Mathematics teacher with over eight years of experience

David C.

I graduated university with a bachelor of science in mathematics and have been teaching at a homeschooling enrichment collective in northern Virginia since the fall of 2018. I've taught pre-algebra, algebra I, geometry, algebra II, precalculus with trigonometry, probability & statistics, and AP Calculus (both AB and BC levels), as well as consumer math. I don't currently teach pre-algebra, but I've taught most of the others every year since 2019 (the exceptions being AP Calculus, which we offer when enrollment is sufficient, and probability & statistics and consumer math, which we added in the last three or four years). My teaching experience has been in small classes of 2-10 students and 1-on-1 specialized instruction, teaching students ranging from 9 to 18 years old.

When teaching and tutoring, I think it’s important to engage with students rather than just “teach at them.” I try to really understand what they know and don’t know, and address knowledge gaps and misapprehensions that are getting in the way of their progress. My experience has been that issues students are having are often rooted in fundamentals, and the remedy is to break rules down and see why things work like they do, rather than rely on pure memorization and a “just-so” approach. My approach is centered on solving a variety of problems with the student, analyzing how to apply the methods and techniques being taught to problems of varying difficulty levels, and grounding everything we do in the axioms, definitions, and theorems that are the foundation of all of math. I believe the key to learning any subject is to draw out the connections between topics and ideas, so that studying any aspect of the material reinforces the others, and thus the interconnectedness of mathematics is always front and center in my approach.