FAQs
- What should the customer know about your pricing (e.g., discounts, fees)?
I usually charge $25 for an hour plus $10 for driving time to go their house and back. This is relatively cheap for a tutor with a master's degree, but honestly, I love what I do and enjoy a pretty simple lifestyle, so I try to not be an undue burden on the families I work with.
- What is your typical process for working with a new customer?
While every new student is their own unique set of circumstances, I usually have three basic questions: 1) Where are you now? 2) What (if any) issues are you currently running into? 3) Where would you like to go? Those three issues really define how the tutoring works. We begin, of course, by addressing the issues already at hand - which may be a small fix, or it may be something we spend more time on. After that, the whole group - the student, the family, and myself - look at what steps we can take to progress (especially with review and practice between sessions).
- What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
I come from a heavily academic background (I have a master's degree), and I've been teaching since I was able to play guitar (around 14 years ago now). The variety of subjects I have taught has really given me a variety of means and tools to tackle each one. I've also been blessed to have been able to teach a large variety of age groups, though focused on k-12th grade. I've been a Teacher's Assistant in Greek (in which I was able to write a three-month curriculum on sentence diagramming for college students), a Latin teacher for 5th-12th grade, and even coach several sports (basketball, softball, volleyball, gymnastics, and even chess, if that last one counts as a sport). Beyond academic tutoring, however, I've had the opportunity to work for the last eight years or so in the youth group of my local church. This has given me a real heart for young people, beyond merely teaching intellectual knowledge. In many ways this has shaped me more than my academic career.