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John tutors in Portland, OR

John W.

Private tutor in Portland, OR

Education

BA in English from Washington University in St. Louis with a 3.5 GPA

Experience

I have tutored privately in all subjects for junior high school students as far back as 2010, and, more recently, was a one-on-one tutor and teacher to classrooms of up to 35 students for the ACT exam. While I am a bit far removed from the ACT and SAT to have my scores reflect my current understanding of the material, I took an ACT as part of my training for a previous employer and scored a 35. I have worked with children aged 3-18 in a classroom setting, and I much prefer the smaller groups permitted in tutoring. It is in this environment that my abilities to connect with students is maximized and provides the students with the greatest benefits. It is this connection that I treasure most about my work as a tutor, and the reason that I've continued to do it for so many years.

Subject Expertise

Availability

Any day at any time

Can Meet

Up to 20 minutes away for no additional charge, Up to 45 minutes away for a flat fee

Hobbies

I recently moved to Portland from Chicago where I grew up, and I’m so happy I’ve made the change! As an avid rock climber, hiker, and tent dweller, the Pacific Northwest has proven to be a perfect place for me to call home. I am excited to set down roots in the area as I spent many of the past few years traveling domestically and internationally through Nepal, India, Thailand, Peru, Colombia, and Guatemala. Here in the United States, I honed my camping skills up above the treeline in Colorado and in the chains of lakes that connect Northern Minnesota to Southern Ontario, striving to learn comfort with just a sleeping bag, a layer of foam, and a campfire. My international travels have similarly informed my character as they helped me to learn the delicate arts of conversation (not always easy in a non English-speaking country), adventure, and patience (you never know just when an Indian train will arrive). I have a host of stories about trekking through the Himalayas, meeting indigenous communities high up in the Andes, eating mealworms in Thailand, and dancing salsa in Bogota that I’m eager to share. Before I hit the global trail, I was a student at Washington University in St. Louis where I studied English and philosophy. I became entranced by James Joyce’s Ulysses, opting to spend three semesters studying the novel (but never feeling as if I quite understood what was going on). Despite my extensive training in English, it wasn’t until I became a tutor and teacher of the ACT test that I actually learned the formal rules of grammar (thirteen years of private schooling and four more years of college apparently wasn’t enough) and gained an appreciation for side-stepping comma splices and constructing beautiful pairings of independent and dependent clauses. I took these ACT skills and spent a year using them by teaching the test in high school classrooms on Chicago’s South side in the mornings and then driving across the city to tutor the same one-on-one in the affluent Northern suburbs. Quite the experience, and one that provided a unique understanding into the economic politics of the city. At the same time, I was receiving an education in massage therapy, and I’m proud to say that I’m currently a licensed massage therapist. My interest in massage started as a love for tai chi as I have explored the intriguing connections between mind and body since I first started studying the martial art over eight years ago. Using tai chi as a way to remedy the immense damage done to me by four years of competitive high school rowing, I became a dedicated practitioner and a new world of healing and transcendent experiences became available to me. Soon, I was entering Buddhist centers in Nepal and India in an effort to explore meditation and deepen my understanding of how the mind and body affect one another. I treasure the knowledge I have received from all of these experiences and look forward to expanding my understanding in the years to come. I’m eager to share a gamut of interests ranging from food (I’m an enthusiastic chef) to sports (I love the NBA), from literature (I just finished Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union and started Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint) to television (I am a huge fan of Adult Swim, a budding anime fan, and a proponent of Last Week with John Oliver and, of course, Breaking Bad). While it may seem that I have almost too much to talk about, I am much more content to learn from others than to talk about myself. With a father who is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst for a mother, lending an ear and asking a provoking question is second nature to me. In all my work and travels, it is connections to people that I value most.

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