Kozmik

I am a certified teacher with 5 years of experience teaching middle school and high school mathematics. I have bachelor's and master's degrees from UC Santa Cruz, in mathematics and education, respectively. I tutor grades 6 through college.

Tutoring Style

I am an open-minded teacher, putting my students' goals first: while I love mathematics and exploring mathematical concepts, I understand that students have specific things they are trying to accomplish. I meet my students where they are, first learning what they do know about a particular topic and then helping them to build to what they need to know, only moving as fast through topics as is reasonable. I believe every student can learn math and that any obstacle to learning this subject can be overcome with an appropriate approach.

Success Story

Math:

I had a 7th grade student who was struggling with fractions in his math course. That he had a reading disability only complicated things. I was inspired, though, by his diligence as we worked together over the course of the semester to help him learn how to represent fractions with pictures and objects, do arithmetic with fractions, and eventually conquer word problems that used or required fractions. He grew much more comfortable with fractions and math overall and went on to pass his course with a B+.

Computer Programming:

Another teacher at my middle school sent a 7th grade student to me who was interested in developing an app but had no idea where to start, besides that she needed to learn computer programming. This was something that intimidated her.

She came to my classroom during my after-school office-hours for my math students. Because it was slow, I had many days over several weeks where she and I could explore software engineering concepts and programming.

I guided her in developing a design plan for creating a simple social media app. We identified who her audience was, how they would use the app, what kind of data she would need, and what services she would need to support her app.

I also introduced her to Scratch, a block-based coding application for teaching young students algorithmic thinking and programming. She progressed through exercises and projects in Scratch, gaining confidence in her ability to program. We eventually moved to simple Python programming exercises. Working on the command line of a computer was an even greater confidence booster for her and I could tell she was excited at the thought of what she could do as she learned this.

We did not get a chance to finish her app together, as the school year ended and I was changing districts the next year. She did make sure that I knew she planned to continue her studies by enrolling in the middle school's programming class for 8th graders. She thanked me for helping her develop her design plan and giving her confidence to continue with her goal.