I am driven by the challenge of helping every student to succeed. I join an elite crew here on Wyzant when it comes to tutoring the foundational math subjects; to these I add an absolutely rock solid background in the intersection of math, philosophy, and computer science: for much of the past year full-time, having dropped out of a successful post-Masters PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Mathematical Sciences many years earlier to pursue training for the Christian...
I am driven by the challenge of helping every student to succeed. I join an elite crew here on Wyzant when it comes to tutoring the foundational math subjects; to these I add an absolutely rock solid background in the intersection of math, philosophy, and computer science: for much of the past year full-time, having dropped out of a successful post-Masters PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Mathematical Sciences many years earlier to pursue training for the Christian priesthood (also incomplete), I have coded a C++ tool for computer-assisted research in discrete math, specifically in graph theory.
Also, helping students discover math themselves is the subject of the PROMYS program (Program in Math for Young Scientists) in number theory. Many years ago I spent two summers at the PROMYS program, one as a counselor to four students in the highly selective high school program, and one as a graduate student myself alongside area high school math teachers in the PROMYS for Teachers program. As a counselor, I worked through daily problem sets with each of my students, helping them to see connections and make conjectures about the classical number theory we were studying. The goal was to make math fun.
I am no stranger to taking time to learn a subject, and I can relate to what students see when approaching it for the first time. More than that, students do not enjoy math unless they feel some kind of mastery in the subject, and that comes with practice and tutelage. Learning math can be fun! I have seen students cultivate a sense of pride and ownership of the material, after starting out feeling alienated and out of their element.
For English tutoring, which I do much less of, I emphasize again the road to mastery as built upon drill upon drill. We must get familiar with the context, and this occurs in dialog, in learning vocabulary and rhetorical devices, in learning to parse (into logic!) the components of a sentence and a paragraph.
