I have always been interested in learning, especially when it comes to new and exciting cultures and places. After graduating from college, I decided to experience firsthand a culture completely different from my own. To afford this, I began looking into work in Japan. Before long, I was teaching English two hours outside of Tokyo. During the two years I spent teaching English in Japan, I fulfilled my expectations by learning all sorts of new things about the culture and language. What surprised me about my time there was how much I enjoyed teaching. The moment when a student finally grasped a difficult concept or found himself or herself able to do something that was impossible moments before was priceless.
After returning from Japan, I took this lesson to heart. For this reason I plan to go pursue a graduate degree, but in the meantime I am living in Brooklyn and tutoring to keep helping people reach that eureka moment. I believe in helping students help themselves by providing them with the right questions or pointing out the missing information rather than doing the work for them. Lectures and examples are useful but too easily forgotten. Discovering how and why a concept works in one's own mind, on the other hand, has always been my ticket to retention. Plus, it's just more fun to work things out on one's own.
Therefore, in tutoring I strive to help students reach these moments of understanding as rapidly as possible while still letting them get there on their own. I try to get them to the finish line quickly without running the race for them. The work is always interesting because each student is different. I love the challenge of finding what works best with each student's learning style; I love finding the quickest ways to those moments of understanding. I hope you or your child will enjoy the process of finding those eureka moments as well.
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