"My name is Teo and I'm currently an undergraduate student at Amherst College studying French and Biochemistry. Before starting at Amherst, I spent a year at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland studying both French and various natural sciences.

Throughout my entire high school career, tutoring was something I did for myself as much as for others. I am a firm believer that a topic is not truly learned until one can explain it to a peer and my approach to tutoring takes this into consideration. I encourage true exploration of the material from my students and seek to build upon and enrich the information the student already understands instead of simply lecturing or explaining from pre-recorded sources. With French, this means sticking to the target language for as long as possible and helping students to vocalize their questions and ideas in French. I believe grammar (especially in the early levels of French) is only important as it lends to coherent and confident communication IN FRENCH. As such I try to motivate each new grammatical concept with a useful or common phrase so that french morphology and syntax become less a chore to remember and more an internalized habit. This also means that I focus less on memorization and more on building a framework onto which students can apply more and more words as they learn them.

My approach to biology is much the same. I take special care to present topics not as random facts but as simple mechanisms that are motivated by a few basic scientific principles. I focus on the "why"s of science and encourage my students to not only learn these ideas but to start to see them as intuitive and logical developments upon previous topics. I have extensive laboratory experience at multiple universities and am especially proficient in the bridge between scientific facts and the experiments we use to prove them. This approach is consistent with the new teaching guidelines for the AP Biology Exam as well as the high school biology curriculum.

I received the highest mark" less...