"My name is Illona, I am a retired special education teacher of students with Autism. I have taught other deficits of special education (LD, BD, Cognitive Delayed, and TMH). I have tutored students ages 5-adult in reading, math,and language arts. I have my own materials that I would use to help the student. I am compassionate, hardworking, structured patient and yet flexible and fun. I take my job very seriously and strive very hard to help my students to excel and be successful. I feel all students can and will learn, they just need to be motivated and feel that they can achieve their goals. My former students who are autistic have completed high school with honors and are in the process of attending college. I have seen my hard work help my students to reach their full potential and for that I am very proud of them. My goal in teaching students is for them to reach their highest potential and be successful and productive, to have confidence within themselves to know that they can reach their goals with success. My method of teaching is to assess, develop a plan, discuss with the potential student what is their goal and how would they like for me to assist to reach success. I want them to start with a comfortable level and then progress to the more difficult (which is the challenge area for them); then we can implement a program to help them with that specific deficit area. In other words it is like writing an individual educational program specific to his or her needs. This is exactly what I did with my students; finding material that would help them learn a specific skill at their ability level helped them not get frustrated and give up. If that fails I will try other methods to help the student be successful. The goal of tutoring is to help the student to get the extra help needed in a specific deficit area to improve and be able to make the necessary progress independently." less...