My teaching philosophy breaks down into three major tenants: 1. Identify weaknesses in and intensively review core skills.2. Not moving to advanced applications until students feel confident with core skills.3. Constantly practicing and reviewing material to maintain retention.

I would evaluate a student for core skills related to the subject matter by giving them a quiz and having them walk me through their answers. I would also try and build a personal relationship with the student in which they feel that they can be open with me, as learning requires honesty about your own weaknesses. Finally, I would try to learn a student's preferred learning style (as well as the length of their attention span).

In order to learn independently, you have to have confidence. This means confidence in both your subject-related skills, as well as confidence in your critical thinking skills. I try to teach both by directing students to reason material out themselves, as well as throwing them plenty of curve balls along the way. By the time a student is done with me, nothing will scare or surprise them.

Keeping the tone light and the sessions fun helps keep a student motivated in the short term. Showing a student how they have improved over the course of our lessons helps keep them motivated in the long term.

I take a step backwards from the current material and review more fundamental concepts. I keep going backwards to more and more elementary skills until we find the root of the student's confusion, and then we work forward to the material at hand.

I have found that for a struggling student, tools like sentence diagrams can be too esoteric and only confuse matters further. Instead, I prefer to teach students to find a sentence's independent clause, and then we use that as a starting point to logically reason through a sentence's meaning.

I like to have a student teach material back to me as if I were the student. Teaching requires mastery, and it also ensures that you know all steps to the material. I also like to try and give students lots of challenging or trick questions to test their confidence in their own knowledge.

I build students up to material that is challenging beyond what their course requires of them. That way, when they master harder material, the actual course itself feels easy by comparison.

It's important to emphasize that a student be honest with me about their areas of weakness. If they can't tell me where they struggle in a lesson, then we cannot address those areas. I try to teach my students that failure is an essential part of learning.

I generally play the situation by ear. Everyone will have different needs, and learning them is a combination of trial-and-error and observation. I emphasize open communication as well so that the student can give me feedback as to what does and does not work.

I prefer to use a digital whiteboard so that the student and I can not only speak to each other, but so we have a space where we can visually communicate and work on material.