TRAVELING THE ROAD OF LEARNING TOGETHER
For experienced educators like me, tutoring is perhaps the most rewarding style of teaching because 1) you get to work with one or a few students rather than a whole class, 2) there is opportunity to learn and adapt to the student’s learning style and mechanisms, and 3) you share the student’s emotional rewards of confidence and achievement knowing you are the catalyst for academic success. So I look forward to the opportunity to become your tutor as much as you look forward to tutoring as a solution to the current academic challenges and issues.
The student populations I have served have had significant academic, cultural, ethnic and economic diversity. I have taught at open admission community colleges, large urban universities, selective medical schools, NASA Johnson Space Center, guest presentations for various K-12 curricula and even in remote villages of Central America. I consistently have earned positive student and colleague feedback and evaluation, and at the University of Houston I was named a “master teacher”, offering guidance in the art and science of effective interaction with students. My academic roles have always included advising and mentoring which I thoroughly enjoy; I’m an effective communicator and cultivate student trust and rapport. My educational principles always have defined my faculty role as a facilitator, motivator and advocate. Ultimate responsibility for learning resides with each student, but instruction should offer alternative means to that end. As the Chinese proverb says, teachers open the door, you enter by yourself. Arriving at any educational level with diverse learning styles and skills, and challenged by not only the curriculum, but also by life beyond the classroom, within reason each student deserves to be accommodated and all deserve to be commended for their academic and career ambitions. Moreover, not every student achieves immediate course and program success for myriad reasons, but with tutoring, family and peer support, academic counseling and mentoring, pure determination and pragmatic goal-setting, every student can find personal success. My philosophy as a veteran educator, including tutoring, is encapsulated in the famous quotation that “the brain is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled”.
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