Algebra 1 and Elementary Math tutor

About Peter

I've had a rather circuitous route through my education, and consequently my knowledge and interests are more various than they might have been for a more conventional student. I skipped high school--long story there--and entered the nascent Honors College at Florida Atlantic University in 2000. Four years later, having honed my writing in several disciplines, I graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences, with a concentration in American Studies, as well as a distinguished thesis award and a Floyd Koch Ethics Award.

From 2005 to 2007, I attended MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where I developed skills that are as difficult to explain as they are to apply. Since then, I've been doing tutoring work on and off, first for grad students, and later for middle schoolers. Writing is my foremost skill, but I've also assisted students with mathematics and reading comprehension.

My approach to teaching is best summarized in two points. First, students invariably know more than they "know." That is, children and adults often understand intuitively things they can't apply on command, so the first order of business is connecting the material to ways of thinking with which they're already familiar. Second, repetition is not learning. Material can only be said to have been "learned" when the student is capable of not only solving problems or following rules, but when she's capable of teaching another student to do so.