What is your teaching philosophy?

I think learning should be fun, no matter how difficult the subject matter. By giving quirky examples or strange mnemonics that stay in students' heads, I can get them more engaged in the topic and motivate them to do the hard work of wrapping their mind around a difficult problem.

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

The first ten minutes or so would be wholly unrelated to the academic subject. I would make an effort to get to know the student and their background, and let them know whatever they want to know about me (within reason, of course). A tutoring session shouldn't feel like a chore or a lecture, so it's important to develop this rapport. I would then move on to the material, going over the course syllabus or test-prep material with the student and figuring out some key points of difficulty to work on over the course of the tutoring sessions. We would then delve into the topic, so I could see how the student works.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

This really depends on the subject. For languages, it's a matter of getting the student to think of the language as a life tool, not just an academic subject, so this means giving them newspaper articles or translated sections of their favorite books to read as practice. In math and science, word problems force students to think of the subjects in real-world terms, not just as formulae from a page in a textbook; I would provide as extensive a formula sheet as possible for reference during sessions, so that the student is thinking about what information is relevant and how to apply those formulae to solve the problem. The goal should be solving problems, not memorizing formulae!

How would you help a student stay motivated?

I will do my best to get students to think of what they're learning as skills in a toolset that they can use later in life, rather than simply facts they must learn for a test. Even when preparing students for standardized tests, I will not be teaching TO the tests, but rather teaching the material contained within them. This means getting students to think critically about causal relationships on history and social science tests; to think about math and science problems as individual examples of broader categories of problems and then think about how to solve them in the specific given context, and to grasp the overall meaning of a passage on a language test instead of fretting about what each individual word means.

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

I would help them approach it from a different angle, particularly trying to think about that concept in a real-world setting, rather than a cut-and-paste textbook example. If they're still having difficulty, we can move on to the next section and come back to that concept later on in the tutoring session.