Mary

I am a certified teacher with 3 decades of experience in education. I taught elementary school for 5 years, 23 years in middle school math, and 2 years high school math and intervention. I have a BA and an MA from the University of Redlands. I tutor grades 4-11 with math being my specialty, especially middle school math.

Tutoring Style

I am a very energetic person who loves to help students figure things out for themselves. My tutoring style adapts to each individual student and their specific needs. No two students are completely alike and therefore I think that no teacher should be stuck in a single way of teaching or tutoring. My job is to help students improve and succeed so that they can achieve their personal goals. I am a lifelong learner and often learn a great deal from my students. We can all learn things from each other as long as we are open to the possibilities.

Success Story

I have had many students who have had success in my classes. With tutoring, I had a student who was extremely lost in math without a calculator. Since she was in middle school, calculators were only allowed for checking work and not class work, homework, or assessments. She was very unsure of multiplication and division on her own. One of the things that I have taught as a math intervention teacher is how to break numbers into friendlier numbers. For example, 7x8=56, but many students do not know their times tables for 7 and 8. Thus, we break the number 7 into 5+2 and then multiply by 8. Most students can remember the 1s, 2s, 5s, and 10s for their multiplication, so we break the most difficult number into factors that they already know or can count on their fingers. In our problem, 5x8=40 - students can count by 5, 8 times, or they might even know 5x8=40. Next, we do 2x8=16 - students could also county by 2, 8 times to obtain 16. Finally, we take 40+16 to the sum of 56. This works with even very large numbers and can also work for division with a little tweak to the breakdown part. The student took approximately 2 sessions to thoroughly understand the concept, but after practicing with it, she was able to have confidence and not need the calculator to even check her work. She passed her math class with an A- instead of a C-. She was very proud of herself and felt confident that her math class for the next year would not be a problem.

Hobbies & Interests

When I am not tutoring or teaching, I love to spend time with my family, especially my 6 grandsons. I also love spending time with my dogs as well as traveling the world. Spending time learning about other places, their culture, their food, and interacting with the people is such a wonderful experience. When I am not with my family, dogs, or traveling, I like to fish, garden, going to Disney Parks, doing puzzles, and playing video games. I thoroughly enjoy life and love traveling with my best friend of 45 years. I do not have to do something to have fun, but it definitely makes life a lot more interesting.