A math ​tutor from Lysterfield.

What makes a good teacher

I believe that a excellent teacher is the someone that never stops learning. I have actually always been an investigative person, that is the characteristic of a man of science. I have been either a student or a teacher in one type of classroom or another, and I have invested much quality time, effort, and funding into my own education. Years of physics and maths lessons, natural sciences research and laboratory work have transformed me much more into one. Therefore, it needs to come as not a surprise that I have a really scientific manner of teaching. Here is what I mean by that.

Experimentation is the key

Experimentation is the basic component of the scientific approach. This is the process that grants quality to the scientific openings: we did not just believe this could be a good idea, but instead we gave it a try, and it did work. This is the theory I like to employ at my work. No matter if I believe that a certain technique to clarify a matter is clever, or comprehensible, or interesting does not really matter. What exactly matters is what the student, the receiver of my clarification, thinks of it. I have a really different experience against which I determine the advantage of an clarification from the one my scholars have, both thanks to my substantial education and practical experience with the subject, and simply due to the varying degrees of interest we all have in the topic. Therefore, my judgement of a clarification will not often match the learners'. Their point of view is actually the one that matters.

How observation helps me

It brings me to the issue concerning the best ways to establish what my learners' view is. Again, I mainly have faith in scientific theories for this. This time, I make extensive apply of observation, but performed in as much of a dispassionate style as it can, the same as scientific supervision must be done. I check for feedback in students' facial and bodily expressions, in their attitude, in the manner they express themselves whenever asking questions and also while attempting to clarify the topic on their own, in the results at practicing their newly gained knowledge to fix issues, in the individual nature of the false steps they make, and in any other situation that would give me data about the usefulness of my teaching. Using this data, I am able to change my teaching to better match my learners, so I can easily enable them to master the data I am explaining. The strategy which follows from the above factors, together with the faith that a tutor should really go all out not just to convey facts, but to guide their students analyse and understand is the basis of my mentor ideology. Every little thing I do as a tutor is derived from all these views.