Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 tutor

About James

Ever since I was 11 years old, I’ve been learning how to teach. I grew up with 7 younger siblings, and all of us were homeschooled until high school. This meant that every day after “school” I would be helping a younger sibling (be they 1 or 5 years younger) with any subject for which they needed it.

In 9th grade, I then made the difficult transition into a competitive private school. Because of all the rapid changes (and some tough-to-swallow grade) my understanding of each subject had to be rock solid. I went to my all of my teachers 3-4 times a week, developing relationships, learning different methods for understanding concepts, and spending hundreds of hours on practice questions. I then eventually became a peer tutor and as I began to study for standardized tests, received prep and training from an NYC tutor with 17 years of experience.

In senior year I started to get clients, some through my mentor and some on my own. But for each student, we would constantly go over different teaching materials and approaches depending on the student. This continued into my freshman year of college and grew even more intense this past year. Last year, I took the intensive "Humanities Sequence" at Princeton reading 60 books over two semesters and also joined the targeted math test prep company "Mathchops". These have both honed my learning and understanding significantly in math, reading, and writing, thus improved my ability to teach them in a digestable way. In total, I have roughly 400 hours of paid tutoring for kids from 6th to 11th grade in math, English, writing, and test prep.

There are two things I love most about tutoring: first, the opportunity to turn a student’s source of stress into a success and second, to experience for myself the wonderful process of “relearning” a subject from the perspective of a new student.