Experience Summary
As a Kentuckian, I was very lucky to have the opportunity to study and excel in French and to study abroad in Japan in high school. These experiences, related to the smallness and isolation of my hometown, made me uniquely aware of and interested in international issues and foreign language learning and teaching. As I have studied various languages, the most important of which being French, Japanese, and Spanish, I have actively sought the chance to share the knowledge I have acquired. For this reason, I have taught French both as an instructor and tutor since the age of 16. Of course, this love of teaching languages has spilled over into tutoring children and adults in writing, ESL, and in my "home" discipline of political history.
Teaching Style
I thoroughly believe that teaching is a mutual engagement - students are not just listening to the story, they are authoring it! For this, I often meticulously plan lessons around themes and concepts, but allow the details to be worked out in the student's interaction with the presented materials. This leaves the questions more open-ended, and the lessons - I think - more fruitful for the exploration these questions inspire. It is my goal to teach people something they do not know in a way that changes the way that they think about what they do know - whether in language acquisition, grammatical structures, or history. That is the impact I like to impart on the people I teach, and achieving it is immensely rewarding.