Why do I tutor math?

TLDR: I try to provide what I wish I had.

I was a kid with a lot of curiosity. I engaged with the adults around me. I enjoyed learning and I extracted as much knowledge from those around me as I could.

But the people I knew didn’t really know that much math.

I have a memory from sixth grade. One day we had a substitute that I drilled with questions. Somewhere along the way, he showed me how to solve two variable linear equations using the substitution method. I went home and tried it with problems I made up.

But he was only there the one day and back then, we didn’t have YouTube.

Fast forward a bit to high school. My two main math teachers were very good. Ms London and Ms O’Bryan. Good classes, but they moved slowly. They went at the normal pace.1 One day, I show up to class and there was a quiz. I must have missed a couple days before because I didn’t know the material. So I asked the kid who sat next to me. Manny. “Hey, how do you do the stuff on this quiz”. He gave me a quick rundown 2 and I did fine on the quiz.

Now I’m pretty good at math, but I’d bet that every random group of 25 students has at least 5 students that could move at twice the pace or more.

Why not enable them to move at that speed?

Anyway, my senior year of high school, calculus wasn’t really offered. There were a couple of us that were labelled as calculus students, but it was in the same room and period as a normal math class. With the same teacher.

Ms O’Bryan already had enough on her plate teaching the main class so us calculus kids didn’t get much instruction or direction. I tried to learn from a textbook and I did make some progress. I managed derivatives and some basic integrals. I didn’t bother taking the AP exam. I would have bombed it.

Go into turbo mode.

So I land at MIT and my calculus knowledge lasted a lecture and a half and off we go.

I loved it. It was such a rush. The classes were hard but finally I was in a class that went at a pace that wasn’t boring. The class was 18.011 taught by Haines Greenspan and was probably the biggest influence to me majoring in math 3

Why did I have to wait til college to take a fun math class?

That’s what I want to provide to students.

But I’m not just about the gifted students

I’ve interacted with many “normal” students who were actually pretty good at math, but somewhere along the line their math confidence was shaken. Those students are often surrounded by adults who aren’t “good at math”.

They just need some encouragement and prodding. I’m pretty good at that too.