Bertrand B. - Tutor in Los Gatos, CA (95032)

Hello,

My name is Bertrand (French male christian first name coming from middle-age), I'm French as my first name may suggest, just relocated in the heart of the Silicon Valley.

These days, I have some time to spend with you to share my language knowledge, and accent. My accent is from Marseille (southeastern France): the country of Marcel Pagnol. It was attenuated over the years spent in international environment. Should I mention that French is my mother tongue?

During my undergraduate studies I taught Mathematics to juniors between 11 and 14 yo, challenged by the weaknesses they had in this field, proud to participate in building the foundations for their future. After graduating with advanced degrees in Computer Sciences and Software Engineering, I was Professor assistant conducting students hands-on practice. Today, here in the US, I'd be pleased to bring you some piece of France through courses for beginners to advanced speakers willing to practice their conversational skills. For the former, please provide class books references, for the latter, the topics willing to be addressed.

For Juniors, I would recommend a more strict tutoring behavior student-teacher, at student's home, sticking on their class books with objectives: (i) improving French grammar and vocabulary, (ii) gaining self-confidence in ability to read and build simple sentences, (iii) preparing classes ahead of time for a good GPA. Could help to find a French penpal in his/her age.


For advanced Students, I would recommend a more casual atmosphere in a library or at Starbucks. Philosophical topics may be conducted in groups: French is not the purpose, but becomes a medium of communication. Sentences shall be more complex and structured, using more French tenses and irregular verbs.


Subject may obviously be more casual according to student aims and language proficiency. Some conversations may be conducted dived in real life environment: restaurant (French Savoir-Vivre and vocabulary around the food), shopping center, supermarket, in the street, ... The goal is to enhance student's corpus linguae in his day to day life, prior to a journey in France for example.

• HTML

  Hello, I would be pleased to share my experience in HTML and web-based technologies to let you have your own real web-site. Everybody is concerned and may have in a few hours a personalized web-site. This is especially recommended from 15yo to give to the youngest the ability to build a strong résumé for later, almost on a daily basis as soon as they have interesting information to record. This data may be used later, for themselves, in order to remember what they did. This also me be used by college recruiters to check applicant's background and their wide range of interests: this may do the difference when seats are limited in prestigious universities!!! We will start with HTML basics creating a framework for general content management: paragraphs, pictures, tabs, tables, colors, .... We will hence move forward according to student's proficiency: style management with CSS, interactive scripts using JavaScript on client side, PHP on server side. For content management we may introduce XML schemas and XSLT transformation sheets. Of course, explanations of all of these web technologies will be supplied to let the student understand the e-world in which s/he lives. To let him/her understand the wonderful technology it is, but also how dangerous it may be (cyber-criminality, identity theft, harassment, spam, ...). For example, it is possible to add in HTML an hyperlink to send an e-mail. However web-robots scan HTML pages to detect e-mail address to send junk e-mails (spams) about wonderful cheap Rollex wristwatches, or Viagra. To prevent that, a simple JavaScript routine is enough. No clue what it means today? Let's give you a chance, or to your children, to understand it quick!!