happens most fully when we come to understand something through our own exploration of the problem. This is also how learning becomes fun, like solving a puzzle. My job is to guide you toward the right path to solving problems so you can keep making progress without getting stuck and frustrated.

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

I would spend a little bit of time getting to know the student personally, learning about their interests and what subjects they like and why they like them. It's important to know each other on a personal level a little bit because everybody's experiences shape the way they learn.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

I like to make sure students understand a problem as best as they can, even if they got the right answer, so they can be confident the next time they see a similar problem. When I help students work through a problem, I like to be relatively hands-off and give them time to try to work out the next step until they seem truly stuck. Practicing independence is the best way to learn it!

How would you help a student stay motivated?

When the frustration is real, it can be very hard to stay motivated. I experience it all the time! By focusing on successes and being excited when students feel that "click" of new understanding, no matter how small, it is much easier to keep moving forward.

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

Everybody sees things in different ways, and difficulties in understanding usually just mean the concept needs to be explained from a new angle. Usually new skills are built on old ones, and often what students need to learn a new skill is to discover something new about its building blocks.

How do you help students who are struggling with reading comprehension?

I struggle with this sometimes, especially because for many math and science "word problems" the writers intentionally give a lot of extraneous information. It helps me to write out all the details very thoroughly in a way that I understand. Going very slowly is totally okay!!

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

Most often I hear people say, "why does this matter?" or, "I'll never use this." This can be really hard sometimes because the classes you take give you a lot of tools to solve problems you don't even know exist. I think there are a lot of super exciting things happening in the world, and I'm always looking for really amazing things that relate back to the basics we learn in school, and hopefully I can find some that the student also thinks is really exciting.