My teaching philosophy is to make learning fun, because nobody wants to spend hours doing something they don't care about! In my tutoring sessions, I'll help you not only understand the material better but also grow to enjoy it in your own way.

Before we begin, I like to get to know my students a little bit better. It's important to me to understand you as a person so that I can better cater towards your needs as a student. I'll typically ask you a bit about yourself, whether that is before we meet or at the beginning of our session, and I like to know what your best learning techniques are and what your least favorite learning techniques are. Again, this will help me build a lesson plan specified just for your needs.

I strive to make sure my students are not only learning the material but also learning how to study better. In every student, there is a different academic strength, and the key is to find it and to learn how to harness it. Once you learn how to learn, you will become an all-star student and be able to figure things out on your own even more often.

The biggest thing that motivates me is to be around other people who are motivated, to have a coach, and to have someone who is there to make sure I stay on task. I can be that person for my students. I can hold them accountable to make sure they keep up, and in return, when they do accomplish what they set out to accomplish, I often bring small certificates to show them how proud I am of what they did.

I often try a new approach. First, it's good to take a break from frustrating material. Even just five minutes of talking about something completely random can make your mind a blank slate so that you can start over and see the material with a clear mind. Then, I often try to explain the concept in simpler, different, and more visual ways, relating it to something the student is more familiar with. For example, if the student is an artist, I can relate the math problem or whatever it may be to something that has to do with being an artist.

The best strategy is to go step by step, letting the student work through problems on their own as much as possible. It's important not to do everything for the student, for example, if they are working on homework, because then instead of learning to figure it out themselves to help prepare them for a future homework assignment or even test, they are just watching you do it.

I would find a way to relate the subject or material to something they are excited about in real life, such as a hobby they like to do.

I can ask a few simplified questions on the material to see how much the student comprehends everything. If they can understand every major concept, I can move on to utilizing this knowledge with them to go through actual problems. The most important thing to ace before applying knowledge to actual problems is to make sure you actually have a firm grasp of the knowledge beforehand.

Repetition, repetition, repetition gets the knowledge into the right place in their brain, and once they've got a good understanding and have memorized the appropriate parts of the material, going over many, many problems does the trick. The more problems the student can work as much on their own without my help as possible, the more they become confident in their own skills.

First, I talk to the student to find out what they are having trouble with. I like to ask about what teaching methods their teacher at school or previous tutors have used, and whether or not they have worked. And, lastly, I ask the student a few questions about the material and have them work through a few problems in front of me to see their process. From there, I can infer what they need to work on. Once I find their problem, I can help them hone their skills to get better at doing it.

Every student has different ways of learning. Some are more auditory, some are more visual, and some learn from doing the problems themselves. Once I can figure out what kind of learner a student is, and how invested they are in the subject, I can find a way to make learning fun, to make it a game, and to make it entertaining and easily understandable for the student in way that caters towards them the best.

I generally come with my own problems for practice, as well as some notes on the material, but we often end up using the student's textbooks and homework problems to work through.

The best way to get over reading comprehension problems is to break it down in a simplified way. With these students, I find a way to show them how to read between the lines. If they can master ignoring all of the unnecessary words and facts in a text and finding just the parts they need for a problem or to understand the material, the reading comprehension part becomes much more doable.