"Dear student,

I have decided to tell you about my experience and interest in tutoring through a personal letter. After all, tutoring is about the personal, one-on-one experience that someone can have when they work a tutor who truly strives to understand his or her learning goals or needs.

I have been tutoring on and off since 1997. I have worked in writing centers for both a community college and a university. I’ve done freelance tutoring, and I’ve also tutored ESL students abroad in South Korea and here in the United States as well. In fact, the majority of my students through WyzAnt have been ones seeking help to improve their English through pronunciation and listening and also through grammar and vocabulary.

Despite the environment or a student's level of English proficiency, my approach is always the same for each tutoring session — to identify the primary learning concern that a student has by listening to a student's description of this concern, to thoroughly explain how to handle this concern by offering approaches and specific examples to the student, and to make sure that a student understands how to address this learning concern on their own before we end a tutorial session.

One of my favorite things about tutoring is that it enables me to devote special attention to certain students who might not get such specialized attention in a classroom full of students who learn at different speeds and have various learning styles. Although it is important to me that I establish a comfortable and trusting relationship with my students, it is equally important to me that I challenge them to think for themselves.

In my opinion, as an educator, I find that students learn best when their opinions are nurtured because this encourages them to open up with questions that help to better target where their key learning concerns reside. My goal as a tutor then is to make sure that my students are able to walk away from our sessions feeling confident that they can handle the speaking, vocabulary, or grammar concer" less...