James

I have tutored students through difficult classes since high school, where I tutored my own classmates. Through teaching and trying to explain the material, I became more comfortable with it. I have a master’s degree in physics from the University of Texas at Dallas and I tutor grades 10-College.

My tutoring style:

I believe that being willing to learn new things is one of the most important traits in a person and one of the most necessary features to be successful in life. As long one has the mentality to learn, anything can be a source of inspiration.

From my time tutoring I realized that the one of the best ways to become familiar with a subject is to try to explain it to someone else. Whenever I tutor someone, I have the student guide what I write, and I have them explain why they believe that to be the right path. It is often slow and uncomfortable, but that is just how learning and growth are. I think that textbooks and classes, in their hurry to deliver so much information, focus too much on getting the right answer and gloss over the difficulty and time it took to get those results. When we follow in the footsteps of great mathematicians, we cannot expect the journey to be easy!

“If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.” – Carl Friedrich Gauss

Success story:

One of my favorite success stories was a student who came in for help in differential calculus. He started off uninterested in why the methods we use work, only focusing on how to get the right answer. As a result, he was confused about which methods to apply when evaluating derivatives. Over several sessions I worked with him to help familiarize him with the methods, and where they come from. Rather than actually working through a specific problem he had, I would start off with a much simpler problem that really focused on a specific method to motivate him to create his own methods. At the end of the semester I would see him helping other students through their work, explaining the methods we worked on at the beginning of the semester.