Dustin

I am a high-achieving student who has helped other students achieve greatness for years. I specialize in standardized testing for high school students, but can teach most subjects at the high school level. I have a master's degree in interdisciplinary behavioral sciences from Kentucky State University and I tutor grades 9-College.

My tutoring style:

I am a methodical tutor who will craft a learning plan tailored to your individual needs. We will review and reinforce concepts systematically until you know them by heart. I put in the work to make my students’ goals achievable, and I expect my students  to do the same. But we can definitely make learning fun along the way! Together, we’ll make sure you excel in whatever class or test you’re studying for.

Success stories:

I worked with Maria for five months, the longest of any of my students. She was a junior in high school preparing for the ACT so that she could get a good scholarship for a private school she had her eye on. Overall, she was incredibly self-motivated and very bright; her biggest problem on the test was her test anxiety. While she knew most of the material and was scoring in the high 20’s in most sections, with the time pressure of the ACT, her Math score consistently stayed around a 19. We discussed why she thought the Math was getting the better of her, and she told me that for most problems, she didn’t know where to start. She would try different strategies until one finally worked, but this would use a lot of her time and by the end, she was answering the last 20 or so questions blindly just to finish the test. With this in mind, I decided the best way to help her was to practice identifying common ACT problems and how to solve them. After hundreds of problems, she became very familiar with almost anything the ACT could throw at her. Questions became recognizable, and she no longer stressed about which way to solve them. She got much quicker on the test as a result. When it was time for her real test, she brought her Math to a 29, getting a 28 composite. Math actually became one of her better subjects! She was able to go to her dream school and get the scholarship she wanted, and I couldn’t be more proud.

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Garth was a homeschooled student with a father who was very involved in his education. He was a very skilled football player who had already been offered a scholarship to play at a U.S. military academy, with the contingency that he needed a base SAT score to be admitted. For one reason or another, Garth lacked solid foundations in high school math, so getting a good enough Math score to be admitted was a real stressor for him. When we started tutoring, he was getting around a 350 in Math, and was told he needed a 500 for admission. His father and I discussed Garth’s needs thoroughly, and considering we only had a couple of months to raise his score before the last available test, we had to be strategic in our game plan. We didn’t have time to teach him everything on the Math SAT well enough for him to consistently get them. Therefore, we decided to prioritize the easier concepts on the exam. Our goal was for him to feel confident with the material in the first half of the test, and for him to be able to get some of the later questions that simply built on the easier concepts. If there were questions that involved harder trigonometry or geometry rules, we planned to have him skip or ignore them so he could focus his time on the “gettable” questions. Over the course of a few months, I methodically taught him the easier concepts on the SAT, and I collaborated with his father to have him do homework on what he learned to maximize his retention. The strategy seemed to work well— he was consistently getting earlier questions on the test he had been missing before. Towards the end of our tutoring, he was even getting some reach questions that most students were missing. On test day, he scored a 530 in Math. It was hard-fought, but we managed to do what Garth thought was impossible at the start of tutoring. He was admitted and now plays football at the college level.

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Hobbies and interests:

I’m a nerd at heart, so my interests are comics (Marvel/DC), trivia, and tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons where I flex my muscles as a Dungeon Master. I also casually enjoy video games and Broadway musicals.

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