Subjects I Tutor:

Reading and Writing for Upper Elementary Students

Social Studies for Elementary and Middle School Students

Language Arts and Social Studies for Middle School Students

Reading, Writing, American History, SAT and ACT Test Prep, and College Essays for High School Students

Writing for College Students

Reading, Writing and ESL for Adults

Types of Students I work with:

I enjoy working with all kinds of learners. A few examples:

--A lot of 5th graders do not like writing very much and D was no exception. We worked together consistently through his senior year in high school. He learned the power of revising to strengthen any piece of writing. We revised his college essays so many times it seemed almost too much, until he won both Gates and Questbridge scholarships.

--Homeschooled 12 year old N did not need much help with her online school assignments, so we spent our first few lessons editing the 200 page novel she had written. Tips on grammar and formatting dialogue helped strengthen her writing. As we got to know each other, our reading and discussions dived into ethics, philosophy and politics and gave us both much to think about.

--With 9th grader G, a boy with autism and a tremendous desire to prove himself, we met twice a week to work on homework. Reading through chapters of The Great Gatsby and The Natural, we took turns reading and interpreting figurative language. Writing became less overwhelming when we focused on using supporting evidence from the text.

--For a full year M was too shy to talk to me; she just shook her head or shrugged her shoulders when I asked a direct question. We met once a week from kindergarten through fourth grade and towards the end she was reading out loud with gusto, able to discuss her opinions and even showed me her dance moves on TikTok at the end of the lessons.

--Already an engineer in her native Ghana, T started over in America with a basic English composition class at our local community college. Outlining, topic sentences, quoting from a text, and concise grammar lessons boosted her writing, her grades, and her self-confidence studying in English.

--Z, a 6th grader, felt stuck to the point of freezing up on each writing assignment. We started by talking about the assignment, his feelings about what he read, and what stuck with him. After about 15 minutes, I showed him the notes I had taken down as we talked and he realized he did have things to say. He picked up his pen with confidence and we continued to talk out his ideas together as he wrote them down.

Lessons:

In person in a local library

or in your home in Bergen county or parts of Essex or Rockland

On line Zoom or Skype