Robin's Tutoring Blog

Q WyzAnt wants to know

If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of academic or professional advice, what would it be?

My greatest piece of advice to my younger self would be to have more courage in following your true passions.  For example, I knew very early on that I loved writing but was fearful that my writing "wasn't good enough" and that I couldn't "make a living as a writer".  As a result, I spent 26 years doing a corporate job that I hated only to embark on a second career that I finally feel called to do in my 40s.

If I had my academic career to do...

With the end of the school year quickly approaching I am receiving a lot of frantic requests from parents, “Could you please meet with my child tomorrow? He has a math test on Friday and if he doesn’t pass, he may have to go to summer school!”

My policy is generally to refuse such requests, although I always do so with a very heavy heart since I know that the student most likely will fail and have some negative consequence. However, where there are some individuals who advertise themselves as “Test Prep Consultants” whose specialty is in teaching unprepared students how to “cram” at the last...

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
? Nelson Mandela

I think this quote speaks to me more strongly than many others because of the trend of anti-intellectualism that I see among some students today. For reasons that are still largely unknown to me, I've witnessed some young people who appear to be under the impression that to excel academically is to somehow be less authentic or less "real" as a human being. This is the ultimate irony, however, in that, as Mandela states, education is in no way limiting, but instead is the ultimate method of becoming...

When I began applying to graduate schools three years ago as part of my plan to make a major shift from corporate America into the world of education I quickly realized that developing and articulating a “teaching statement” or a “teaching philosophy” was going to be an integral part of the academic application process. According to the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning (Writing Teaching Statements and Philosophies, 2011), a teaching statement serves as a summary of the methods and approaches that an educator plans to take in helping students achieve their academic goals.

There are scores...