My Tutoring Origin Story
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I have been lucky enough to have created a career as a professional math tutor for 27-years, and a question I get asked by students, parents, and friends is, “How did you get started as a tutor?”

At some level I have been tutoring since middle school and high school. I was always the kid the hallway between classes helping my friends with their homework. In high school I was a peer counselor. As a peer counselor, during school hours I would go to the middle school, which was just across the parking lot, and help students with their math. I discovered that I really liked helping students learn. There was nothing more incredible than seeing that spark of understanding in a student’s eyes.

After high school I went to college starting off as Open Option with no specific major. I tried a lot of different subject areas, and found myself finally drawn to Math Education. While taking my education classes I was required to fulfill a certain amount of teaching experience. This was early on during college career, sophomore year. They wanted us to get a taste of what it was like to teach students before we got too far down the path. While extremely rewarding, teaching is not for everyone. One of the opportunities available was volunteering at a non-profit that ran an after-school program for K-12 students. I tried it and enjoyed it as much as I had when I was helping students in high school as a peer tutor.

From there I applied and was accepted to be one of the free tutors in my college’s math tutoring center. As a part of being a tutor for the math department, you were required to take a course called “Supervised College Teaching”. Once a week all the tutors would meet to discuss how to be a great tutor, practice our techniques, and talk to each other about issues we had had while tutoring students. After the semester of taking this course, working in the math tutoring center became my job for the rest of my college career. I spent two and a half years, even over the summer, working as a tutor for math tutoring center. As a free tutor for a college, you meet with students of every shape and size. It teaches you very quickly that not everyone learns in the same way, if you want to help as many students as possible, you have to adapt to your student’s unique needs. I LOVED IT!!

People would always ask me how I could teach the same material over and over again? I explained to them that it was the students that made it great. Having to adapt to their needs kept me on my toes, and kept my brain churning. Helping them to overcome their anxieties, and seeing them build confidence, filled my soul.

Even though I knew I loved tutoring, I had not ever thought about being a private tutor outside of the tutoring center…until that one day that it all changed for me. As a tutor working for the university in their tutoring center, I was required to show students how to do problems a certain way. Over my multiple years of working at the center, I had developed my own methods for how I thought a student could better approach certain problems. While working with a student I had helped out quite a bit, I said, “You know I would love to show you this other way for solving that problem, but when I am working here, I have to do it the way they want me to.” They looked over at me and said, “Well what if I paid you outside the tutoring center? Could you show me how to do it that way then?” I thought about it for a second, and was like, “Yeah, I could definitely do that.” And that was how I got started as a private math tutor.

Through the rest of my education program, I discovered that being a traditional teach might not be a great fit for me. I had also gotten to a point with the private math tutoring that I was having to turn students away because I did not have enough time to tutor. I had to complete my own school work as well. When the end of college came and I was considering what I might do in the “real world” to pay the bills, I thought, “Well what if I opened my entire schedule up to private tutoring? Could I pay the bills?” I decided I would take the leap, and try my luck as private math tutor. At that moment my career as a private math tutor was born. 27-years later I am still doing it, still loving it, and yep still paying the bills.