Collin

I am a writer and passionate lover of literature and language with 9 years of experience as a Writing Coach and ESL instructor.  I hold a bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia and I specialize in helping students of all ages improve their academic and creative writing.

My Tutoring Style:

I am a thoughtful, engaging, and spirited teacher, who loves connecting with my students on a personal level in order to channel  their unique ideas and most heartfelt passions into their Writing as a means to self-expression and the discovery of their authentic identity.  As a published author, I fully believe in the duality of the Writer's Mind - divided equally between the Creative/Fearless/ Freeflowing side and the Critical/Analytical/Editing side - and instruct my students using specific techniques that will allow them to most effectively extract the fruits of this dichotomy and more readily fuse them together on the page in order to produce well-structured, highly-detailed, and visceral writing.  More specifically, I show my students the value of Brainstorming and Outlining at the beginning of the writing process in order to "get out" their best ideas and set forth an organized "roadmap" that will give them confidence that they won't get lost on the page, which frees them to write with more creativity and less inhibition, knowing that any "bad" writing can be edited and improved upon later.  My lessons utilize an appropriate balance of both "show" and "tell" by giving constructive feedback and encouragement related to the student's most current writing samples while also demonstrating concretely and in real time how to improve their sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and cohesion.  I am able to adapt my own teaching voice and style according to each student's age, level, and needs, and experience has shown me that my contagious passion for language will inspire even the most writing-averse student to find joy in expressing themelves on the page.

Success Story:

My most recent success story comes from working with a very bright 7th grade student who thrived in his math and science classes but dreaded Language Arts.  As this is a common predicament for me as a Writing Coach, I am well-versed in breaking through the classic teenage barrier of yes-and-no answers, and by the end of our first lesson I discovered that his two strongest interests were Baseball and Hip-Hop.  After gaining his trust and confidence by demonstrating my shared  passion in these areas, I then structured our in-class writing assignments around these fields, engaging and encouraging him to express his thoughts and opinions into analystical essays about which players the L.A Dodgers should sign in free agency and why the golden era of 90s Hip-Hop is thematically and poetically superior to the repetitive vulgarities produced by most mainstream rap artists today.  In turn, his school-related writing improved greatly as his ideas became more organized, his sentence structure more varied, his word choice more precise, and his voice stronger and more compelling.  What makes me the proudest as a teacher, however, and brings me the greatest sense of fulfillment, is the fact that he now writes in a journal on a regular basis and channels his feelings via poetry in order to better understand and accept himself as he matures.  While my lessons may not always have the same effect on every student, I can say with confidence  that during my 9 years as a teacher I have consistently succeeded in forging strong, lasting, and productive connections with each student as a consequence of my passionate and earnest desire to convey the beauty, utility, and triumph of the written word.

Hobbies & Interests:

Soccer, Baseball, Fitness ... Storytelling, Poetry, Journaling ... Reading, Studying, Learning ... Lyrical Hip-Hop, Country Western, Reggae/Dub ... Hiking, Camping, Adventuring ... Loving My Pets