Matthew R. Marler

Introduction: I tutor math, physics and chemistry. Most of my students have been high school students, but I have also tutored college students and graduate students (statistics: MBA students, PhD candidates.) I earned good grades in high school and college, majored in psychology and statistics, earned a PhD degree in statistics, and worked as a statistician in medical research. I have tutored since I was in high school, and as a graduate student in college I taught introductory psychology, and statistics at all undergraduate levels and I tutored undergraduate students and graduate students. In my tutoring, I emphasize skills that students can learn that they can use to teach themselves in my absence. It starts with simple things like looking up words in the index, memorizing definitions and then coming to understand them by picking up the meanings in parts, practicing what they have already learned so that they can do it over without repeating old mistakes, and thus do them faster and build on what they already studied, repeating back to me, using technical language lecture style, what the principles are that they employ in solving each problem. Drill and explanation have been shown to be very good at building skills and generalizing knowledge to new problems. I also give a short lecture on the neurophysiology of learning, to support the idea that drill in conceptual learning is as important as "reps" in athletics, because "the brain grows to do what the mind forces it to practice," and the processes occur on all time scales, minutes up to months.