Tutor in Los Altos, CA 94022

Every job I've ever had has been about teaching. My first job was student teaching at Redwood Grove, a nature daycamp in Los Altos, when I was in the eighth grade. I was hired by the YMCA at the age of 15 as a resident camp counselor, and ended up working a variety of camps with kids from ages 3 to 15.

As I grew, I followed my interests in economics, biology and environmental studies to new opportunities, but education was always a component. With the Mono Lake Committee, I gave naturalist tours to the public to teach about the history, geology, biology, and politics of the place. During the following academic year, I was hired by the Whitman's economics department to tutor introductory macroeconomics. Most recently, I served as the Technical Manager for Semester in the West, an environmental field studies focused on the politics, ecology, and writing of the American West. While the position's basic requirements are facilitatory and supervisory, I took every opportunity to teach students. I worked with students to edit their academic papers, and received tons of great feedback on my own feedback! I involved students with fieldwork data analysis to teach them about Excel, data manipulation, and statistics. I helped students conceptualize the concept of an "adaptive landscape" on a whiteboard during our ecology class.

As a tutor, I bring two unique tools to the table. The first is narrative. In economics, biology, chemistry, and math, we work with concepts that are often abstract and difficult to wrap our minds around. I like to use story to make sense of these concepts, and link the steps of a complicated process in a memorable way. Students want an image of why something is the way that it is, not merely to take it for granted. My second strength is patience. In whatever subject I am teaching—Mono Lake History, economics, chemistry, pre-algebra—I understand that students are not going to grasp it right away, but I am willing to plug away until they do.