Dylan

I have been tutoring students in math since 2016. I earned my bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in mathematics in 2020 and I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in math at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

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Tutoring subjects:

I have tutored students in math in every grade level from early elementary school up to college. My students have succeeded in pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, pre-calculus, single and multivariable calculus and ACT and SAT math.

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Ages I’ve worked with:

I’ve loved working with students of all ages from the start of elementary school through college. I currently teach pre-calculus at City College.

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My tutoring style:

I’ve always learned best from teachers who love math and put in extra effort to share that love with their students. Those teachers have shaped my life by continually inspiring me to learn more and stay curious about numbers and patterns. In my own teaching I try to pay it forward by sharing the things that made me fall in love with math. I teach my students to solve problems by doing tricks with their fingers, drawing pictures, doing thought experiments, and looking for patterns. I come up with tricks to remember things with rhymes and songs and do whatever I can to make problems more fun for my students (sometimes by rewriting them to be about dinosaurs). Above all I strive to treat my students with the respect and friendship that all of my fellow mathematicians-in-training deserve.

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Success Story:

In an old tutoring job, I had a pre-calculus student who was struggling in his class even though in our tutoring sessions he consistently demonstrated that he was a clever problem solver and a great student. His mother met with me and told me that he was getting bad grades on homework assignments he wasn’t even talking to me about. We decided together that I needed to talk through the homework with this student every day, even if he said he had already done it. I will never tell a student that I don’t believe they did their homework correctly, but I did start asking him to tell me about his homework even if he said it was easy. I’d ask him to give me an example problem to satisfy my curiosity, and then I’d have him solve it for me. If he had trouble with either of those tasks I would come up with my own practice problems and we’d work on them together. I didn’t usually see his homework assignments, but several times I saw him figure something out and say, “I’d better fix that on my homework.” He ended up with an A in pre-calc for the year, but what I consider my greatest success in this story is that he learned to check over his work independently and never lost confidence in his abilities.
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Hobbies and Interests:

Aside from learning and teaching math, I also enjoy watching movies, cooking, and especially eating. I also love to play games, especially ones involving math and patterns and I’ll often introduce them to my students if we have extra time.