| I earned my BA in English from Concordia University Irvine in 2010. After graduating, I worked at CUI as a graduate assistant for several general education English classes. I lectured on various novels, poems, and short stories, provided private tutoring for students, and I graded and provided feedback on essays.
I also taught an Early College Prep course for high schoolers in Writing and Research. Every lesson had text analysis, a grammar lesson, and writing practice. |
| My university education provided a thorough grammar education. Classes such as History and Development of the English Language as well as my involvement in the campus newspaper honed the skills I had acquired in previous schooling. I also have classroom experience teaching grammar fundamentals to high school and college students. As I help others with their academic and creative writing, I continually deepen my understanding and appreciation of the English language. |
| My university education heavily emphasized reading and analyzing literature. As a part of my classwork I read European and American literature from Beowulf to Brontë to Joyce to Woolf; Postcolonial literature, including Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy; and a wide variety of literary criticism. I have given college lectures on a number of novels and poems, namely Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Brontë's Jane Eyre, and T.S. Eliot's Wasteland. In my tutoring, I analyze books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and 1984 with my students. |
| For high school tutoring I prefer to use the New Critical approach to the text. Only by finding the balance and symmetry in a text can the themes and symbols can make sense. However, I often find it helpful to introduce other ways of reading: historical context, significant biographical information on the author, and political and social philosophies can enrich a student's understanding of a text. |
| For the past five years I've been working with high school and college students on their writing skills. Each person has their own process, and sometimes a student needs to discover what works best for them. I help them figure out how they best get words from their mind to the paper. With my background in grammar, vocabulary, and teaching, I can then help the student through editing and rewriting. |