Mathematical Thinking

I love coaching students.

You'd think test-prep would be the dullest career imaginable -- indeed, we who teach it are often relegated to the lowest rung on the educational ladder: the scum-sucking bottom feeders of the teaching pond. And, frankly, sometimes this characterization is spot-on! Test-prep is usually dull, routine, and soulless; the antithesis to everything good education strives to be.

(I do things a little differently.)

After graduating from Arizona State, I discovered that I had a gift for teaching. Working at a tutoring center in Scottsdale, Arizona, I found myself being specially requested by students from preschool to college. I often excelled with the angry, disaffected teens that other tutors shied away from. The center's director asked me to be the exclusive tutor of his 7th grade son. My joy was treating students as mature adults, engaging them at the highest possible intellectual level.

After working there, I took on a number of wonderful odd-jobs: teaching existentialism to middle schoolers, entrancing bored high schoolers with Native American religious cosmology, and confronting kindergarteners with the radical, and sometimes bizarre, morality of the Jewish and Christian traditions.

My ultimate goal is to become a classroom teacher -- to be a phenomenal humanities instructor at a private school or homeschooling co-op. I want to teach history, philosophy, earth science, sociology, world religions, art, literature, and math, though not necessarily in that order!

While I prepare to do that, though, I coach students.

It's a delight.

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