Teaching Philosophy

I started teaching entirely accidentally; in 2015 I sat down at a cafe while waiting for a meeting to start and was informed that, if I was here for math tutoring, I would receive a free slice of pizza through a new program called Pie-R-Squared. I was paired with a tutor, who quickly realized that I did not need tutoring and suggested that I start tutoring other students who actually needed the support. This was the creation of Pie-R-Squared’s “peer tutor” program; well after graduating and even during the summers, I continued to work as a volunteer tutor here for the next four-years.

Though I have extensive experience teaching in the classroom - through a combination of positions as a teaching assistant from my undergraduate and graduate career - the bulk of my teaching experience has been through tutoring. I often tutored students of faculty and staff at UMass Amherst, regularly staffed the Physics Help Room, and supported multiple summer programs beyond Pie-R-Squared. Throughout the majority of graduate school, I worked as a tutor for Ivy League Tutoring, a small business tutoring students online and in-person in Rhode Island and Florida. To-date, I work as a private tutor through several online platforms.

This experience, along with the influence of several notable teachers during high school, has uniquely shaped my approach to teaching. As a teacher, my first goal is to make the students comfortable in the space we inhabit before beginning instruction. Though this seems trivial, ensuring that students are comfortable and happy is essential to my strategy as a tutor; I believe that students learn best when a mutual trust between them and their teacher is established, and creating a safe, comfortable space is the best way to build that trust. When that trust is built, students are more inclined to slowly walk through problems together and they become more receptive to the key concepts that are conveyed during a lesson.