13 years of teaching IB math and skilled in desmos for SAT math

Phil T.

Although I have a Bachelor’s and Master’s in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University and Stanford University, respectively, I have enjoyed tutoring or teaching math since I was a freshman in college. Mid-career, I completed the coursework in pedagogy (minus the internship), for a Masters of Art in Teaching from University of Southern California, and after more than 10 years working internationally as an engineer I became a math teacher for 14 years at an international school.

At a full-time teacher, I taught principally math, and some design thinking and programming classes including individual or small group learning resources classes for 6th, 9th, and 10th grade math, and classroom groups of 6-26 students for 10th-12th grade. This included 11 cohorts of International Baccalaureate math students from 2015-2025, at both standard and higher levels. I am especially skilled with helping students leverage the graphing calculator and in advising the math internal assessment project component of IB. In addition to in-person, I also have experience in working with students online. I have also worked with my students on math SAT prep. I created over 1000 math youtube videos for my students during my career, which I continue to use as a free resource for independent practice for my tutees.

In a tutoring session, I like to start by taking questions that a student may have, and in the process of working together on the problems, get to know the student’s interests, math goals, and abilities. The foundation of my math teaching philosophy is to frame concrete examples close to the student’s interests and experience as a basis for understanding math concepts which are often too abstract to grasp easily. I use this framework to explain concepts to students in areas where they are having difficulty.