I am a current public school English/ELA teacher with more than 7 years of classroom teaching experience at the middle and high school levels. I currently teach high school ELA and English Language Development, working with students across a wide range of reading and writing levels, including multilingual learners and students who are significantly below grade level. A substantial part of my day-to-day work involves helping students become stronger readers and writers, whether that means...
I am a current public school English/ELA teacher with more than 7 years of classroom teaching experience at the middle and high school levels. I currently teach high school ELA and English Language Development, working with students across a wide range of reading and writing levels, including multilingual learners and students who are significantly below grade level. A substantial part of my day-to-day work involves helping students become stronger readers and writers, whether that means reading comprehension, vocabulary, essay writing, literary analysis, organization, or simply figuring out how to approach an assignment that initially seems overwhelming.
My academic background is fairly broad. I have a BA in English and an MA in Modern European History, and before teaching English I spent six years teaching middle- and high-school history, including both regular and AP-level courses. I was also a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Germany and am fluent in spoken and written German. In addition to teaching, I have done extensive academic research, research assistance, translation, editing, and writing work, so I am particularly comfortable helping students with writing across different subjects, not just with traditional English assignments.
Probably my biggest strength as a tutor is the amount of experience I have working with students who don't necessarily find reading and writing easy in the first place. In my current teaching, I regularly have to take fairly difficult grade-level material and figure out how to make it accessible without simply watering it down. I am used to breaking complicated assignments into manageable steps, explaining things in different ways when the first explanation doesn't work, and meeting students where they actually are rather than where they are theoretically supposed to be. While most of my experience has been in the classroom rather than one-on-one tutoring, those are skills I use with individual students every day.
