I was a full-time math teacher in California public schools, where I taught all levels from prealgebra through AP Calculus. Many of my students still keep in touch and hail from all around the world. They have gone to many colleges including Stanford, Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Cal Berkeley, and UC Davis to name a few. Their current careers are doctors, teachers, and engineers. One former student has her own TV show. Another produced a film for Pixar that won academy awards.
Part of my professional background was obtaining an M.S. in Computer Science and working at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. I wrote remote control and text messaging apps.
After retiring from full-time teaching I substituted and privately tutored in the Bay Area and recently moved to these magnificent Sierra foothills. I prefer to call my extensive tutoring experience personalized instruction. My goal is to meet the student's goals--understanding the concepts, improving test scores, raising the grade, lessening the stress, working with their style and at their pace, whatever the individual requires.
My students tell me that I explain clearly, use everyday language, real objects, useful diagrams and visualizing techniques which makes the technical terms and notation easy to deal with. I work on test-taking strategies and 'learning how to learn'--how to cope with it all.
Students have said that I make it easy to learn and am down to earth and non-intimidating so they can build self-confidence. I work with the students' learning styles rather than imposing rigid approaches. Often there are many ways to solve a problem and if the classroom teacher insists on a particular method or format, but the student can't relate to that, we can translate between the student's style and the teacher's.
I have lots of supplementary materials from my teaching and tutoring, in case students want extra practice or test review. Let's take the stress out of math and let's get it done.
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