Fun Facts

I love foraging! My passion as a teenager was to make lunch out of the nearest field - or, at least, to read Euell Gibbons' "Stalking the Wild Asparagus" and fantasize how I would do so.
I love piano! Sit me down at your piano bench, press play, and enjoy listening to some of your favorite classical composers.
And - you guessed it - I love math! Math was always my native language, even more than English. In fact, I learned algebra before I learned to read. One of my favorite books is Euclid's "E

About Me

As a child, I was a mildly curious and abundantly content homeschoolee. As a teenager, I was as voracious a reader of novels as I was an eater of meals (which, as my poor, cooking mother can attest, was pretty voracious.) As an adult, I'm currently studying at BYU-Idaho, where I hope someday to be released with a sticker on my head saying "science/utah/salt-lake-city">Computer Science Graduate."

Tutoring has long been an integral part of my life. It has weaved itself into my piano playing (I taught five students when I was twelve), into my community service (over my college years, I've voluntarily tutored various students in Math, English, and piano), and even into my other jobs (my former boss had me tutor his college-age son in Economics, even though I had never taken the class!) Incidentally, during my most recent semester at BYU-Idaho - where I tutored calculus - my tutoring became "integral" in more than one way. But possibly my most involved - and certainly my most fulfilling - experiences as a personal tutor occurred during my two years in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I served as a Spanish-speaking missionary for the LDS church.

I feel very comfortable in one-on-one, tutoring relationships, probably because I spent most of my childhood in that kind of environment (since I was home-schooled.) The excellent tutoring I received through my mother has made me deeply committed to helping others understand, in a similarly patient and intelligible way, the principles of math and reasoning. I believe that one answer produced by the student, through careful, open-ended questioning, is worth a hundred produced by me. As such, my goal is less that the student gets the "right" answers and more that he or she gains the ability to reason toward solutions. My greatest satisfaction as a tutor comes when my pupil says something like, "Hey, that makes sense! This is actually easy!"