Skilled Greek Tutor and UChicago Graduate

Garrett A.

Coming from a family of educators, I have appreciated both the challenges and thrills of sharing knowledge from an early age. Growing up I learned that the volley of question and answer can be beautiful and rewarding. As a result, I discovered that the keys to learning are having the ability to articulate what you don't know and then having the confidence to ask the question. Whatever that happens to be, it is the right question. So my philosophy is to place emphasis not on the material of a subject directly, but on the skills for dealing with it.

I tutor in ancient Greek, German and all levels of math, from pre-algebra up to calculus and statistics.

Currently I am a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Chicago, where I also got my master's degree. Before that I studied for a bachelor's degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, having grown up in Omaha. For a time at Nebraska, before finding my passion in philosophy, I considered majoring in math. As I was finishing high school I scored a 35 in the math portion of the ACT, earned a 5 on the AP Statistics test, and in college got an A+ in Calculus and Modern Logic classes. As another point of reference, my cumulative GPA as an undergraduate was 3.98.

My 4+ years of teaching and tutoring experience have come in various formats. I have been a teaching assistant at UChicago, both in philosophy and in ancient Greek. At the University of Nebraska I was teaching assistant for classes in the honors program, and worked as a math tutor. At the elementary and middle school level the core of my experience has been on reading.

The actual practice of philosophy consists essentially in close reading: moving through a text slowly, patiently, frequently stopping and asking questions to check comprehension. This is a process I love, and a skill I enjoy sharing with others. Of course, much philosophy was written in other languages. For this reason, before moving to Chicago I lived for two years in Berlin, where I struggled with and eventually mastered the bea